The company came afterwards

There is a paradox in how the idea of RENAVID first took root in me, then began to grow, and now, at last, seems to be on its way to becoming something real.

In one sense it has come very naturally. Piece by piece, it has grown out of what I already do every day: the properties I run, the systems I use, the problems I run into, and the small irritations that keep returning until you eventually start to wonder why things are still done the way they are. RENAVID did not begin as a business idea I sat down to find. It began as a number of loose threads that, over time, turned out to belong together.

At the same time, the timing could hardly have been worse for starting something new. I already run a fairly young property company, and I am involved in the development of Kneippen Företagspark, where an old and rather run-down glue factory is being turned into a modern, energy-efficient business park. Beyond that there are other investments, companies and projects, each of which wants its share of attention.

And then, of course, there is the rest of life. I am in what may be the best period I have had so far, and also one of the most intense. I am the father of two small girls, three and five, in that strange stretch of life where the days can feel endless while the years disappear far too quickly. My wife and I are also building our own house, a project that has followed us for nearly four years and is only now beginning to approach the day we move in.

On paper, this is not the right time to start another company. And yet RENAVID has felt like one of the more obvious decisions I have made. Not because I needed another project, but despite the fact that I really did not.

Perhaps that is where I have to begin in order to explain why. Because every time I have tried to look at the idea rationally, to weigh the time it will take against everything that already exists, I have ended up in the same place.

Building companies has become my new art form

I suppose I have always had two fairly different sides.

One is practical. I like understanding how things work, finding problems and trying to solve them. I also grew up with business very close by. I am the third generation of a family that has run its own companies, and when a company sits in the middle of a family it is rarely just a job that someone leaves for in the morning and comes home from in the afternoon. It finds its way into everything: the conversations at the dinner table, the worry, the decisions, the periods when everything is going well and the ones when it is not. As a child you may not see the whole picture, but you understand early that a company can become something much larger than its legal form. It becomes part of the family’s life.

After a childhood like that, there has long been a strong wish in me to one day build something of my own from the ground up. Part of that wish has already found its outlet in the property company my wife and I started together. That company is also the foundation of much of what RENAVID has become. The properties gave me the problems to work on, the environment to test in and, eventually, the reasons to start building systems of my own.

But I also have another side, which is not really practical at all.

Since I was small I have liked to write. Short stories first, then poems, and later music. During my teens that part of me almost disappeared. I am not quite sure why. But somewhere towards the end of my twenties it came back, with considerably more force than before.

It was probably only when I sat down and wrote an entire book that I understood how large that part of me actually was. A fantasy novel of around 180,000 words. It is still unpublished, and perhaps it always will be, but that mattered less than I expected. The strange thing was that I had written it at all. Month after month I had returned to the same world and the same story until, in the end, there was a finished book where before there had been nothing.

I think something of the same need is present in my work with companies today. Starting and building companies has, in some way, become my new art form.

Not art in the sense that companies should be beautiful for their own sake. Rather that the building itself makes room for the same part of me that once wanted to write stories and music: to begin with something that does not yet exist, to try to understand what shape it ought to have, to change what does not work, and slowly to watch something that at first was only a fairly vague thought become real.

RENAVID gives that part of me an unusual amount of room. It brings together things I have long been interested in but used to think of as separate worlds: property and technology, writing and business, the making of the product itself and the thinking behind how it should work.

Many years ago I came across an idea that has stayed with me, though I remember neither the exact wording nor who wrote it. The gist was that business without art risks having no soul, while art without some form of business rarely reaches far beyond the person who made it.

The first half has grown more important to me over the years. I want to build companies that have an idea of what they want to be, where the details belong to the whole, and where it shows that somebody cared both about how something works and how it feels to use. Perhaps also about what was deliberately left out.

There is, of course, a less romantic side to all of this. A company is still a company, and I think that wanting to start companies is, in itself, a fairly poor reason to start one.

That, at least, is a lesson I have had plenty of opportunities to learn. Over the years I have had more business ideas than I can remember. My wife probably remembers more of them than I do, not least because she has had to sit through a good many enthusiastic presentations of things I was completely convinced about for a few days or weeks. The enthusiasm has not always been mutual.

Most of those ideas went away.

RENAVID did not.

The difference was that this time I never had to begin with the company. The problems were already in front of me. I was working on them every day. I had bought the systems, tried to adapt how we worked to fit them, and eventually started building my own solutions where they fell short.

By the time RENAVID began to take shape, much of the actual work had therefore already begun. The systems existed in our properties. The problems were real. I was using the solutions myself and had to live with the consequences when they did not work.

The company, in truth, came afterwards.

It started in the properties

Property is a strange industry in that growth almost always requires more of the very thing that made it hard to get into in the first place: capital. There is a high and very concrete barrier in front of the first purchase, and once you have got over it you soon discover that the same barrier stands in front of the next.

My wife and I have chosen a fairly traditional path with our property company. We own it together, we take in no outside equity, and we finance acquisitions with our own capital and bank loans. That gives us the control we want and suits the time horizon we have chosen, but it also means the company grows at the pace the capital allows.

