In this episode of the Nobel Podcast host Nick van Eeten interviews Martin Folke Vasehus, CEO and founder of ComplyCloud, a Danish SaaS company. Martin shares his journey from being a corporate lawyer to founding a successful SaaS company, highlighting the challenges and achievements along the way. From bootstrapping the company to facing financial struggles and overcoming obstacles, Martin’s story is one of resilience and determination in the world of SaaS.
Key Highlights of this episode
- Martin’s career journey from corporate lawyer to SaaS entrepreneur
- Founding and growing ComplyCloud
- Overcoming financial challenges and bootstrapping the company
- Importance of product-market fit and the evolution of ComplyCloud’s offerings
- Hiring tips and the significance of a structured recruitment process
- Personal ambitions and maintaining a work-life balance
Nick: Welcome to a new episode of SaaS Unscripted. In today’s episode I’m interviewing Martin — we are following people with an exciting career in SaaS, and today it’s your turn. Can you quickly introduce yourself?
Martin: Sure. My name is Martin Folke Vasehus, I’m CEO and founder of ComplyCloud, which is a Danish SaaS company. I’m sitting here in a sunny Copenhagen — that’s why we have to do it online instead of in a physical studio, although I would have loved to see you in Amsterdam.
Nick: We can do that another time. Before you founded ComplyCloud, what’s your background for the people listening?
Martin: I actually used to be sort of a classic corporate lawyer. I had a job at a big law firm, a tier-one law firm here in Copenhagen — I was there for just short of nine years — and I dealt with all sorts of cases that had to do with IT and digitization; that was my primary focus. Some founders found their company because they don’t like the industry or think something is wrong with it. I actually loved the role as a lawyer, so it wasn’t because I thought everything was wrong. I just saw some opportunities that made me found the company. But I was a happy lawyer, to be honest.
Nick: You mentioned you saw opportunities you had to jump on.
Martin: I’ve had the dream to build a company for some time — the founder dream. I actually had two or three ideas where I made prototypes or demos, but I never had the courage to found those companies. And I think that was good, because all of those ideas were me thinking I had a solution for another industry. The good thing with ComplyCloud, which is what I ended up founding, is that it’s about something I know stuff about. I’m very good at compliance and the law — I know everything about GDPR and all these matters that we help companies with. So I really have the in-depth expertise, and I think that’s a good thing for a founder. Just seeing the business opportunity can be dangerous, because you don’t know if you can read the market. Here I really felt I had a read of the market. I founded the company in 2017. It’s rare to meet people who are passionate about compliance — at least it’s rare to meet a normal person passionate about compliance — but I am. Before we got the GDPR, the word “compliance” was just for the regulated industries: finance, energy, pharma. With the GDPR, compliance all of a sudden became something for everybody. It doesn’t matter if you’re a hairdresser, a bakery, or a big IT shop — you have to comply with the same rules. That was a very big step forward in who needs to run compliance, and I felt confident that I knew practically how to do both the legal stuff and operational compliance, efficiently. I could see there was a problem in the democratic society: the SMEs and mid-market companies wouldn’t be able to comply with the IT-security rules, the GDPR, NIS2 and so forth, because they don’t have the muscle, the finances, or the competences. So I really saw a need for a company like the one we founded.
Nick: So compliance became relevant for a lot more businesses, you were a subject-matter expert on GDPR, and the opportunity built up — a good combination to kickstart your founder dream.
Martin: If I may summarize it like that, yes.
Nick: How did you actually start? For everybody who’s founded a company, or is thinking about it, there’s that point where you take the leap of faith.
Martin: That was a special experience for me, because it was a friend of mine who I was going to co-found the company with. We had agreed and shaken hands that tomorrow we’re going to quit our jobs, it’s going to be great. But then I went in and talked to my boss — I think for two hours, because I was close to getting on a partner track, so I had a good thing going at that law firm. To quit took a lot of time and effort. We agreed: if you walk out the door, we won’t cross blades again — it’s not a two-way thing. Okay, bye-bye. And then, when I tried to call my co-founder, that bridge was burned. Not on a social level — I’m still friends with my former bosses — but the career path is burned once you go out the door. Then I tried to call my co-founder to see how his quitting had gone, and — as you’re already laughing — his boss was slightly more sneaky than mine. His boss said: “Isn’t it true that you’re about to have a baby with your wife? And you just moved to a new home? It sounds risky. I think we should increase your salary with this chunk of money. I’ll just leave the room — you sit and think about it and call your wife.” He calls his wife, they agree it’s pretty risky, they’re going to have a baby, and he takes the money. Then he calls me and says he didn’t quit his job. That was quite a blow, because I can’t actually program, and he was supposed to do that. So half of the equation was just gone in a stroke. I felt pretty bad the first days.
