The move to Aarhus
In 1999 Trifork (in reality EOS) had two offices. One in the science park in Aalborg, which was located close to Aalborg University. The other was a small office on the outskirts of Aarhus with four people. The reason for having two offices was that there was talent in Aarhus we really wanted as part of our journey. People we trusted and knew from the university or from our network.
The main technology everyone was talking about in 1999 was Java. A platform and language I knew really well, since the products we delivered to our customers were written in Java. The 1999 JavaOne Conference (held June 15–18 in San Francisco) was a watershed moment for Sun Microsystems. With 20,000 attendees, it cemented Java’s transition from a “cool programming language” for applets into a serious platform for enterprise and mobile computing.
The biggest takeaway from the event was the official partitioning of Java into three distinct editions, a structure that defined the ecosystem for the next two decades.
1. The Birth of the Three Editions
Sun Microsystems rebranded the “Java 2” platform into three specific target areas to address the fragmentation of devices:
- J2EE (Enterprise Edition): This was the headliner. Sun introduced the J2EE specification to provide a standard for multi-tier enterprise applications, introducing or formalising Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), Servlets and JSP (JavaServer Pages).
- J2SE (Standard Edition): The baseline for desktop and general-purpose development.
- J2ME (Micro Edition): Designed for “resource-constrained devices.” This was the birth of Java on mobile phones and pagers.
As we were then, and are today, a company that does the utmost to stay on the forefront of the technology wave, we of course repeated the successful JavaTwo event in Aarhus and Copenhagen. JavaTwo was an event created on the plane from San Francisco to Copenhagen. At JavaOne, Kim and I would divide the vast programme between us. Kim would cover J2EE and all the backend material. I would listen carefully to everything related to UI, UX, widgets and performance. I am also really interested in the interface between software and hardware, so I would cover the new J2ME, where you run Java on small things: a finger ring, a credit card or a small controller. On the plane home we would make our own presentations and read up on all the documentation. We would code examples for demo purposes. So when we landed we would have a night’s sleep and go straight into presentation mode. One day in Aarhus and one day in Copenhagen, where about 80 people would show up to get our view of the news from that year’s JavaOne. Presenting at these two seminars taught us to stay sharp and up to date with the latest technical developments.
The best way to learn is to teach. It is something I still stress to everyone at Trifork today. Teach and inspire. We made a good part of our revenue this way, so it was not really a choice we had. The rewarding part, besides the income, was seeing people get excited about all the great things we brought home.
Lesson 2.1
“The best way to learn is to teach. If people show up, you know you are inspiring and leading the way.”
Kim and I would also do a company strategy session at JavaOne. We were a very effective team, so three hours in a bar on top of Bank of America over a couple of cognacs would do the trick of planning every strategic move for the next 12 months. The main topic that year was whether we should combine our two offices into one new one in Aarhus. I had found a magnificent place called the Scandinavian Center, which included a conference venue with room for 1,000-plus people. It also had very attractive office spaces and good parking. I made my case and Kim agreed. Finally I could move to Aarhus myself, where the bay of Aarhus made a perfect playing field for sailing. Kim was positive too, since he had found a girl who lived in Aarhus. The other main topic was whether we should invest in building a J2EE application server, which would be a gigantic effort and cost millions. Since this was Kim’s dream I voted yes, and said I would find some investor funding so we could have our dot-com adventure like many others at the time. Two big decisions, with a view towards the Pacific and a beautiful sunset.
Lesson 2.2
“When you are small and nimble, everything is simple.”
Organising the move out of two offices into one was done in a one-liner. I found an email from 5 July 1999 where I state: on the first of August we are moving from our current offices to our new office in the Scandinavian Center. Followed by: who can help with the move? Within the same day everyone had answered that they would come and help, which meant the move could be done in a few hours.
