Growth-OS, the operating system for successful long term growth
Yara Paoli
Achieving Sustainable Growth: Data-Driven Marketing in Today's World
Brittany Bingham
SEO: How to Move Fast in a Fast-Moving Landscape
Matthew Barby
Roadblocks to corporate innovation
Hallgeir Knutsen
Using metrics to drive SaaS growth - how to use metrics to get focus and target visibility
Anders Johnsen
Building the right team for success
Anne Solhaug Tutar
Xbo - a digital journey: from internal check list tool in Block Watne to spin out with industry wide offering in 18 months
Jorn Haukoy and Ingrid Schubeler
Big or Small: how to drive growth through partnerships
Karianne Melleby
Commercial traction - selling your product at scale
LJ Bjorkevoll
From bottom up to top down: embedding data science into product organisations
Ellie Dobson
Fight churn! Six ways to keep your customers
Magnus Willumsen
Fireside chat: Why IT is one of the biggest obstacles of development/digitalization and what can be done about it
Danat Tekie, Jorn Haukoy, Jon Andreas Pretorius and Anders Christain Morthen
Panel Discussion
Yara Paoli, Lucas Weldeghebriel, Natalia Angela Gibson
Brittany BinghamVP Marketing & Growth at RaiseMeAchieving Sustainable Growth: Data-Driven Marketing in Today's World
Brittany Bingham
Brittany Bingham
Brittany's background has largely been focused on growing and scaling SaaS businesses via testing and marketing channels, along with building growth-oriented teams.
After several years at SurveyMonkey, most recently as Sr. Director of Growth Marketing overseeing lifecycle marketing across all of their business units, she joined RaiseMe as VP of Marketing & Growth.
RaiseMe is a mission-driven EdTech startup focused on college readiness that gives students of all backgrounds the ability to earn scholarships from colleges in increments for academic and extracurricular achievements as early as the 9th grade. They’ve enabled 2 million students on their way to realize their college ambitions, and partner with nearly 300 universities.
Brittany also advises startups, speaks at industry conferences, and teaches in growth programs in the Bay Area, California.
Yara PaoliChief Growth Officer at PreplyGrowth-OS, the operating system for successful long term growth
Yara Paoli
Yara Paoli
Currently acting as entrepreneur in residence and growth-OS consultant for various start ups as well as building up a growth methodology and an awesome team for Preply, the online tutoring marketplace.
She was also employee 32 at Skyscanner and she left when the company had over 1000 employees, she was overseeing more than 300 people and the company had been sold for 1.4 Million British pounds.
Her international experience of 15+ years covers the main aspects of building a successful growth organisation: growth strategy development and enablement, change management, team optimisation and upskilling, scalability and sustainability, motivational framework implementation, impactful leadership, channel and product market fit assessment.
She also has a 1st honour degree in Psychology and a master in Communications. This helps her greatly in listening, understanding and working with people more effectively and shaping her leadership style so to focus on the most important aspect of them all: the growth culture.
Sharon VosmekCEO AstiaCreating a sustainable culture of innovation
Sharon Vosmek
Sharon Vosmek
Sharon Vosmek is the CEO of Astia, a global organization that levels the investment playing field for entrepreneurial teams with women leaders. In this role since 2007, Vosmek oversees and manages Astia’s creative, proven approach to investment that contributes to the success of female entrepreneurs and their ventures.
Well-regarded around the globe, Ms. Vosmek is known for her opinions, research and commentary on the importance of women leaders as integral to innovation and high-performing entrepreneurial teams.
As a highly sought-after speaker, she has also spoken at the United Nations, the Milken Institute’s Global Conference and California Summit, and given lectures at numerous universities on the topic of building inclusive ecosystems, most notably at Stanford and MIT. Ms. Vosmek lives and works in San Francisco.
Kremena ToshevaBusiness Developer Agera VenturesModerator
Kremena Tosheva
Kremena Tosheva is a business developer and a tech evangelist part of the investment team currently curating Agera Ventures portfolio of growth companies. Kremena has a solid experience in building digital and physical communities and been an active force in the Norwegian tech eco-system through her previous job at Oslotech, the managing company of Oslo Science Park. Kremena is the entrepreneur behind one of Norway's largest science and tech business jams - The Cutting Edge festival. Kremena is passionate about building businesses and helping them reach their full potential.