Nick: So what did you do from there?
Martin: I had to make a plan: how do I make money, bread-and-butter stuff — I have a family, at that point two kids, now three. So I figured out how to do consultancy, how to find a new co-founder, and that kickstarted all the sales meetings. And I’d do the prototype — what I called a prototype was just 176 PowerPoint slides. It looked like a Chrome web browser, but it was a slide; when you click something, you came to another slide. It was not a prototype, it was a slide deck, but that’s how we had designed how the software should look. I toured around figuring out who would pay what for this. I did that for three or four months, and I even went down to Web Summit in Portugal and stood a whole day pitching this to everybody who wanted to hear me out — and also people who didn’t want to hear about it, because nobody wants to hear about compliance, right? But there’s a magic point for all founders: product-market fit. It’s a big thing to see the evidence of it — a moment of pride, because it actually works, it solves a problem. And it was good for me that I got that tough start, because the solution I’d designed with the co-founder who didn’t become a co-founder looked totally different — it was made under the assumptions we had sitting behind the desk. Something happens once you get out and get the feedback, and I couldn’t do that while I had my job. Since I didn’t have a job anymore, I could, and it gave me extremely good feedback that made sure the stuff we started to build was the stuff people would pay for.
“What I called a prototype was just 176 PowerPoint slides. It looked like a web browser, but it was a slide deck — that’s how we’d designed how the software should look.”
Nick: So you had feedback and a slide deck — then you had to build something.
Martin: Then I had to build, actually. That could have been done in a much more structured way with smart tools, but it happened with a physical notepad. It was me and then I found my co-founder, who came in after four or five months. We drew stuff together on whiteboards and started to build as we went along. At that point we were three employees — one part-time, a co-founder and me — and we quickly became five, six. That was the core team that took it from the very minimum viable thing to something that worked for that scope. We hit the timing very well, because we had that minimum viable product ready at the start of 2018, and 2018 was the year the GDPR came into force. The first movers who thought they needed a system to support them had more willingness to pay us and take the risk that we could build the rest than they probably would now.
Nick: When did you get the first revenue for the software product?
Martin: I think in May 2018. At that point we called it a full-fledged SaaS, but it was an MVP at best, to be honest. There’s a span of time at the very start where you need to be explicit on your product roadmap — you need to promise a lot of stuff. We don’t do that now; our sales team is not allowed to promise features, we sell based on what we have today and what’s working. But at the very start you have to take that chance, because the sale is partly on a dream of what it will be, not just what it is right now.
Nick: How did you get your first customers?
Martin: From talking. I used to do a lot of presentations as a lawyer — I participated in conferences — so I had a network, and I shared my story online on LinkedIn. People reached out proactively, and I sold. The first deals were 100% inbound, because they came from my closest network. After half a year we really had to start picking up the phone, doing sales meetings — which is also fun. Then in 2019 we got the first person in who could really sell, his name is Glenn. He was the VP of sales, or sales director — I can’t recall his exact title at that point. He came in and started to build up the functions with SDRs who call to get a meeting, account executives who complete the deal, and so forth. I had no clue myself how to structure that — I could read blogs about it, but I’m just a lawyer, I’d never seen SDR machines work. So it was great to have him on board. In all companies there’s this first person besides the founders who can actually sell, and that’s a point in the founder story you can recall, because then you see the real metrics and what it can become. For ComplyCloud, that was Glenn.
Nick: How did the business perform before Glenn came in?
Martin: Pretty good, compared to being just six or seven people. We got more consultancy work in than we could handle, so the business grew fine. In the first year you don’t really measure your percentage growth, but in 2019 to 2021 we had between 150% and 300% year-on-year growth. That was very good on a bootstrapped business — it was cash-flow positive, not at scale, but on pure cash flow.
Nick: What were other pivotal moments in the early days?
Martin: Hiring the right people — that’s something I’ve learned in steps. With hiring Glenn, and hiring a team for him, I started to see what good can look like in terms of sales. As the company evolves, you need new types and profiles for your leadership team and other roles. I can’t emphasize enough how important hiring is. In the very early stages you’re on your own — it’s hard to use a big recruitment firm if you’re two people — but I think we should have been a little more picky. We were lucky with the good people we got; it was more a matter of luck than us being good at recruiting. I can’t help thinking: what if we hadn’t been that lucky? That would have been a catastrophe.
