Sandbox

Meet a Sandboxer: Kasper Hulthin

June 1st, 2010 by Katrin Winiarski

Kasper is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Hoist. He has been selling bikes and cars at his dad’s shop since he was tall enough to look over the counter, doing various projects while studying, and always been dreaming of starting his own company. As he finished his master degree at Copenhagen Business School, Kasper took the decision to go for his dream. 3 years, 4 companies, and 5000 experiences later he can honestly say – it won’t be the last one. Kasper on Twitter.

Tell us the story of your latest project

I was lucky to join one of the most interesting web start-ups right now, Hoist. Our ambition is to create the online platform for work, like Facebook is for peoples social life. A platform for collaboration across people, groups and organisations, easily adaptable to your own workflows, as we have made it possible for everyone to build their own work applications. Fantastic and overly ambitious project with a brilliant team, which I really enjoy working with.

What are you doing and how did you get there?

I’m basicly doing what I love to do! I enjoy, and emphasize, passing on some of my experiences to students and other young entrepreneurs and I always talk about the balance of activity vs. action, hence the balance of analysing what to do (activity) vs. making it happen (action). I believe you need both to succeed. However, I’m mostly good at making things happen, and to do that you need to be good at people. Lucky I found some good ones to work with.

Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

The best decision in my life was to start-up my first company, and the second best was to close it again. From a financial point of view it was a failure, but it was still the decisions with the most significant impact on my life, and I will never regret. On the other hand I had a brilliant idea when I was 17, and I’ve many times regret I didn’t act on it. A quote goes “Good decision are made upon experience, and experience are made upon bad decisions”. Might be right… From a business perspective some of the the key learnings is to keep it simple and to make binary choices, the path in the middle takes you nowhere.

What do you want to achieve in the next week, the next year, the next 10 years?

Next week: Hopefully closing an epic investment agreement for Hoist.

Next year: Getting more fantastic people working on Hoist while making it grow to be a well known global start-up. Get an additional appartment outside Denmark.

Next 10 years: Creating resources to make bigger things happen. No concrete plans, but teaching kids commerce, working with the development countries, and building a race-court seems like good fun at the time. Building a family with kids to inspire and to be inspired from.

What was your most inspiring moment during the last two weeks?

Experiencing the teams enjoyment from making big things happen and watching excited customers and users showing of their Hoist App’s to each other at a ‘new feature pre-release event’.

How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them?

If you’re interested in being part of one of scandinavia’s most interesting web start-ups, we are always looking for good people, partners and friends of Hoist. On a personal level, I’m always out for new input, people and places to travel, so don’t hesitate to contact me.

Kaspers favorites:

book – Richard Branson: ‘Losing my Virginity’. But to be honest I haven’t read many books… Normally excusing it with the motto: “I don’t read history, I write it!”

movie – The Godfather

place on earth - On top of the sand dunes by my parents summerhouse, looking over the beach /ocean feeling home and small.

travel destination during last year - Eating home grown/cooked italian dinner at my friends old winery in south Italy last summer and visiting New York for the first time

food - Home cooked with love – like it should be!

drink - First sip of a cold beer, when it’s well deserved

quote - “He who hesitates, masturbates!”