The Agera Group was founded in 2016 with a dual mission to accelerate scale-ups on their growth journey (Agera Venture) and to accelerate established businesses through innovation consulting (Agera Consulting). This hybrid design builds a bridge and actively explores synergies between innovative scale-ups and established corporations.
"We believe that through active ownership and direct involvement in our portfolio companies we increase their chance of success. Our goal is to cover a gap in investments between seed capital and private equity funds."
Danat TekieChief External Relations YSIModerator
Danat Tekie
Danat Tekie is a young earthpreneur. She is one of the Co-Founders and the Chief External Relations of the global organisation Young Sustainable Impact (YSI).
YSI is a global organisation working to solve sustainability challenges through entrepreneurship and innovation by gathering the smartest young minds from all over the world to create impact startups from scratch.
Prior to YSI, Danat was part of building/ developing the organisation Future Leaders Global, which has become the biggest and fastest-growing leadership programme for youth in the Nordics. She is passionate about leadership and making sustainability business as usual.
Jørn HaanæsStartup Director for Oslo Business RegionModerator - The Start-up Horror Story Show
Jørn Haanæs
Jørn Haanæs is the Startup Director for Oslo Business Region, the city’s platform for strengthening entrepreneurship.
Jørn comes from the startup world, having served as CEO of the music tech company Soundrop (exit to X5 and CD Baby). Prior to Soundrop, he was the Marketing Director at Warner Music in Norway.
He is passionate about startups, tech, the future of work and how it all ties together in the city of Oslo. Jørn earned his B.A. in Management from BI Norwegian Business School.
Virginia VegasHead of Programs at Angel ChallengeModerator - Investors Breakfast
Virginia Vegas
Virginia E. Vegas is spaniard living the Norwegian startup dream.
She is a graduate in Law and Business from Autonomous University of Madrid with previous work experience in Linklaters, Merck and the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Inspired by strong female leaders like Federica Mogherini and Christine Lagarde, Virginia believes in the need of more role models to inspire the future generations of young girls and female professionals.
She is currently working as the Head of Programs at Angel Challenge, helping entrepreneurs fundraise their first round and grow their company as well as promoting best practices on startup investing in the Nordics.
Jørn HaukøyGeneral Manager at Code11
Jørn Haukøy is a generalist and serial entrepreneur. He has spent most of his professional life in the intersection between business and IT, and is now speeding up a shift in corporate practice where he is bridging the gap between startup and corporate culture.
Jørn works across domains, from strategic to operation, and through his work with some of the biggest corporations in Norway including Equinor, Statkraft, Fortum and Block Watne developed Agile Business Exploration, a framework that uses best practice principles to combine the flexibility in a startup mentality with the know how of big corp to bridge the gap between business, products, technology and people.
He is currently the CEO of Code11, an innovation company with offices in Oslo, Bucharest and Berlin and has composed more then 50 agile teams in a total of 11 different companies during his time there.
Geir FørreManaging Partner Firda AS
Geir Førre is a serial entrepreneur who founded and led Chipcon and Energy Micro, two successful Norwegian semiconductor companies from inception to exit. He was also the founding investor and Chairman of Prox Dynamics, who pioneered a whole new industry within Nano UAV helicopters.
Anne Solhaug TutarDirector, Antler NorwayBuilding the right team for success
Anne Solhaug Tutar
Anne Solhaug Tutar
Anne is an entrepreneur and startup expert currently managing Antlers operations in Norway. Antlers first cohort in Norway is set to launch in Oslo starting January 2020. At Antler Anne helps founders build teams and scalable business models with a particular focus international scalability and growth. So far Antler has worked with more than 700 entrepreneurs and have invested in more than 90 companies.
Anne’s entrepreneurial background comes from Turkey where she founded the country´s first health food FMCG. After a successful market entry in Turkey, the company expanded into a total of 5 markets spreading from the Middle-East to Europe with customers such as Starbucks and Carrefour.
