Christian Solli Nyborg (Enebakk, Norway, 1972) responds literally to the profile of classic entrepreneurs. Outgoing, creative, very restless, quite workaholic and with the short-distance passion transmitted by those who live for and for their projects, Nyborg now goes out of his way for his two creatures – the telecommunications comparator Ysi and the mobile phone case company Phonecases3D – from Scandinavia. He has just temporarily moved there for family reasons with his wife, Ana, and little Laia and Erik.
Nyborg affirms that he does not need to earn more money after amassing his small fortune as one of the co-founders of MásMóvil, from which he emerged in 2014. "We made world history, we were the first Spanish unicorn, they called us crazy, crazy foreigners," he says. still excited. The virtual telephone operator started from scratch in a sector dominated by an oligopoly, broke down barriers, avoided bankruptcy, carved out a niche for itself and succeeded. Nyborg left the firm, but he still has great affection for it and has learned many things.
“Entrepreneurship is hard, we ate pasta four days a week, you become obsessed with work and, at one point, we had to fire a third of the workforce,” he adds. One of those affected, whom he later rehired, was a girl with whom he would start dating later and today she is his wife. In those years he modeled on fire his management principles: passion; the demand, which leads to always focus on results; and transparency, essential for teamwork to work with clear rules, admitting mistakes that inevitably come when the initiative is taken and things are done.
After the success of MásMóvil, Nyborg created a company to make it easier for Norwegian companies to hire Spanish engineers. But when the price of oil plummeted from over $100 to $25 a barrel, demand for workers plummeted, and it had to close. In 2016, he returned to the fray with two companies related to telecoms. The first, Ysi, is the one that has gained the most traction. It is a comparator of telephone and internet services in which it has already invested three million along with other partners. "It will take between 10 and 20 million more and they will surely come because this business is very scalable, but it is clear that there is a risk and it can go wrong," he admits bluntly. It has 14 people on staff, but the one that works the most is the algorithm... The company asks each client their needs and looks for the offer that best suits them, makes the recommendation and manages portability. It also alerts you to future market changes. Ysi is a reference in the sector.
In parallel, its founder participates as a mentor or investor in 17 companies and takes care of Phonecases3D, his second own firm, which personalizes mobile cases for 50 sports clubs and a lot of companies and NGOs. With the experience of someone who has spent almost twenty years in the world of entrepreneurship in Spain and, at the same time, knows the ecosystem of the Nordic countries and other latitudes well, Nyborg shares praise and criticism in equal parts. “Spain has improved a lot, there is disruptive technology and it has a great capacity to attract talent: everyone who wants to start a business wants to come here”, he starts with the whitewash. The sand comes later: "What kills entrepreneurs is the barrier of bureaucracy, which leads to consuming a lot of time, a scarce commodity for those who start a business," he concludes.
Don't you miss MásMóvil? “I'm not sorry I'm not there now because I'm an entrepreneur; I am not comfortable with hundreds of employees, I prefer to create and be freer!”, she assures. Nyborg, an unconditional fan of Barça who dreams of rebuilding after seven years of European failures, is still Norwegian, which means that he is very international, capable of adapting to the environment in which he finds himself at all times. With his father-in-law from Olot, he speaks Catalan and perhaps talks about his next business venture, which he must have in his portfolio, for when he settles in Barcelona in 2024.
