Entrepreneurship? Ask Nicolai,

CEO at BootstrapLabs, a Silicon Valley business lab and accelerator that builds and accelerates companies.  

  • Nicolai Wadström, CEO of BootstrapLabs

  • Nicolai Wadström is the CEO of BootstrapLabs and this year he’s also a board member of the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce in San Francisco/Silicon Valley. His experience and knowledge of entrepreneurship and the American/Swedish business culture will be a huge asset to the chamber.

  • BootstrapLabs is in a downtown San Francisco building consisting of 100 start-ups and 400 people. Wadström tells me there are more start-ups in this building alone than in all of Sweden.
    Nicolai Wadström was born in Malmö, and in 1995 he started his first company within the experience industry focusing on digital entertainment and experiences. The company specialized in digital effects for television, and one of the most famous works is the special effects of the popular Swedish “julkalender”—The Mystery at Greveholm.
    The achievements of Wadström’s career are many, but a few include the school he and two co-founders started for people in IT, called Malmö Hacker Academy, the graphic design for the annual Swedish Song Contest, commercials and the computer game The Mystery at Greveholm. These achievements were made in the 1990s.
    In 1999 he started VIOMA, an enterprise software company offering products for Enterprise Content Management with many international customers. The company partnered with consulting companies to deliver the product to the end customers. Wadström traveled to the U.S to be closer to the customer companies and to license the technology to a number of U.S. software companies. He decided at the time not to move VIOMA to the U.S..

  • Realized the U.S. potential
    Wadström saw the potential for start-ups here, and with the aim to start a company where he could work with parallel entrepreneurships, he started BootstrapLabs. He recognized that it’s what you do that matters, not who you are or where you come from. And, because he saw difficulties for European start-ups to grow and how their businesses could have a much larger position here in the Bay Area, Wadström built a platform for European start-ups to come to the U.S. The baseline of the culture in this area is that everyone is different, and that’s a good thing.
    When being asked why he accepted the position as a member of the board Wadström said his aim is to create a place that’s natural for entrepreneurs and business people to turn to when they come to the U.S. or are about to move their business here.
    The Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce San Francisco/Silicon Valley are happy and pleased to have an energetic, driven person like Nicolai Wadström on the board.

  • Emma Lööf Björnram