Operator vs investor – how do the roles compare?

It’s not uncommon for many in the venture capital industry to have experience on both sides of the table, as an operator at a venture-backed company, and as an investor. One such example is DN Capital’s recently appointed Head of Nordics Rasmus Areskoug, who joined DN earlier in 2024 following a number of years as CFO of our portfolio company GetAccept, a SaaS firm that’s streamlining the sales journey for enterprise clients that DN first backed in 2019.

I sat down with him to unpack his experiences and why he decided to make the move over to the investor side, as well as his views on the Nordic tech ecosystem.

Nenad: You’ve been on both sides of the fence as an investor and on the board of a VC portfolio company. How do you compare the two?

Rasmus: I spent almost five years at GetAccept, the last three of which were as CFO, and during that entire time I worked closely with the DN team who had invested initially at Series A back in January 2019. A major difference I would point out is the different viewpoints you take of a business as an operator versus as an investor.

As an investor you have a ‘black box’ view of the businesses you invest in, you can’t see how different levers are being pulled and decisions are being taken in real time, instead you get lagging indicators of performance after the fact. As an operator, you’re focussed on pulling those levers and creating the outputs that generate those lagging indicators, and you have a set of leading indicators to operate with.

Nenad: What drew you across the table to work as an investor at DN?

Rasmus: Firstly, I wanted to take the investor approach and what I had learned during my time as CFO of a venture backed company, and help other companies.

I had worked very closely with DN during my entire time at GetAccept, in particular with Thomas Rubens who led DN’s investment, and I was consistently impressed with their approach, from pitch to today. I found DN to always be more engaged and into the detail than many other firms we dealt with, and we built close working relationships. DN were never shy in asking us the difficult questions that we needed to hear, but that others might not have been close enough either in terms of detail or relationship to ask.

Overall, DN were some of the best investors we worked with, so they were a natural fit for me when I decided I wanted to spend my time working with a wider range of companies.

Nenad: Can you give some examples of where DN helped the GetAccept team during our 5+ years invested, beyond capital?

Rasmus: As I said earlier, DN always asked us the difficult questions and helped us take tough but necessary decisions. It really helped build mine and the team’s confidence to know that at DN we had backers who were sweating over the same decisions we stayed up all night worrying about. The DN team always came to meetings with us with a thoughtful approach and were across the detail, which helped us take better decisions more efficiently.

DN also helped us find and appoint two board directors and a number of other key members of the management team.

Nenad: Moving on to your current role at DN, you’re our recently appointed Head of Nordics. What in your view are the prospects for the Nordic tech and VC ecosystem?

Rasmus: It’s a really interesting region. Sweden has historically produced great consumer and fintech companies — look at Spotify and Klarna — but we’re now seeing more and more great SaaS startups.

With such a rich heritage of great startups in the region and some great recent exits, I think we’ll see more alumni startups and spinoffs.

I see the region as having some cultural differences to other parts of the world in terms of startups. Lots of Nordic software companies have bootstrapped and tended to avoid VC investment, I think there is a latent conservatism which has led firms to avoid risk capital, and that includes SaaS firms — so part of my role will be to build trust in VC as a partner for startups, and I think DN is a great place to do that. Not many others have such a track record in growing software companies or helping them expand to new geographies.

Nenad: Final question — you’ve been in post at DN for just over 100 days, what’s been your focus so far?

Rasmus: I’ve been speaking to as many entrepreneurs as possible across the Nordics and in our core categories. In particular I’ve been focussing on those building office of CFO software — those who are building products that solve the problems I encountered during my time as CFO. It’s an exciting time to be an investor in the Nordics.