We sometimes talk about owning for ever. Not literally, of course, but as a way of reminding ourselves what kind of owners we want to be. When we buy a property, the natural question is not when we will sell it, but how it should work and look in ten, twenty or thirty years. What needs to be done to it, and which decisions come out differently when you assume you will be the one living with the result for a long time.

That perspective makes some things easier. Growth is not one of them. If the ambition is to build a substantial property company over time, it can feel slow. A good acquisition is still only one acquisition, and the portfolio grows at the pace the finances permit.

So early on we needed something other than the number of buildings we owned to measure ourselves against. We actually set that goal before our first purchase: we would try to become unusually good at running the properties we had.

At first the wording was almost absurdly broad, but it became clearer as it met everyday work. We wanted to know the buildings better and stay ahead of the maintenance, to be able to follow whatever was discovered all the way until it was actually resolved, and to stop hunting for the same information in several different places every time it was needed. Much of it came down to fairly simple things, but the kind of things that decide, over time, how well a property is actually run.

Technology felt like an obvious part of that work, so we did the reasonable thing and started looking for systems. Some we bought, some we tried, and several worked fairly well for exactly what they had been built for.

The trouble was that our operation paid very little attention to the boundaries between products.

A fault in an apartment can begin as a message from a tenant and, much later, become the basis for a maintenance decision. In between, a contractor may have been on site, a deviation may have been created, and several documents may have been added. Operationally, all of it belongs together. In the software, the same event was often split between systems that knew very little about each other.

After a while I also noticed that we had started doing something I disliked more than the fragmentation itself: we were changing the way we worked to suit the programs.

I have always had trouble with that order of things. A system should, as far as possible, be shaped around an operation that works well, not slowly shape the operation around its own limitations.

It was around the same time that AI went from something I followed at a distance to something I could actually use myself. My first reaction was fairly simple: I have to understand this. But quite soon I realised that this ambition, too, was too vague. Being “good at AI” did not mean very much in itself. The interesting thing was understanding what the technology could do within a field you already knew in depth.

For me, that was property.

It changed the way I experimented. Instead of asking what the latest model could do, I started with things in our own operation that I already knew ought to work better. Sometimes the solution was absurdly small. In other cases one problem dragged the next one along with it, and what had begun as a simple workflow suddenly required that information be structured in a better way. Once that structure existed, it could in turn be used for things I had not thought of at the outset.

After a while I was no longer merely improving how we used our existing systems. I had started building parts of them myself.

It was never a manifesto against off-the-shelf software. I still have very little desire to build things other people already do better. But when, now and then, I found myself with a solution of my own that worked better for our operation than a program we were paying for, the decision was fairly undramatic. We stopped using the program.

When the same thing happened again, my picture of RENAVID began to change as well.

Something I would have wanted to find myself

In conversations with others in the property industry I noticed that the interest in AI was often considerably greater than the sense of what the technology could actually change in their own operation. It was already in use here and there, sometimes very successfully, but the use often sat beside the operation itself. People had been given a new tool without necessarily changing the systems and workflows behind what they did.

It was the latter question that had begun to occupy me. What becomes possible when you do not just lay AI on top of the work you already do, but begin to reconsider the way the work itself is organised?

I recognised the distance between the two because I had tried to cross it myself. When I started looking for knowledge, there was an almost unlimited amount of material about AI and just as much about property, but very little that started from both at once. What was missing was someone who could follow the development of the technology with one hand while keeping the other in the concrete business of running buildings, where the value eventually has to show itself.

So it was not more information I was looking for. I wanted to see what happened when someone actually took the new technology into real buildings, built with it over a longer period, and then described what remained once the novelty had worn off. Which ideas survived, and which did not? What could be built in a few hours but turned out to be hard to run over time? And when something really worked, what did the system behind it look like?

Somewhere in there is still the simplest description of what I want RENAVID to be.

A place where the work comes before the conclusion.

Where the systems first have to meet reality in our own properties, and where whatever is published or taught carries that experience with it. At the same time I want RENAVID to be able to look further than our own buildings. The development is moving far too fast, and is far too interesting, for everything of value to have to be invented by us. Some of it we will build. The rest we will simply have to understand better than most people do, and translate into the world we actually work in.

That may also be why RENAVID has become so hard for me to set aside. It gathers several things I would otherwise have gone on doing separately: the work in the properties, my interest in AI and technology, the urge to build, and the need to write in order to understand what I am learning.

I do not know exactly what shape all of this will have in five years, and I do not think I want to pretend that I do. The conditions are changing too quickly for that. What I feel considerably surer of is the direction itself: that there is work worth doing where property meets the technology now changing in front of us, and that the work becomes more interesting when you do it for real before you try to tell others how they should.

It is a fairly modest starting point for yet another company, but perhaps a more honest one than grand visions usually are.

Looking back, I am not sure the decision was really to start RENAVID.

The harder decision was realising that I had already begun building it.