Omid Ekhlasi: Founder & CEO of Techarena - Scandinavia's Biggest Tech & Business Event

0:00Omid Ekhlasi:All right. Hello. Welcome back. I'm here with Omid, the founder of Tech Arena. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself, a little bit about what you built? Hi, sir. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Omid Ekhlasi. I'm the founder and CEO of Tech Arena. And we know we're mainly a physical, but also a digital platform, bringing together the people who are actually enabling and creating change and building things in our society. So founders, of course, business leaders, investors, people who make decisions of politicians, experts. And our goal is to get them, you know, in the same room to share ideas, to network, and ultimately we want them to do business.

0:45So we're mainly known for our two large scale events. So one's happening in Stockholm and one's happening in a small island in Sweden called Gotland. Within these two events, we bring together 18 ,000 participants from more than 120 countries. But the whole tech arena, you know, it's built upon how can we support founders to grow their business. So we also have two yearly competition for entrepreneurs. We do have for six years, we've been running an accelerator program for female founders because, you know, So they receive a small amount of the total investments made in startups. So we help them to raise funds.

1:29And we also do these international delegations, bringing Swedish and Nordic companies abroad. But mainly, the most important, we open up the Nordics and Sweden for investors, entrepreneurs and corporates to come here.

1:42Omid Ekhlasi:Amazing. And look, there's lots to get into. The ecosystem at the moment in the Nordics, Sweden and around is just like crazy. like every week is like another startup raising another big round either like small scale but also yeah like lagora lovable tandem health there's like every week sun there's more going there's more going on um so i think my first question would be what's it like in in the in that part of the world now you know you've been building this for a long time but right now it feels like it's just crazy yeah i mean it's uh i mean it's so exciting you know it's like every day you wake up and then you see a new unicorn.

2:20And then, I mean, it's a whole new generation. It's like it's a new breed of entrepreneurs that have risen now. I mean, it feels like almost like a phenomenon. You see this, you have cultural phenomenons, you have societal phenomenons. You sometimes get this in sports. And, I mean, to take an example, you have this very small region which is Dagestan and they, you know, they pop up, one UFC champion after the other one. And then I think I saw the same thing happened in a village next to where I lived where you suddenly, we got this immigrant to start coaching wrestlers. And all of these kids went there.

3:03They became better. And as they became better, you know, more and more people came. They created a community around it. And suddenly, you know, no one wanted to wrestle them in Sweden. So they went out and becoming European champion, world champions. And I think I see the same thing when it comes to like the entrepreneurial scene in Stockholm. Like you have the knowledge, you have the expertise, and then, you know, you start attracting the talents. And now, I mean, when it comes to the AI, you always also have the market, right? So I think it's the perfect time. And I think that we will see a lot of new companies popping up.

3:40Omid Ekhlasi:And tell me a bit about Tech Arena then. I think it's coming up to its 12th year. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we started tech 12 years ago. I joined a business group. It was a mix between a private incubator and an investment firm. And in Sweden, researchers, they own their IP. And everybody's talking about, so we have all this amazing research, but no one is working to commercialize it. So that's exactly what we did. So we worked with researchers to very systematically, you know, take their ideas and create commercially viable companies. We had 10 holdings, everything from, you know, medical technology, creating individualized implants to help people with arthritis to advanced material.

4:32so we had this one material that later became it came to be used in the formula one cars as the outer layer of the brakes and you know working with this company my role was to okay there's a lot of r &d focus currently in these holdings you need to work towards making them more commercial and and then i got the opportunity to work so closely to with entrepreneurs and founders and And I learned that building a regular company, you know, it's hard. Building like these type of research-intensive companies is next to impossible. So we made it kind of our mission to, okay, so let's start helping founders to do the same journey as we are trying to do with our company.

5:16So we created this first Tech Internet Challenge, which was an entrepreneurship competition. We went out in our network. We gathered virtual finalists. We come to this cinema, this theater, we have the finals, and eight people show up. So we started out, you know, it was not the best event. But, you know, the next day, we had this, we brought together, we have this gathering, bringing together all of the finalists. We brought some people from industrial sector, from the corporate sector, media was there as well. and then and investors and then we saw that this small gathering uh that came the next day it had so much value companies got investments you know all of almost all of the finalists you know that you started to get traction in the media some of them got clients and tech arena today is the same thing it's the same concept but much much much bigger amazing no i mean yeah i mean it's i was

6:18Omid Ekhlasi:looking at the um the both the prior guests and the guests that you've got coming on yeah it's crazy i mean like from richard branson steve wozniak co-founder of lovable like you've got there's no guest too big no no no no no no no how have you done that i mean from from you know eight people in the cinema to getting the biggest founders and entrepreneurs on a stage in stockholm like how like yeah how did that happen i would say they never give up mentality i think they never give up mentality and and uh so so so i told you about you know we have two events so one is in in an island in sweden and this event is the biggest public event in sweden gathering like politicians all of the large corporations and we have a part of that right so it's not all our event but we have a part of it and for this specific event we had the opportunity the first the year to have like two days of seminars and and we decided to okay let's see we want the biggest name so we were quite naive right this is like i don't know 10 11 years and we want the biggest name so we asked the ceo of sob the ceo of volvo the ceo of astra seneca we basically asked all of the ceos in sweden and for some reason like eight of them showed up so they came and then we had these seminars and then i learned that okay so no one sees how many people you ask right they just see the final results.

