Patrik Möller's journey in building and financing CorPower Ocean, a company that has raised $147 million from top-tier investors.
Patrik Möller's journey in building and financing CorPower Ocean, a company that has raised $147 million from top-tier investors. It highlights the importance of delaying VC funding and creatively sourcing early funding through grants and research programs to preserve ownership.
It takes time to do these really big step changes to it. It's not a sprint. It is an ultra marathon. That's the single biggest learning I've made on the way. And it's about making small compounded gains or wins that over time make huge wins. [Music] All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the dealmaker show. So today we have an amazing guest you know joining us you know I guess that he's done it a couple of times. We're going to be really walking you through the um the journey of building, scaling, financing and then also you know when it comes to building a team with different nationalities uh also getting ideas you know how you get inventors too and scientists on board as well as developing and proving the technology in different stages right so again you know brace yourself for a really inspiring conversation and without further ado let's welcome our guest today Patrick Mhler
welcome to the show thanks a lot great to be here Alexander So, born and raised in Sweden, right there, close to the border with Denmark. Give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you? Yeah, there in southern Sweden, where people from Stockholm, where I live today, would say that I'm from Denmark because of the dialect in in southern Sweden. Uh, yeah, good place to start, I think. Uh, a nice dynamic area and, um, yeah, quite as the Scandinavian places are quite international today. So, a good place to start, I think. Now in your case, you know, how did you get the whole um I don't know like entrepreneurial bug and were you always like a problem solver growing up? I think I've always and even through my dad etc. always been the kind of person question everything is this just because somebody says this is the best way to do it. Is it really the best way to do it? And
I think I've always had that kind of thinking and especially going to school and then university. uh that has always been one of my things to to think even if it says in a book does it have to be the only way uh to do it and then I studied in UC Berkeley in in California and then I saw more and more of the entrepreneurial activities going on around there and that was really inspiring to me as well. How do you find yourself in the US you know coming to Berkeley? I mean how how did that come up? I mean it's quite the long trip from Sweden. Yeah. Yeah, that was probably one of the my best years ever. so much fun and extremely interesting people. Uh so I got to live in something called the international house in Berkeley where we were 600 people from essentially all countries of the world and then of course taking classes in chemical engineering that I studied and micr fabrication that I
specialized in then towards the semiconductor industry. Uh yeah a whole new world opening it up and and berserkly also being quite a lot of radical people. I think that resonated with me uh as well. Now for you, you know, obviously at the time when you when you got going with your first company, I mean in Europe, you know, especially in Sweden is very similar to Spain where I'm originally from and it's more like, you know, the culture is different. You don't have the entrepreneurial mindset that maybe you have in the US, especially when you go to places like California. Uh but how was it? how how did that whole idea of of going at it with starting a company, you know, come through as opposed to maybe doing the corporate route that maybe I'm sure your parents would have loved for you at the time. Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that. I think my dad always had is like when I started
even the first years after starting, he's like, "Yeah, but when aren't you going to apply for jobs sometime?" Uh but yeah, I think I had an idea when I started in in in Berkeley to simplify the way to do semiconductor manufacturing essentially removing a lot of the process steps in metalization. So the top layers of silicon manufacturing and uh when I got back to Sweden I decided to do it stepwise. So we did a thesis work on it that becames our ma master thesis and then we got a proof point for the principal and then we got quite keen on starting a a company around that and I guess we were quite you know young and everything was possible having been a year in in California. you were really like uh enriched by the idea that yes try yes yes just yes just yes just yes just yes just yes just push and I think that really helped me to just keep pushing on that idea and it turned out that we we
yeah we ran that for some 10 11 years and we built a pretty successful company on it so yeah it was worth the try but I guess the dedication to just continue I think I just took it stepwise at the time when when you then decided to do your thesis work then decided to register a company it was of course forming a a bold old vision but it took some time to realize that this is going to be a 10 year plus type of venture etc. I don't think I knew all of that from the beginning. How was it like to uh raising money for the first time? Yeah. So we were quite you know I think it's a good thing to start companies where you're coming straight out of university. So I started it together with two other friends from um university and uh you know you have low costs of living at that point usually in your your stage of life. So I think we continue to live on a very low cost in the first years. So that
avoided us having to raise substantial amounts of money. We did apply for a lot of um soft funding scholarships and grants to do the research and I even enrolled as an industrial PhD student. So half my salary got covered by a PhD support from a research program etc. So we were quite creative in the early days of not having to raise too much of um private capital or venture capital. It took us a few years until we got the first investors into the company. How how much how much capital did you guys raise for this company? We raised some 50 60 million uh for that company. Was it tough to to raise being in Sweden? You know, because obviously now in Europe there's more access to capital, but back then the startup ecosystem was almost, you know, non-existent. No, exactly. This was 2002. We were uh supported by an incubator in Stockholm called Sting, Stockholm Innovation and Growth and they
were like we were among the first companies today. It's probably the most successful incubator in Sweden and uh yeah it was a very early stage the ecosystem for VC financing and so was not what it is today and a lot of the big exits that has been hadn't happened at that time. Uh so we got some um business angels uh engaged from the beginning and people who had built companies, operators and they were very helpful and providing some of their first money but also their experience and helped out a lot and then in some years later we were able to get some uh university related technology investment uh fund uh and later on some of the big names like North Zone and Wellington Capital etc came in uh out of yeah Europe. European north zone being Swedish or Scandinavian and Wellington out of Germany. So let's talk about maneuvering no through cycles through situations because Leman hit and Leman
hit everyone. Um yeah how was that for you guys? Yeah I mean we had the kind of investors in with a very US type mentality is like money is not a problem. How can we scale this faster? And we were scaling scaling. We were we bought a factory in France. We had quite a bit of people on the team etc. and all by sudden Lehman Brothers hit and we also had a number of strategic investors at that time on the cap table from uh Silicon Valley. big machine companies doing machines for semiconductor manufacturing. And the whole idea is that there would be a bidding war between these companies of buying up our technology in our company. And all by sudden after Leman Brothers of course money did become a problem and uh everybody were slowing down and cash flow became a challenge. So we downsized a little bit and then we decided okay rather than we had probably one or two years of test production
remaining before starting to sell in larger volumes we had a few different manufacturers with our equipment in piloting and that would require a new round of financing etc to take the next two years. to the board and together we decided it's better to sell the technology as is and everybody expected a quite good deal with some of the strategic uh Silicon Valley companies but you know everything was very sour in the market at that time uh and then they didn't really buy so we ended up selling it to another outfit in Luxembourg in the end and I think that taught me also everything about timing I think it's very healthy to be through some of these uh cycles uh it turned out as Well, we had our chairman of the time was a former CTO of one of those companies that was supposedly one of the buyers of our technology. What we didn't know was there was a merger ongoing in the background between
that company and…