Nick: Glenn showed you what good looked like — how did you find him?
Martin: Glenn just wrote me one day. I didn’t know him. You get tons of messages on LinkedIn where people ask, “would you like to do this?” I was just in the mood that day to answer, and I answered Glenn. So it was really not a very structured way of doing recruitment. We do it quite differently now.
Nick: What is your recruiting strategy now — when do you decide you need more headcount?
Martin: We drive our growth strategy and financial model with some caveats: this has to happen before we hire these people. For example, if we hire two SDRs and two account executives, we need to see a certain amount of traction from them before we hire new ones. Or we say we aren’t going to hire somebody new in finance or customer success until this section is working under certain metrics. It can be complex — particularly for me, who is not a numbers guy — to make a financial plan where you hire a bunch of people against growth assumptions. Joining the people side to the growth assumptions, and having some brakes so you don’t scale too fast — we actually did scale too fast when we raised money from Seed Capital. At the very end of 2021 we raised a seed round of 4.5 million, and we’d budgeted: we need this many in product and tech, this many in CS. The problem was we’d become more picky about finding the right salespeople, but we were extremely good at recruiting fast in product and tech, so all of a sudden the organization looked odd — growth didn’t quite follow. We had to scale down a little, then scale up again. Operating that requires close cooperation between the CFO, the CEO and the rest of the team, because everybody needs to be on board with the budgeting.
Nick: Your journey so far was bootstrapped — first clients, first product, first sales director. When did you decide to go and raise capital?
Martin: That was an ongoing theme over time. In the very start I did try to raise money, but I got a no from them all. First, they said you need a little more traction; secondly, they said they didn’t think the product scales. One of the unique features of our product is what we now call Legal Intelligence — we have 12 people with a legal background who actually program the business logic. So we use a lawyer to do the development of the business logic, which is a unique thing, not really seen elsewhere in the market. People said: one, you can’t find lawyers who want to do that work; two, you can’t make it work because you have to do too much if-this-and-this; and three, a service substituting a true lawyer is not going to work. And I always like it when people tell me there’s something I can’t do — then I show them wrong. That’s exactly what we’ve done. It’s the main engine of the platform now, our own proprietary Legal Intelligence. We’ve done so many “if this, then that” from a lawyer’s point of view that if you count how many pieces of advice or documents or tips you can get from the software, it’s 16 with 53 zeros. The rules-based algorithmic engine, built by lawyers, is just huge — it would outcompete every lawyer, every law firm. So I was told you can’t fund because it’s not going to scale — but then we scaled, and then we could fund. We were lucky in the sense that in both 2020 and 2021 we won a bunch of innovation prizes — best legal tech in Denmark, that kind of thing. I’m very competitive by nature, so I signed up for a bunch of pitching competitions, and in 2021 we won the one at a big event here in Copenhagen called Tech BBQ. There were a lot of VCs there. I received a giant barbecue — because it’s called Tech BBQ — and that was so awkward, because I couldn’t carry the grill, so I just stood there not knowing what to do with it. But we won, and I got into talks with a lot of VCs, and we decided: let’s make a push now and see if the timing is right. That, again, was something to do with luck — not because I read the interest rates or the macroeconomic climate — but late 2021 was just the best place and time to raise money. So we were quite successful, and we partnered up with Seed Capital here in Denmark. We’ve been very happy about that since.
Nick: How did you choose the right investor?
Martin: One part, which is very important and not very scientific, is to ask: is this somebody we would like to work with? And when I say “we,” it was pretty much me. Do I like the person, do I share values, can I see myself in a tight spot with them and solve it? That last part is important, because everything is nice and sweet in a funding meeting — everybody’s trying to say what the other person wants to hear — but you need to be sure it’s somebody who, when it really hits the fan, pardon my French, you can sit down and crunch problems with, where you trust they have your best interest. I’m not going to build five or ten companies, I’m not even going to build two. I think this is my company. I want to have fun every day with everyone I work with.
Nick: How do you assess that?
Martin: We have this thing we call the beer test: is this somebody I would go out for a beer with? If not, then we can’t hire that person. Of course, some people don’t drink — but it’s about the same for the VCs. If it’s somebody where you can’t see yourself having more in common than just talking about growth rates, then it’s hard to build the kind of relationship and partnership you need to get through the tough spots. The VC we have now — Peter, who’s on the board from Seed Capital — I see quite a lot. Sometimes we do Thai boxing, we spar, we go out, we have fun. We even had a social score on the scorecard, zero to five: is it somebody we want to have fun with?
