And there we were…

Mats Andersson explaining how he came up with the summit idea

Its a bit of a long story how this came about. I had a zoom call last year with Soren Bauman from Silicone Vikings, who referred me to Mats Andersson. Mats and his phenomenal team at The Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco and Silicon Valley were putting together a Forest Innovation Summit.

Brendan had planned to travel with his family to the USA just before COVID hit. As those ticket vouchers were expiring, and he was coming to the USA anyway, we decided to come over and make a bit of a road trip out of it. The plan changed and evolved a few times but it turned out pretty darn great!

And that is how we ended up pitching at Berkley University.

As a side note, my day started off at 04:00, as I had some homework to do for Lund Innovation’s Validate program. At 05:00 I had a videocall as part of the validate program while Brendan was on our first call with the Future Forest Initiative Validation Sprint program to meet our mentors. So a double booked meeting at 5 am is how we started the day. I joined Brendan at 06:00 on his call. We had breakfast at the summit around 08:30 and watched all of the amazing speakers from 09:00 onwards.

After the summit there was an opportunity to network in a garden outside in the sun.

We got to our room and are now preparing for another pitch that will take place at 23:40. So for anyone that thinks we came for a vacation, think again ;-)

Photo credits by Bert-Ola Eriksson from Katam Technologies

Photo credits by Bert-Ola Eriksson from Katam Technologies