10: Serial Entrepreneur Ola Ahlvarsson Wants to Build a New Society Based on Self-Development

Future Skills

Ola Ahlvarsson is a really really interesting guy (Personal site | Wikipedia). He's founded more than 20 businesses, worked with many of the world's biggest brands that you know of (like McDonalds, Google, Microsoft, Merck, Procter & Gamble, Twitter, IBM.... etc)

He's also an avid martial artist, with a Black Belt in Karate, and he's become the European champion in Goju Ryu Karate, the Swedish champion in Kung Fu and in Taekwondo, and the world champion in WAKO kickboxing.

Two notable businesses that Ola runs are "Star Stable", the world's largest online Horse game - with more than 6 million users, and "Epicenter", which is Sweden's biggest scale-up incubator.

Here are a few tidbits of what you’ll learn from the conversation with Ola:

• What Ola would do if he were the Benevolent Dictator of the world
• How to look at the world through multiple dimensions, or lenses, to see things from different perspectives
• How Ola got Swindled by his Miami employee and how a team of Indians made off with his money
• The difference between a scale-up and a startup (and why it’s easier to become a rap star than create a successful scale-up company in Sweden.)

And many, many more things.

Here are some books mentioned:

Only the Paranoid Survive, Mission Possible, The Nordic Secret, Homo Deus, Nazi Diaries, Robert Kegan’s The Evolving Self.

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