Thousands of small experiments: Merete Hverven of Visma
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What is Visma’s overall growth story and how did the conversation begin?
Where we have had success, we showcase that to all of the other businesses. Where we've failed, we also showcase that to all of the other businesses. So instead of all of them having to do lots of experiments, we're doing simultaneous experiments across. And then when we learn from that, it is by far the largest entrepreneurial network that we have in Europe.
Welcome to Orbit, the HG podcast series where we speak to the leaders of some of the most successful software businesses on the planet about how they built and scaled those businesses. I'm Nick Humphreys, the senior partner of HG, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Maretta Vervan, the CEO of ISMA. Um as one of HG's longest and frankly one of the partnerships that's been closest to my heart, Vizma has excelled over the past two decades plus, pioneering software as a service, and then no doubt poised to excel in some of the upcoming tech revolutions that might happen over the next few years. So thanks for joining me, Moretta.
Thank you for having me.
This is actually your second appearance on orbit, so thank you for that as well. Last time we spoke a lot about why the Nordics are such a great place for kind of technology businesses. Um how would you say that the Nordics in general are positioning themselves for the next kind of few decades from a technology point of view?
Wow, that's a really good question. It's a big question, but um Last time uh I was here I stated that uh In the Nordics, salaries are quite high.
Yeah.
And in general, it's always been also quite um low unemployment uh rates. That continues to be the case. Uh all of the countries are really small, so to stand out, we have to continue to invest and focus, learn and grow based on the new technologies coming our way. We have to be massively productive. And uh I'm I'm really proud to say that even in the last survey that was carried out worldwide, uh the Nordics, even though very, very small, very few inhabitants, rank in the top fifteen across across the globe with regards to being highly digitized and continue to be so also. So I think it will continue as we have in the Nordics. And it's been working so far. So I guess we'll continue with that uh with that journey.
I guess one of the other features I've seen which is slightly away from tech is Because the local economies are great, but they're not big enough to sustain really big businesses in their own individual kind of country right. Yeah. I think it just creates this kind of mentality of I mean I think about yourself and your own background and family background, think about a lot of the other kind of managers and senior team at Visma. people kinda have this kind of like international and expansionist mindset, you know, from a pretty early age. I don't know whether that was kind of part of your background or whether it was part of like Korea, but that seems to be something that is inherent in a lot of people.
Yeah, I I think you're right. We have small countries we could never manage on our own. We have to look outside of the countries and learn from the best of the best. So an example when chat GPT comes. Of course everyone has taken uh that uh into account, but but we've always been the front runners looking outside of the countries, looking for technologies and other ways of working to be productive and actually be able to scale coming from the Nordics and then going external, than actually just having to look at your own own hometown because it won't scale. It's not big enough.
So if you don't mind my retro, I'm gonna take us back a little bit, because one of the things that I observed, you know, sitting on the board of Visma back in 2009, 2010, was that you were the first company that I was aware of in Europe that really thought seriously about cloud and SaaS technology. And really embraced it in a way, I guess, reminiscent of the innovators' dilemma. Yeah, at the time you were a scale business, you were mostly on-prem. But you seem to kind of like dive headlong almost into kind of SAS and do that in a way that I found t to be very unique.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is Visma’s overall growth story and how did the conversation begin?
0:04–6:05
2
How are the Nordics positioning themselves for the next decades of technology?
6:05–9:45
3
Why does Visma rely on thousands of small experiments instead of one‑size‑fits‑all solutions?
9:45–17:03
4
How did Visma transition from on‑premise software to a cloud‑first SaaS leader?
17:03–22:51
5
What is Visma’s approach to acquisitions and keeping entrepreneurs engaged?
22:51–35:15
6
How does Visma build a youthful, diverse leadership team and develop leaders?
35:15–39:59
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