Digital Health
Our digital health journey started at our GOTO (JAOO) conference in Copenhagen(in October 1998). The CTO of a hospital came and talked to me about technology, and was intrigued by Java and other new technologies. There was a generational shift happening. Before then, every byte had to be optimised and utilised — to the extent that the year in a date would most likely lack the century. So as 2000 came around the corner, a lot of systems had to be fixed to stop them believing they were suddenly back in year 00. The CTO of this hospital had systems with this flaw, and he invited us to come and have a look. I didn’t know much about the state of hospital software, but I knew I could learn fast. I invited myself to a design thinking session, which meant I would spend a few days in the hospital observing how doctors, nurses and patients interacted, how they used the different IT systems, and what they still documented in files and on paper. The design thinking session was day, evening and night. The week after, I suggested that we could fix his system by building an entire electronic record system for documenting the workflow of patients arriving, a journal of what they were treated for and how, what medicine was prescribed and a lot of other things. We knew we only had until Christmas to finish the system, and it had to be very well tested. We worked very closely with nurses and doctors, and it was interesting to see that the nurses quickly picked up on the idea of documenting their work on a computer, even if only a few had ever touched a keyboard before. The doctors, on the other hand, were very reluctant to change. They told us that keyboards were a tool for secretaries.
As part of the deal we had to deliver 24/7 support for the system, so my number was printed on every screen (40728483). Because of my team’s great work, the phone hardly ever rang.
Lesson 2.3
“Study how users adopt your solution. Own your work and support it.”
As we won more work in the healthcare market our team grew, and then one day some big public tenders started to appear on our radar. We had people reaching out to us from the market, telling us they had heard good things about our products and technology. They also made it clear that we would have no chance of winning, since we were still a small company with fewer than 50 people.
So how do you, as an entrepreneur, become 10x bigger overnight? Not only bigger, but also financially solid, with the brand and reputation to win large public contracts. This was a true challenge, and I will leave it to the reader to figure this one out for now.
In the meantime my future wife started to work in the healthcare division. She is a nurse and could teach us even more about how to support care and the processes in a hospital. We hired people from our network — people we knew were really good at what they did. A lot of them are still with the company even today. We also partnered with innovative doctors who came with further ideas and energy on how the healthcare system could be optimised by “adding electricity to paper”, as one doctor explained it. Maybe that doctor knew something most people didn’t, since AI might soon take up 20% of global energy consumption. In order to compartmentalise, we created a new legal entity called Medfork. The fork for medical tech.
“In those early years we learned how important it is to truly understand a domain such as healthcare. Combining that with deep, innovative technical know-how is the key to success. To pitch groundbreaking products you need to be ahead of the curve.”
As mentioned earlier, we made it a practice that everyone should teach. When you hire people who can teach applied science at the same time as delivering software to customers, you have a solid foundation. It forces you to stay tuned in and to constantly learn yourself. To make sure we could get enough students, we partnered up with a Copenhagen-based company who were good at selling. It happens a few times in a lifetime that you run into people who are out of the ordinary. Torben Hyllested was such a guy. Torben is a tall, handsome man who is bold enough to wear a pink shirt with a few buttons open. Always tanned, and he used his charm and wit when he entered a room. That is exactly how he arrived one day with a colleague at our Scandinavian Center office in Aarhus. It is not every day a team from Jutland sees such an entrance. Torben walked down the hall, where he would see geeky installations such as my first NeXT computer in matte black and a purple JavaStation, the thinnest client you could dream of. He met my team, who were certainly dressed differently. Long story short, we agreed to set up the coolest training facility in Copenhagen, in a very historic building. We would call the new training company Mindfork (some read it as MindF.CK), which made people smile, but it was exactly what we wanted. We wanted to provoke, teach and change the way people thought about new technology.