Anne is a business and finance alumni from UC Berkeley and Copenhagen Business School.
Åste EinnChief Design Officer at PayrScience over opinion!
Åste Einn
Åste Einn
Åste is Co-founder and Chief Design Officer at Payr. She has 14 years of experience working on projects where she has held a leading role, from idea and concept development through to deployment.
In 2017 Åste was the only Norwegian, named one of the leading women in fintech internationally by Innovate Finance, and both in 2018 and 2019 she was named one of the Top 50 Women in Tech in Norway.
Anders Christian MorthenDirector - Innovation & Services Telenor NorwayFireside Chat Participant
Anders Christian Morthen
Result oriented and visionary leader with an international career in digital product development and product management. Driven by design thinking, lean and agile practices and long experience of leading digital business development processes in a large organization.
Track record of finding new business opportunities and interested in the entire business and its people - top to bottom. Knows that EBITDA is derived value from interaction between systems and employees, not just effort spent and endless planning and hedging risk. Strong track record for delivering results. High leadership ratings and extraordinary working capacity; focused, structured, holistic and analytical, in addition to high entrepreneurial aspirations.
In depth knowledge about Agile methodology and and how to drive Product Development and Project Execution the lean way. Working with diverse teams have taught me practices, principles and techniques to explore, build and scale products while at the same time grow a culture to support it.
Natalia GibsonCountry and Community Manager at LunarPanel Participant
Natalia Gibson
Natalia Gibson, Country and Community Manager for Lunar, spearheads the Danish challenger bank’s entrance in Norway. She is responsible for growth in the Norwegian market, increasing brand awareness, building strategic partnerships, and laying the groundwork for when they bring their bank license to Norway.
Lunar was founded in 2015 with a mission to challenge the traditional banks under the tagline “things change, banks should too”. Lunar makes banking easy, transparent and personalized.
Prior to joining Lunar, Natalia worked as business developer and has a master’s degree in International Business from CBS.
Hallgeir KnutsenPartner and Product Manager Reodor Roadblocks to corporate innovation
Hallgeir Knutsen
Hallgeir Knutsen
Hallgeir has been an entrepreneur for 20 years. In 1999 he established the print music magazine Kingsize, that later moved into the digital sphere. The magazine expanded to Sweden and was eventually sold to Nöyensguiden. He then moved to New York where he founded New York Digital Labs and spent six years developing digital solutions together with some of the worlds leading brands. Hallgeir is currently a partner and product manager in Reodor, helping large companies adopt the mindset and methods of fast moving entrepreneurs.
Natalie PillingCEO EL Passion7 ways to f**k up your MVP
Natalie Pilling
Natalie Pilling
As the CEO of EL Passion, a digital product house, Natalie manages a team of over 70 professionals from different backgrounds, who develop digital products for startups, small and medium companies and corporations.
In her free-time she co-founded dareIT.org, a mentorship program for women in tech.
Prior to EL Passion Natalie served on the management team in travel startup Comtravo and car start-up ClassicFinder. Her experience also includes stops at Siemens Energy and Simon-Kucher & Partners.
After earning her bachelor’s degree from Warwick University, Natalie graduated from HEC Paris with an MSc in Strategic Management. Natalie is a language geek who can communicate in 7 different languages – 4 of them fluently.
Kea ZhangHead of Product/UX Teston How to make a tailored OKR process that actually works for your company
Kea Zhang
Kea Zhang
Kea Zhang is Head of Product/UX at Teston, a startup building a tool that takes all the hassle out of localised user testing.She currently wears many hats, but her main work involves leading the product team and managing product priorities and processes.
As a part of this, she established OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) early on in the company and has since been iterating on Teston's OKR process to ensure increased alignment, focus, and speed of delivery in the product team.
Kea has an MA in Psychology and an MSc in Human-Computer Interaction. Her background, combined with a wide range of UX and Product experience in agencies, startups and the corporate world, allows her to see challenges from multiple perspectives while always keeping a human-centred approach. This is something she applies every day, working on what she enjoys most: product, UX, process design, and building a motivated and productive team at Teston.
Lucas WeldeghebrielFounder and CEO Shifter MediaPanel Participant
Lucas Weldeghebriel
Before Lucas Weldeghebriel founded Shifter, he spent 14 years in Schibsted working in VG and Aftenposten as a journalist, section manager and product developer.
He is passionate about the art of building a business, tech startups that solve major challenges and food.
Ivar KroghrudSenior partner NorselabCornerstones of a Growth Culture
Ivar Kroghrud
Ivar Kroghrud
Ivar is a successful serial entrepreneur with more than 20 years’ experience. Among his best-known ventures are QuestBack – that he took from 2 to 300 employees and top tier position in its industry – and AdminControl, by most metrics an equally successful business.Ivar is not your average entrepreneur.
Over the years, he has developed a clear vision for what it takes to build and sustain a winning team; He continuously demonstrates his dedication to company culture as a competitive advantage throughout the lifetime of a company.
Ivar has a roadmap for cultures that favor growth, and goes beyond traditional management methods.
Over the years, Ivar has put his cultural acumen at the service of management teams to help them focus on company cultures that promote engagement and growth.
He is now a Senior Partner at Norselab, playing an active role in giving technology startups a flying start.
Magnus Willumsen Investment Manager at Viking VentureFight churn! Six ways to keep your customers
Magnus Willumsen
Magnus Willumsen
Magnus works as an Investment Manager at Viking Venture, the Nordic software investor. Viking Venture invests in B2B software companies and help them scale.
Magnus enjoys data-driven problem solving and has helped several companies scale through improving sales processes, aligning price models to customer value, reducing churn, and through bolt-on acquisitions.
Prior to joining Viking Venture, Magnus spent six years in consulting and investment banking.
Anders JohnsenCEO Documaster Using metrics to drive SaaS growth - how to use metrics to get focus and target visibility
Anders Johnsen
Anders Johnsen
Anders worked over a decade for the Norwegian IT-Company Software Innovation with the Document Management products Doculive, Public 360˚ and ProArc, coding and managing the products in R&D and combining that with roles in delivery and sales, ultimately owning the ProArc Business Unit in the company.Anders was the CTO of Software Innovation for 2 years after Tieto acquired the company for 70M€ in 2015.
He has founded and built successful development centers from scratch in India and Eastern Europe and holds profound understanding of software product development processes, co-authoring a publication in the IEEE Software journal in 2012: “Quantifying the Effect of Using Kanban versus Scrum: A Case Study”.
In 2017 Anders began his Documaster journey, and as the company’s CEO his focus is on subscription growth, healthy SaaS metrics and scalability.
Arne TonningPartner at Alliance VentureInvestors Breakfast Panel Participant
Arne Tonning
Arne Tonning is Partner at Alliance Venture, the leading early-stage tech VC in Norway, filling the roles of investor, non-executive director and advisor.
Arne is most excited when working with ambitious founders and startups to solve hard problems to build great companies. He spent the last five years as Investor in Residence at Nordic Innovation House (NIH) in Silicon Valley for Innovation Norway, advising and supporting startups in the NIH community and on NIH programs. Arne has management consulting background from CapGemini C4 and has worked for the Norwegian Trade Council in London and as a Research Scientist at SINTEF. He holds BSc and MSc degrees in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University.
Arne is an experienced speaker and lecturer in settings from Stanford University and Vestlandskonferansen to startup and corporate leadership workshops.
He is co-hosting the Valley Nordic podcast, covering the topics of startups, technology and culture from Silicon Valley and Nordic perspectives.
Personal profile on Linkedin, Twitter and Medium. Company profile on Web, Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook .
Karianne MellebyDirector Corporate Partners at StartupLab
Karianne U. Melleby is responsible for building a strong network of corporate partners at StartupLab. The impact coming from closer connections between corporate partners and entrepreneurs is one of the key success factors StartupLab focus on in order to help their members closing their first customer.
Prior to joining StartupLab, Karianne has been hands on in several corporate startups both in DNB and Telenor. Most recently she was heading up the DNB Open Bank initiative, including setting up the organization and defining what “Open Bank” means for DNB.
She has been responsible for accelerating Internet adoption in Telenor markets Based in Thailand, she had the unique opportunity to engage and explore with people across South East Asia.
