Entrepreneurship, Love and Death

The past Wednesday I had the opportunity to participant in an entrepreneur event with the non-profit organization Connect. The event took place at Grant Thornton’s office at Sveavägen 20.

The day started with breakfast and networking – and greetings to some of the entrepreneurs I met at the last event with Connect. I find it fascinating how someone could go from being a total stranger, to someone you give a friendly hug, just because you were at the same event recently. I am not sure if this is specifically for the ”entrepreneur bubble”, or just human behavior. Anyhow – it definitely shows the great impact networking has on your personal network!

Since they had invited six different “speed lecturers” to the event, I got to hear about different aspects you need to consider as entrepreneur or soon-to-be start-up. One of the topics I found most interesting was actually about law. The lecturer, Sten Bergström from Grant Thornton, had many years of experience and shared some of the cases he had been working with. The name of the lecture was “Entreprenörskap, kärlek och död”, which you find translated to English in the heading. There was, for example, a company owner that died of a heart-attack at the age of 45. The only heir of the company was his son – born two months after his death. Another example was when all the leaders of a concern died simultaneously, due to the tsunami 2004.

Even if these scenarios seem to be far away from our current situation, I wanted to share the experience with you. I believe it highlights the importance of legal clarity when it comes to business – and that the legal files need to cover even the events we can’t anticipate. If you have a co-founder, make sure that your responsibilities and duties are stated. If you have children, are married or just partners – make sure that the papers speak your will, in case you (god forbidden!) can’t yourself.

This post got deeper, and darker for that matter, then I planned to. I hope though that it was interesting reading! To cheer you up, here are some pictures from the event: