About Daniel Nilsson.

I grew up in Halmstad on the Swedish west coast. I studied enterprise and business development in Växjö, at what is now Linnaeus University, and then moved to Gothenburg for a master’s in the management of growing enterprises at the University of Gothenburg. I have been in Gothenburg ever since.

My first company was a student magazine: Metro Student Magazine. I started it in 2000 at Växjö University with Christian Albinsson and Joakim Thörn. It began as “C samtidigt på campus” and was later renamed RIFF. By 2007 it had become Sweden’s leading student magazine and was acquired by Metro. I learned how to ship something every month, how to find readers, how to sell advertising, and how to hand a company over.

In 2003 I joined Cryptzone at launch as chief operating officer. Cryptzone was an IT security company in Gothenburg, and I worked there for nine years. When I joined there was no product, no revenue, and no team. When I left, we had 61 employees, 6.5 million euros in annual revenue, and 850 customers across 34 countries, with the United States as our biggest market. Cryptzone was later acquired and is today part of the zero-trust security company Appgate.

The thing I am proudest of from the Cryptzone years is the US launch. The founders asked me to go to New York to build the market. I was young, I had never done a deal in the US, and I had no real idea what I was doing. I rented a house an hour outside the city and commuted into Manhattan every day. I did every single thing I could think of to make it work. The US eventually became our number one market, and the company that later acquired Cryptzone was American. That move mattered.

På svenska: Om Daniel Nilsson

After Cryptzone I did a short period of consulting. The most interesting piece was building a partner programme for the Tele2 Group. Tele2 adopted a version of that model, and their IoT division still uses it.

In 2013 I joined Mentice as chief marketing officer. Mentice is a medical technology company in Gothenburg making simulation platforms for endovascular procedures. I was there for two years and ran more than sixty projects: a new CRM, a rebrand, a new sales process, a new website, a new support system, and a company-wide cultural reset. Mentice is now a customer of Up Strategy Lab, which means a lot to me.

In 2015 I joined Appland as chief commercial officer. Appland had a platform and not much else. We designed a new version of the product, an app store as a service with sub-stores for games, kids, and general apps, before Apple and Google expanded their own offerings into the same space. Then I built a partner programme to take it to the world. With one and a half people we recruited 45 partners and signed agreements with mobile network operators across 40 countries, including Telenor, Vodafone, Axiata, Ooredoo, Smart, and Globe. Our solutions ended up on more than ten million devices in over 200 countries. Appland was acquired by OnMobile in 2018.

And then Noel and I started Up Strategy Lab.

Noel Braganza is my co-founder at Up Strategy Lab and MuchSkills, and my husband. He came from a design and research background, with time at the MIT Design Lab. Years before we met, he had been keeping a simple Google Sheet at his previous studio to track the skills inside his own team, because nothing on the market could show him what his people could actually do. When he and I started working together and saw the same invisibility problem in every client we served, we turned that sheet into a product. The product became MuchSkills. It won the Red Dot Design Award, which almost never happens in this category. Everest Group named it a Major Contender in the PEAK Matrix for skills intelligence. It has mapped more than 100,000 professionals, including teams at Accenture and Red Hat, across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia and Asia. Everything about MuchSkills came out of Up Strategy Lab. The studio came first. The product is the proof that the method works.

MuchSkills is not the only thing the studio has built. We have also co-founded ventures including HardSkills, which connects R&D-intensive companies with specialised technical talent, and ProtoAnything, which delivers industrial prototypes fast. Building our own products is how we know what it costs to build other people’s.

Today I spend my time on three things. I run Up Strategy Lab with Noel. I run MuchSkills as chief executive. And I write The Visibility Edge, a newsletter with tested ideas on building better B2B companies. It has 7,000+ readers.

I am often wrong about how long things will take. I always think everything will move faster than it does. It is a flaw I have never fixed. It is also the reason I start things and finish them. I have built enough companies to know that the part that matters is the part that happens when nothing is happening yet.

Outside work, Noel and I travel slowly, mostly around food and ideas, and mostly to Goa, Australia, USA, and the UK. Home is Gothenburg and family is in Halmstad.

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