Forbes_USA_June_13_2017

ENTREPRENEURS
Google Slayer
Starting with $15,000, Jorn Lyseggen built a version of Google
Alerts before Google Alerts. And despite the big-foot competition,
Meltwater has found the talent to forge a $300 million company.
BY ZACK O’MALLEY GREENBURG
Adecade ago, with Google and Yahoo
lumbering onto its turf, Jorn Lyseggen’s
fledgling media-intelligence
company, Meltwater, faced an existential
challenge. Getting clients to
pay Meltwater to track press mentions suddenly
became a lot harder when Google Alerts was offering
the same service for free. Rather than cut back,
Lyseggen went on a recruitment binge—interviewing
3,000 job applicants face-to-face in a dozen or
so countries over a span of five years.
To find unorthodox solutions, he brought on an
eclectic cast of characters. There was executive director
Kaveh Rostampor, an Iranian refugee who
arrived in America via Sweden. Another hire, Sebastian
Geides, had been a competitive handball
player on the verge of finishing a theology program.
When Lyseggen asked him why he would choose
Meltwater over the priesthood, Geides responded
that Meltwater’s product was easier to sell.
“Talent is talent, everywhere,” says Lyseggen,
48. That philosophy has helped him not only survive
the challenges from Google and Yahoo but also
transform Meltwater into a company that produces
annual revenue approaching $300 million, with an
estimated profit margin of 15%. Meltwater, based
in San Francisco, has 25,000 clients—from Harvard
Business School to the Denver Broncos—all paying
for what’s essentially a souped-up Google Alerts. It
notifies clients about media mentions but also offers
tools that, for example, can distinguish positive
mentions from negative ones. Prices for Meltwater
range from $5,000 to $25,000 a year.
Lyseggen didn’t have to look far for proof that talent
is talent everywhere. Born in South Korea in 1968,
he was adopted by a Norwegian family and raised in a
tiny farming village near the Swedish border. “When
people meet me, they’re a little surprised that I don’t
look tall and blond and dashing,” Lyseggen says. “I was
pretty much a redneck kid. I didn’t know much about
the world. I have friends that still are pumping gas.”
He went a different route, enrolling at the Bergen
University College of Engineering in 1988, where he
spent nearly all of his student-loan
money—roughly
$10,000—to buy the
fastest personal computer
available and began to design
software. After graduating,
he went to work for
the Norwegian Computer
Center, where he grew
fascinated with Java. He
then quit and founded an
internet-consulting outfit,
EU Net Media. In December
1995, with Lyseggen’s
help, Norway’s first online
transaction was recorded.
Two years later, he sold
the consulting firm for $7
million; he then launched
a similar firm and got $40
million for it in 1999. He
started yet another and
watched it go public in
Sweden and soar to a market
cap of $500 million,
only to see the share price
plummet during the dotcom
bust.
Lyseggen forged ahead and founded Meltwater
in 2001, seeding it with just $15,000 and a tiny office
in an Oslo shipyard—because, he says, he was pouring
money into other startups that excited him more
and didn’t want to subsidize a struggling business for
long. But he believed in Meltwater’s premise. At that
point, Google was just three years old and hadn’t
yet launched Google Alerts. In Lyseggen’s view, the
world was drowning in information, and he wanted
to find a way to use software to help simplify things.
“The sell was a subscription to the service that monitored
all the news that was published online,” he
says. “Whenever news that was relevant to them was
published, the clients would be notified.”
Initially, Lyseggen and his very small sales team
NANA KOFI ACQUAH FOR FORBES
54 | FORBES JUNE 13, 2017