7:41And once you accomplish that, once you, you know, the next year when we say that, okay, so you want to come and join us? And they say, who's been there? And then you, you know, you name drop these people, then they understand, okay, this is the high level event. So I think this is a learning we took with us. Of course, going from, you know, a CEO of a Swedish company to Richard Branson, that's something else. But I think it's the same context that applies to get Al Gore. we were in talks with his team for like two and a half or three years and we finally had like the right timings uh probably he wanted to do some business in sweden so you know you just have to

8:17Omid Ekhlasi:be resilient yeah yeah it's amazing and and you know you also got the big event i think it's in february is is i think is that the next one in stockholm yeah 11th and 12th of february in the national football stadium of sweden i think it's crazy um yeah i mean can you go bigger you know what's the vision for the next 10 years like what would you like it to become over time i would say that the goal is to bring together i'm gonna i want to be the most relevant event in europe i know that it's hard for us to compete with some of the events they have like 180 or 200 000 participants but i want like the top three people from each large-scale corporation to come i want the best founders to come i want the best investors to be here and i think if you look at that then you don't need to become much bigger than we are right now so this year will be 12 000 i think that the maximum you know seated you can the arena can take up to 55 000 but i think if people want to be able to move around and you know be on the pitch floor then it's like 15 000 and i think like to bringing together so they're 15 bright thousand brightest people like in in the nordics in europe and all around the world i think that's the goal for us and another thing that i want to create is that I want to become the bridge between the Nordics and the outside world, if you want to say so.

9:36So there's a lot of interest in coming here. There's a lot of interest for the Swedish market, for your Swedish corporations. But for a lot of these kind of bigger, let's say, investors or brands, they need something to come to. They cannot just show up. And when you have a large-scale event like this, it becomes like an attraction. and it becomes something for people to gather around so that has been that's the kind of long

10:02Omid Ekhlasi:term goal for us amazing and i guess you know i'm i'm at the start of my journey you know my business is only a few months old but sort of in a similar space and i'm looking at maybe doing some events next year what kind of advice would you give to somebody starting in this space because the events just look so challenging yeah um i mean i would say that if you have a vision and you know what type of people you want to do it for. So I think you need to, so when we started, one of the, I would say like one of the things that have enabled us to do it this far was that when we started, we really didn't need to make any money out of it.

10:43So we could see that, okay, we want to do this for founders and then we built everything around for founders. So if we have a competition, it was free for founders. and if we have like a if you want to spotlight something it was the founders the best time like the finals it's at like a biggest stage so everything we did was for the founders and then we could have some integrity because I would say like that's the one of the key elements when you do these type of events that you have some kind of integrity you know why you're doing it and then I think just just go with it because the first year you will have some I mean you cannot plan for everything right and and to be honest i think like we've done it now twice in this large-scale setting the first year everything was chaos so we came here we actually lived in the football stadium for like one week almost like we slept in a hotel next to it but we would go home like i don't know two in the morning come back like four four hours later i had no idea how it would turn out but it showed that like the energy and everything around it was so good because people you know if you bring the right people they actually it's almost like a wedding like they want this to go well they want to support you so that creates an atmosphere so i would say like

12:03Omid Ekhlasi:just do it no that's a great point yeah people yeah people people generally are supportive of things like this that lift up the whole ecosystem yeah yeah um what do you think it is about the sort of the swedish the nordish the nordic ecosystem at the moment that has made it such an innovation hub yeah i think it's uh it's uh you know i always get this question and i know like you could you could you could bring it back for many years and say like okay you know they had this kind of like pc initiatives and then like many many years ago they had like instrument music initiatives but i think most recently you know education is free and then we have a lot of role models and then we see that and people are very like especially like students they're very eager to try and currently I think right now it's the best time you always say you know you do you use this kind of analogies like okay shoot or shoot aim fire you know or you say like fail fast.

13:13And I think now is the perfect period to actually do it, right? So you see all of this, if you look at currently, you see all of these AI startups. If you just look behind the hoods and see what some of them have done previously, they might have started a culture companies. Like within the last two years, they've failed. But they go out, they know how the technology works, they know the opportunities, they know the possibilities, they go to an industry or something that they want to solve, create a product they want to create, they do it, they see, ah, it doesn't work. Okay, let's try something else.

13:46And I think this is brilliant. I think that's exactly the type of mindset that you should have. Try it quite fast. And if you see there's a market, just go with it.