Nick: Peter came on board from Seed Capital — how did the company change from that point?
Martin: In so many ways, not just because Peter came on board. If we start with the organization: when we were bootstrapped, we were very much a two-string organization — you can sell or you can build, that was how we drove it. We wanted to raise money because we wanted to build a real, professional-sized organization with finance, CS and everything. I was actually the CFO almost until we raised money — I did salary runs, accounting, all the bookkeeping myself for quite a long time, which was pretty stupid, actually; I should have hired somebody. We got a more mature organization, hired a bunch of people — and I don’t think the people from that point will take it harsh if I say we also made some mis-hires, quite a lot actually. We weren’t aligned in the leadership team on what the personas were for who to hire. A tip from me is: hire slow, fire fast — you should hire slower.
Nick: And usually you can’t blame it on the hires — it’s a leadership miss.
Martin: Exactly, you can. We had too many people we didn’t set up for success. I’m told that’s something we all go through as part of the founder journey — perhaps it’s just a mistake you have to feel on yourself to get the real learning from it. That can be tough, but we worked our way through it, and now we have a good profile of what we look for, and we can be extremely transparent about it. That’s another thing I’ve learned: not just transparency about how it’s going, but transparency about what we expect from people. I really like crystal-clear transparency on expectations, both from their side and from mine.
Nick: What would be your hiring tips for other founders or SaaS companies?
Martin: We hired a VP People, and we did that too late. She is very good at figuring out ways to interview and test people — not to get a yes or no, but to have the conversations that are good to have up front. A tip is to make a structured, professionalized hiring process where you actually look for the red flags. I have a tendency, when I really want to hire somebody because I think they’re nice, to talk around all the red flags. You need to do the opposite — look for the flaws, be transparent: “your profile looks great, but you don’t seem so-and-so, let’s talk about that.” That’s a better approach, and it’s not something you learn in the law firms here in Denmark.
Nick: Do you have people who are a really good fit, and people who are not?
Martin: Of course. It still happens that we hire somebody who doesn’t work out as well as we’d hoped, but we have a better, more structured process now. First, the qualifications — we have somebody on the team who can test whether they have the toolbox; that’s the first ticket in. If there’s a checkmark there, then we see if they have a cultural fit, which is trickier to assess. And in the end, do they have the personality to push through? I always tell people: be aware, we’re well funded, but you’re not going to come in and just drink a lot of matcha tea and eat avocado food. It’s a pirate ship — you work hard, you get low salary, there’s no honor or glory. You just enjoy being a pirate. You need to have that side of you. We have a culture that we really want to drive and protect.
“It’s a pirate ship: you work hard, you get low salary, there’s no honor or glory. You just enjoy being a pirate.”
Nick: How would you describe your culture, and how do you test candidates for it?
Martin: Let me describe the culture briefly — we have three words or sentences. The first: the team comes first, always, and we don’t leave room for prima donnas. The second: we act with decency, in every aspect. The third: you have to have passion — I need to see the fire in people’s eyes. Those are the things we test for. I think it was Slack, or some other company, who in their early days had a big neon sign that said “don’t be a dick” — and that was the culture. Simple as it may be, it’s a good test: are these nice people, people you want to have a beer with, do they treat other people nicely? If you have people with talent who also act with decency, then you’ll most likely have the rest too — team players and so forth. We also do personality tests. But it’s hard — I can’t give a methodology, it’s a one-to-one thing, how you see and test that.
Nick: Where do you see the company growing into?
Martin: The VC answer would be: EU category leader of compliance SaaS. Besides that, I really hope and trust that we can keep building the team. My first dream was to build a product that works, to solve a complex problem, and to build a really great team — the team dream, like Manchester United in Ferguson’s days, a tight team where everybody has each other’s back. Continuing to build that is where I see the company going, besides growth and picking up new markets.
Nick: And what are your personal ambitions?
Martin: The primary thing for me is to be a great leader — where people feel supported and empowered to develop and become great versions of themselves, professionally and sometimes even personally. I don’t have a plan of “in five years, exit, IPO, or something else.” Of course, I also have a family, and right now I’m working quite a lot, that’s no secret — it takes hard work, and that means sometimes you have to sacrifice things that hurt. I’m not going to do that for 30 more years.
