Ove

I grew up in the archipelago of Stockholm (26000 islands). My first decade was all about playing with friends. My second decade was all about sailing with friends. I’ve sailed everything from home made windsurfing boards and catamarans to large racing boats and scooters.

Once I capsized a HobbyCat (a 16’=480cm Catamaran) in the midle of Lake Michigan where we could not see the shore in any direction. Everything worked out, no one got hurt and we manage to turn the catamaran back up and sail back to the harour.

My nineteenth year I spent in High School in Michigan and when I came back I started my first company. I produced customized tebles for micro film viewers for banks in Stockholm. I did my military service in the Navy, where I was chief on a large minelayer and later educater at the firefighter school.

My first university degree was in technical programmering where I discovered that I had a talent for machine code programmering but still my first jobb was as customer support manager at a company working with data communication solutions since I was bilingual i.e. I could speak both with the customers and the programmers.

Four years later I was on the board of directors of their newly created sales company but when my first child was born I didn’t want to work 70 hours per week anymore.  I became part owner and sales manager for another IT-company but after two years I started a new company of my own to make it possible for me to work from home and be close to my two kids. I merged my knowledge from my previous jobs and created the worlds first tele-communicating colour printer for drawings but the world was not ready for such a technique and sales were slow. This was long before the Internet was introduced.

I started studying Marking Economy with a major in strategic marketing for my second university degree.

When our kids were 7 and 8 their mother, my wife, decided that I was too much of an obstacle in her life so she filed for a divorce and we started paying ping-pong with the kids. One week at dad’s place and one week at mom’s place. This led to that the kids became socially isolated since their friends didn’t know where they were (this was before cellphones had become common). One day when I had been staring at 5 full cycles of a traffic light without moving on the way home from my office I decided that enough is enough and I decided to buy a farm 400 km away from where there were no traffic lights. I also wanted to do something to stop the ping-ponging with the kids.

I found a new love, got married, and got 9 ponies.  One thing led to the next and a hoof problem that my daughter’s pony suffered led to that I started studying alternative hoof care in the USA. Again one thing led to the next and after a while, I was touring Europe and North America teaching every farrier, veterinarian, and horse owner that was interested in how to rehabilitate what the establishment thought was incurable hoof issues.

This work led to my third university title. During the 4 years I was working 6 months per year in North America I started my first US corporation. After 8 years of working with rehabilitation of horse hooves decided that I would do even more good mass-producing my new horse feeding system, SlowFeeding I started a Swedish manufacturing company, hired personal, and started producing 150 models of slow Feeding nets of my own design. I had the company grow by 300% per year for 4 years in a row. Inspired by his I started my second US corporation but when I did let myself be fooled by a German customer everything went bankrupt and my second wife gave up on me after 16 years. 5 years earlier I had started a webshop for her to have if we, for any reason, would go separate ways.  She kept the webshop and since no shadow fell on me from the bankruptcy and I had to close both the Czech and the US corporations.