13:55Omid Ekhlasi:Yeah, super interesting. Yeah, and it's just, there's something in the water, it seems, at Stockholm because it's just, yeah, there's something that's just... Yeah, you're right. So if you look at Stockholm currently, So you had this kind of Silicon Valley effect previously, right? You have some companies that make it. And then you have, and I think you're in Stockholm as well. Like you see the Klarna's, you see the Spotify's, you have, you know, you have a management team or you have a team of leadership, let's say five people, 10 people, 200 people. They're, you know, part of this kind of journey, which is very, very fast.

14:28Like, okay, you're launching the product, you're gaining customers, you're going to the US, you're doing deals. and the people who can have a part of this journey and learn, they get a lot of knowledge, they get a lot of experience and quite importantly as well, they get some money. So then that triples down into the ecosystem. So one of the things that I've seen during my many years at TechGarrow is that we get a lot of data from the companies that actually apply to our competition. So then like four or five years ago, I started to get these companies that, okay, previously I don't know this person at Klarna previously this person at Spotify so so companies founded by previous people who worked there or you know they had investments from people who had worked there and I actually saw a company that had an idea and they did an IPO like within one year and they actually they wrote it in their application within one year will be on the Nasdaq Stockholm stock exchange and they did it because they know exactly you know how to do it what the problem is they have access to capital so i think that that's something that we will see more and more right when you have this uh how would you say when you have a lot of companies that are founded then it's more likely that some of them actually get you know

15:48Omid Ekhlasi:get to be very successful that's such an interesting story what startup is that that's crazy uh they called the check-in so i don't know if they might have changed names uh but But I also have another story that I think is quite fascinating. So the winner of Tekkena 2024, it was Legora. And back then the name was Leia. So, I mean, we've given out, I don't know, 60, 70 awards throughout my time. And every time, you know, someone is called up and then named the winner, they come up and they're like, they're so surprised. and you know they're genuinely like happy and surprised that they won and then max unison who is the founder got the question like okay so was this a surprise to you and i think like he understood that he should say yes and no yes but then he was like and you could see on his facial expression no it was not a surprise for him because he expected to win and during the whole event the only thing that he had done he said that he said i didn't think so much about the competition i've just pitched and are taking meetings with clients and and this is like they've just been around for six months and i think this type of mentality where people know you know what they want to do and failure is not an option and they have this very very like focused mindset i think that's kind of a i think that's uh that's uh that's something that we will see more and more especially in this kind of new companies that are coming that's an amazing yeah validation of the model as well you you know, Lagor is one of the most interesting companies of this year, you know, just to become a unicorn.

17:29Omid Ekhlasi:I mean, do you do any investing personally? Or is that something that you want to do or you do more of? So currently not so much. I've started another company called Voxo AI. And let's say we didn't do AI, but we do a lot of the things that the new AI company do, but we did it six or seven years ago. So we were a bit too early for the market. Yeah. So currently, like everything I do is just supporting Voxo and running Tech Arena. So no outside investments as of now. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I mean, yeah. I mean, like, yeah, you seem to be stacking up amazing success stories. And what are some of the impacts of that?

18:11Omid Ekhlasi:You know, like do those people then help spread the word, get other people to the event? Has it created a sort of network effect across the Nordics? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think that for us, the validation I get is like, okay, how many meetings did you have last year at Tech Arena? And one of the things that we want to create at Tech Arena, so one of the reasons that we might differ a bit from other ones, is that either you have these events that are purely focused on investors and startups, right? You want to have founders and investors. Or you have the large-scale events that are focused on, let's call them executives, but you also have some investors and startups going there.

18:53But we want to create something where all of them are like, there's a balance. And one of the best kind of feedbacks I've received from startups at Tech Arena is that, okay, so we are two co-founders. This is last year. They said, we're two co-founders. One of us had more than 10 meetings with investors and one of us had more than 10 meetings with potential customers. And it's at the same event. so you know we want to bring bring the biggest brands we want to bring a lot of executives so i would say that 40 percent of the participants are executives and then 60 percent are startups and investors but i think this is needed because if you build a company money is one part you know getting funding is one part of it right and i mean you can never build a company on just funding you need to have clients uh so this is something that i learned quite early on that's why i told you the story about being part of this business group because what we've learned when we you take something to the market is that it's good to have a paying customer directly or as soon as possible someone who can help you with the pilot and when we like 10 years 12 years ago this was something that people would say about wow you have paying customers that early now like every application i get like the company's been there for one week and they all have an investor and paying customers so i mean yeah so so like the entrepreneurship game have stacked up yeah it's changed it's a

20:17Omid Ekhlasi:very different market than it was five ten years ago um yeah well but i think we're out of time um but it looks amazing like the event looks phenomenal it's like it's an amazing thing that you've built um and yeah thank you for coming to to talk to me about it yeah thank you for having me i hope to see you there yeah it sounds good i'd love to okay perfect take care thank you you too bye bye