Nick: You started with two kids, now you’re a father of three. How have you balanced that?
Martin: First, I have a great partner — the co-founder of my home and kids — a quite fantastic woman who’s supported me the whole way through. It’s easy for me to say because I have that support, but it’s really key. Sometimes you come home feeling that classic thing: “is it all bogus, can I even do this, why am I even CEO?” — and you need somebody who empowers you and provides that strength. Besides that, there’s the practicalities — what time do you meet, who hands in at school. We just agree on how to do stuff, and then we do it. Not so long ago she chose to take a pause from her work, so she takes care of our three boys and the home.
Nick: So building a business is a holiday compared to her job?
Martin: To be honest, sometimes coming in here, sitting at a clean desk with a cup of coffee — that’s something I don’t experience at home very often, because three boys will just be three boys. Very outgoing boys, which is super nice, but it’s also tough work, just like it always is.
Nick: Any other challenges you’ve faced growing the company?
Martin: Tons. Just one last on a personal note: it’s hard — you don’t change your personality, but you need to change the perception of yourself the whole time depending on the circumstances, the role, the stage and the size. Sometimes you need to toughen up because it’s tough times, and sometimes you need to be soft and show your feelings to people so they know you’re a real human. Really adapting to that can be tough.
Nick: At some times all the pressure is on you as founder and CEO. How do you balance that?
Martin: One thing is that I’ve said to myself that’s just a fact of life — sometimes I need to carry pressure and still smile. And I actually enjoy that a little bit; I like to take the majority of the weight. I don’t know what that says about me, but I like the narrative that I go in front, I’m always there for the team. So I don’t mind that sometimes it’s hard. I have some members of the leadership team here, and my wife of course, where I can really deep dive and talk about it. You can’t carry it alone — that’s not feasible — and my wife is the strongest support in that sense.
Nick: Any other tips for aspiring founders who want to build a career like yours?
Martin: For aspiring founders still at the tipping point — should I do it or not — I think you should do it. At first I thought, am I going to regret this? But everything plays out right in the end. When a door closes, another one is going to open, and it tends to be more than just one. Founding a company is fun and hard.
Nick: Is there a founding story from your network, or your own, around bootstrapping that stands out?
Martin: There’s a colorful, slightly personal one. We charged all the license fees up front, 12 months, so sometimes we’d have a lower month where cash was low. In one month — March 2020 — we didn’t have enough cash, so I had to make drawdowns on both my Visa cards and my Mastercard into the company to pay salaries, and I had to give a guarantee to my bank. Then I got a phone call from SKAT, the tax authorities, saying your tax should have been paid six days ago, we’re going to come to your house and take security in it — your kids shouldn’t be home in two weeks. So I had five days to find a lot of money. That was when I really started losing hair. I did it, with help from my bank, and I took a loan on my house and gave a guarantee — it was almost like my kids and wife and everything were on the balance there. To get the support from my wife at that point was amazing, because she could have said “this is not responsible anymore,” but she just said: if you don’t succeed, you’ll just find a normal job and we’ll get back up. You shouldn’t ignore all the risks, but it was paramount to go through that. That was the stage where we really went all the way down, scraped the bottom, and came up. When you come up, it gives you this amazing feeling — that’s what founders live for. It’s not necessarily the growth numbers; it’s when you overcome problems that seem like they can’t be overcome. That’s where you feel alive.
Nick: I even feel alive hearing it. So the tax authorities got their money?
Martin: They got their money, they didn’t come to my home, we paid people’s salaries and we grew out of it. We sold our way out of it.
“It’s not necessarily the growth numbers — it’s when you overcome problems that seem like they can’t be overcome. That’s where you feel alive.”
Nick: That was a tough pirate journey. Interesting story to hear, Martin — not only the last pirate story, but the whole story: founding the company, having no co-founder in the early days, pitching your slides to whoever wanted to hear it, bootstrapping into a company that you pitched to a lot of investors who didn’t want to invest, up to a point where everyone wanted to invest. Very cool. I think you’re the right guy to scale this to the next level and be that worldwide player you mentioned.
Martin: Thank you very much, Nick.
Nick: Thank you very much for joining us on SaaS Unscripted — we’ll be in touch, Martin. Thanks a lot. Thanks for joining us on SaaS Unscripted. To explore the latest career opportunities, visit our website, nobelrecruitment.com, and don’t forget to subscribe and leave your review on your favorite podcast app. Until next time on SaaS Unscripted.