Karianne is currently member of the Board of Directors in KLP, Norway's largest pension company, and in GC Rieber Salt AS.
Espen SundveCPO Kolonial.noMoving teams in the same direction
Espen Sundve
Espen is the Chief Product Officer at Kolonial.no - where he's rethinking the grocery industry.
Before that he spent 10 years in Schibsted building digital products and transforming the company; through roles such as CPO/CTO in VG and VP of Product Management across all of Schibsted's media houses.
With extensive product management experience ranging from execution in small teams to a strategy and team building in large scale organisations he has unique insight into what it takes to build great products and teams.
Lars Johan BjørkevollCEO ScaleupXQ
LJ Bjørkevoll has the past 15 years established and scaled commercial initiatives and organizations out of the Nordics with huge success. He was one of the earliest employees in the Swedish high growth company Mediaplanet, with national and international responsibilities for sales and growth. Later he joined the Norwegian software company Xeneta with initial monetization and international commercial roll out as the focus. With the know-how from the above and several other commercial ventures he launched ScaleupXQ back in 2018.
ScaleupXQ establishes and scales commercial approaches and organizations on behalf of Saas and Marketplaces startups/scaleups looking to expand their business.
Ellie DobsonDirector at GraphCore
Ellie has 15 years experience building data-driven solutions in engineering organisations. She is a particle physicist by training, having worked as part of the Higgs discovery team at CERN. She has worked for the past decade for software companies in variety of industries, but with the focus on the application of advanced analytics and digitalisation to engineering disciplines.
She is currently a Director at GraphCore, a British company that develops accelerators for AI.
Didrik DimmenEx. Co-founder & CMO of FlowMotion
The Start-up Horror Story Show: how one of Norways most promising hardware startups went from over 70,000,000 in revenue to bankrupt
Anette NordvallManaging General Partner at Nordvest
Ative Early Stage Tech Investor focusing on the New Nordic markets in ICT, and Deep-tech Science based innovation; adding for profit Impact, Diversity, Environment, and Global goals.
Appreciated Board member, Public speaker and Business leader. With over 40 early stage investments Team becomes expensive and cumbersome: if not adding other values than written CV and standardised questioning.
Anette will introduces us to other ways of transforming people into teams pulling the same load and direction.
Anette was honored with the Vinnova-Wallenberg Fellowship to Stanford University and Nordic Innovation House in Palo Alto, CA, USA, researching angel investing and common investment values between the Nordics and Silicon Valley; during 2016. Appointed by Swedish Business Magazine Di Digital as one of Sweden’s Most Powerful Tech-investors 2015, 2016. Named at Nordic100 Most Influential Person, 2017 and 2018. Nominated as Pay-it-forward Investor 2017 at Swedish Start-up Gala. Mentioned in EBAN 2018 report on 200+ most active Business Angels in Europe. Cored at Venture Cup Swedish Country final 2018 as "Sweden's nicest Business Angel”.
Anjali BhatnagarCEO and Founder Parampara.co
Anjali is a seasoned leader & entrepreneur with a PhD in Physics from the University of Oslo. Her commercial career spans more than 20 years, during which she has managed product and project development in international Telecommunications/IT/GIS companies including Telenor and Geodata and web- and service design consultancy companies.
She left her job as managing director for Design without Borders in 2016 to become an entrepreneur for Something Borrowed- a peer to peer fashion rental marketplace platform. The platform later evolved into a European B2B and B2C vintage fashion marketplace called Parampara.
Ingrid Schübeler CEO for Digital XBO
Ingrid Schübeler is a Digital Business Developer in OBOS, the largest property developer in Norway, where she works in the intersection between business, customer and technology. She has a long track record of implementing and developing new digital solutions in the building and construction sector through her role as project manager and senior advisor for OBOS IT.
She is currently CEO for Digital XBO, a new spinoff-company from Block Watne and OBOS that aims to set a new standard for how property developers assist, interact and share information with buyers of yet to be constructed homes. A standard that she wants to improve by putting the customer in focus and re-think how the industry can meet to collaborate on common challenges.