Sophia Bendz & Marianne Vikkula: Conviction Is the Whole Game

In this episode of The Northbound Show, host Ken Villum Klausen sits down with Sophia Bendz — General Partner at Cherry Ventures and one of Spotify's earliest employees — and Marianne Vikkula, Head of Wolt and former CEO of Slush.

The subject is conviction: how you find it, how you sell it, and why it's the one thing that doesn't get cheaper as everything else does.

Sophia almost turned Daniel Ek down. She loved her job at a PR firm and tried to talk him into hiring her one day a week instead — until a Friday afternoon meeting ran until nine at night and she missed her dinner plans. Marianne walked into Slush as a 20-year-old volunteer with no idea what she'd signed up for, was handling budgets in the millions at 21, and later joined Wolt at Series B to lead an expansion into 20-plus markets — including the day a national bank turned up at the office to explain that what they were doing wasn't right.

They go deep on hiring by listening to the pain rather than hiring ahead of it, why recruiting is a selling game and not a buying game, the difference between a builder and a manager, and what Sophia is actually reading in a room when she writes a first check into a company that doesn't have a name yet.

Then the harder question: when anyone can put a full product live in a minute and land as one of a thousand, what still breaks through? Plus the Nordic advantages neither of them would trade — being too small to ever build for a single market, being safe enough to speak up at work, and why being slightly naive turns out to be a competitive edge.

Hosted by Ken Villum Klausen, The Northbound Show brings together Nordic founders and leaders for long-form conversations about how small nations consistently build companies with outsized global impact. Because the Nordics' greatest export isn't a product. It's a mindset.