Haakon is a co-founder of Dawn and works across our entire portfolio. He contributes to our direction and positioning, as well as overseeing our growth stage investing.

I came to venture capital from a strawberry farm in Norway, by way of running my own businesses.

That background probably explains how I look at the companies we back. Growing up around practical work, where the seasons don't care about your spreadsheet, teaches you something about resilience. Building businesses of my own taught me the rest: the doubt, the long stretches where nothing works, the small wins that keep you going. And then the incomparable feeling when it does work and it grows by itself - like a strawberry field that has been well prepared.

Having sat on the founder side of the table, I have learnt that any decision is normally better than no decision - the wash up and learnings come later. When you are in the thick of it, telling a wobble from a real problem can be critical and I have a good feel for that. Finally, I have learnt nobody is right all the time and hindsight is a wonderful (but useless) thing. The founders I work with describe me as a ‘great sounding board’ and that is what I hope to provide; help to do your own thing the best.

For me, the thing that makes Dawn special is partnering with founders who become global category leaders, often in the face of far more challenges than people on the outside ever see. That never grows old.

Before co-founding Dawn, Haakon was UK CEO and a founder at Self Trade, an on-line stockbroker which floated in April 2000, and then sold in October 2000 to HypoVereinsbank for €911m (US$1.1bn). Haakon studied Mathematics at the University of Oslo and holds a BA (Hons) in Economics from Durham University.