I believe we had a cool training room in Aarhus, but the room in Copenhagen on Islands Brygge was next level. I insisted that people should learn in pairs, so based on the pair programming principles I designed the “Kent Beck” pair programming table. It was shaped so that the two people pairing would be slightly facing each other and equally facing the big monitor, forming a triangle of learning. The building was an old zeppelin hangar, and you might want to ask how it ended up in Copenhagen, since zeppelins were a German thing, mainly from the First World War. The thing is that when a nation loses a war, the victors claim ownership of various artefacts. Just as the Vikings did it centuries ago, this zeppelin hangar was brought from Berlin to Copenhagen — and here we were, in this piece of history, teaching applied computer science.
2001
September 11 terrorist attacks (11 September) – Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners, destroying the World Trade Center towers in New York City and striking the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people and drastically reshaping global security.
This was the main event of 2001. At Trifork we remember this year because we were affected by this very attack. It all started in May 2001, when we got in touch with a big US tech company that showed interest in our J2EE application server. The J2EE application server, known as the Trifork app server, was in our own humble opinion a masterpiece, developed by a very lean team of brilliant engineers.
We were invited to New York, and I went with my chairman Johan B. Petersen, who I loved to work with. After a couple of meetings we had negotiated a deal at a value of USD 14m, a big amount for a few young software engineers. Johan and I felt on top of the world, and we celebrated the term sheet with a trip to the viewing platform of the World Trade Center, at level 107 as I recall it. It felt very solid, I was thinking. All you could hear was the wind, and the view was absolutely breathtaking. No one could imagine that all of this would be gone a few months later.
Sun Microsystems, with whom we had a very good collaboration, had an office in the Twin Towers, and I found this short description of how lucky the Sun team were on that tragic day in September.
That week in September we held the JAOO software conference in Aarhus with more than 1,000 people. We had speakers from New York and the rest of the US speaking at the event. For the software community this was becoming an important event, and in many ways bigger than us. I remember that on the afternoon of 11 September in Aarhus, all the screens at our conference showed the tragedy, and no one could grasp what was going on.
One of our speakers was already on the way home to New York and landed 20 minutes before the airspace was closed down. Four and a half thousand planes were grounded in just three and a half hours.
Several of our speakers were stuck in Denmark while their families wanted them home. This was also the first time I really learned how journalism works. As our conference was growing in numbers and significance, and very prominent people spoke there, I tried to get the press to write about the significance of software and how it was changing the world. There was little interest in this. But when a group of American researchers and software experts were stuck in Aarhus because of a terror attack, I didn’t have to call anyone. We had the press all over us. That was the week I lost faith in the free press.
Eventually everyone was able to leave, and to return for the next year’s event.
The USD 14m deal did not happen in the end. I decided at the eleventh hour not to sign, and it is one of those decisions that in a material way would have changed my life and the path for Trifork. I often wonder where that alternative timeline could have taken us. As you will realise later, this was not the first time something like this crossed the path of Trifork.
How to grow big overnight
Now the reader has had a bit of time to figure out how to grow big fast. In my world view, Maersk was the most credible brand one can think of — so what if I could merge my company with Maersk? It turned out that Maersk, with 55,000 employees, had an IT company with 3,000 people and a healthcare unit of 25 people, the same size as Medfork. So I spent a few months getting to the right people, and at my friend Torben Hyllested’s 50th birthday celebration, the CEO of Maersk Data was attending. We were enjoying Danish smørrebrød and beer and snaps at the St. Annæ restaurant. At one point I thought: it’s now or never. I went over to the CEO of this big company. I made my case and explained that together we could do magic and change the Danish healthcare system. To my surprise, he said he had actually known about this crazy idea for a little while, and now he seemed to have understood its importance. At least he could see it was important to me. Two weeks later we had a new partner in Medfork, which was rebranded “ACURE – A Maersk Company”. Three years later we were 170 people, and by far the most successful digital healthcare company in Denmark. Had I not met Torben Hyllested, and had he not celebrated his 50th with prominent guests, ACURE might not have happened. Thank you, Torben.
Learning:
Overcome your fears and tell people about your ideas with passion, so you can change the world.