Meet Erik Hasselberg: Founder of Login Hasselberg

David: Welcome Erik! Please tell us a bit about yourself and your background - Who is Erik Hasselberg?

Erik: Thank you, David! Well, I guess I am mainly an application developer who started working in the IT industry in the late 80’s. I have mostly worked in environments where I have a stake in the business. I live with my wife in Lidingö and am a father of three adult children. In my free time, I enjoy spending time in a boat and doing some sports, preferably running and playing tennis.

David: Can you tell us about your experience co-founding Carmen Systems? How did it feel to see Carmen Systems grow to being acquired by a major player like Boeing/Jeppesen? 

Erik: Carmen Systems was a fantastic experience for me and many factors led to the company being successful, even though this was not always clear during those years of hard work.

I have a degree in engineering physics from KTH and my first job was at a company involved in the previous AI technology-wave (for those who remember that). We received a contract from Volvo who had a small, obscure department that had gone from developing systems for factory planning into airline crew scheduling. Their system was based on integer optimization and we were hired to find methods to integrate this with AI techniques. Things happened and the AI company where I worked went bankrupt in the early nineties. Myself and one other colleague started our own consultancy company and continued with the Volvo project. This former colleague of mine is the most brilliant programmer I have ever known. As we worked with our small consultancy company, he invented a programming language that could express detailed work- and rest time regulations for airline crew, and that could integrate with Volvos crew scheduling application. I also contributed to the Volvo project. At the same time I was working with other consultancy projects, one of which was a small wage guarantee application for a major law firm in Stockholm… a.k.a Garanti.

Soon thereafter in the era where Volvo streamlined its business, the obscure crew scheduling department with only one customer, Scandinavian Airlines, was up for sale. A Canadian investor was interested and financed the buy-out. My colleague and I were now quite involved in the setup and our specially developed programming language was a key component in the product. The rich Canadian, two key persons from Volvo, my colleague and I founded Carmen Systems in 1994. My wife and I moved to Gothenburg and I started working at Carmen Systems’ new office together with the founders and a few more people from Volvo.

Carmen’s first five years or so were a balance act of continuing to develop the applications and chasing new customers. The team was fantastic, and we were very ambitious. We went only for the largest, i.e. national, airlines in Europe. Our focus was on real financial customer value and our optimizers were state of the art. If we saved one percent on the cost of the so-called crew pairings, it meant yearly savings of many tens of million SEK for a large airline. We hired PhD:s and other experts in mathematical optimization from all over the world. The programming language that my old colleague invented played an important role. It made it possible to have one single product that worked for airlines that all had very different work and resting time rules. We could leverage our product and sell it in one version to SAS, Lufthansa, Alitalia, Swiss, British Airways, Iberia and others. 

When almost all of Europe’s airlines had become customers, we started looking at the United States. This led to Boeing becoming interested in Carmen Systems and in 2006 they bought the whole company and integrated it into their IT systems subsidiary, Jeppesen. The company has grown substantially since the exit, and I think Boeing is very pleased with the deal.

David: After the sale of Carmen Systems, what inspired you to build Login Hasselberg together with your wife Helena? Could you share the story behind founding Login Hasselberg and developing Garanti XL?

Erik: After Carmen Systems I wanted to have fewer bosses and employees and be able to work more freely. After a few startup attempts that didn’t take off I realized together with Helena, my wife, that the old application that I had developed in the nineties was still used by law firms and other insolvency practitioners and that it was quite popular. Helena had kept the customers happy with support and other services during all these years.

We realized that we had access to an attractive niche market and that we should do a retake on it. That was when the current version of Login Hasselberg started, sometime in 2011 or so.

David: Login Hasselberg has an incredibly strong market position in Sweden - you have 100% of the market in your niche! Tell us about how you have managed to achieve such a strong position?

Erik: I am not sure we did so much. There was no application that helped the lawyers with this very specific task when the first version came out in the early nineties. The users were pleased with it, so it spread by word of mouth. We have been lucky to have loyal customers from the start.

When we launched our new version, Garanti XL, it was not so difficult to persuade the users to take the step from the old version to this much improved application. We competed with ourselves for a few years when the only choices on the market were our old application, which cost very little and was fairly basic, and our new system Garanti XL, which was much better but also more expensive. 

Two things were important factors that helped us convince the customers:

• the volume based business model where large customers pay more than small ones.

• the fact that we won the public procurement contract with the County Administrative Board (länsstyrelserna) and developed the system at the receiving end of the wage guarantee process. This made it possible to integrate the lawyers with the authorities. It is very difficult for anyone else to copy that.

David: Final question - what benefits do you see with joining forces with Marathon Software? and why did you choose to partner up with us?

Erik: When Marathon first contacted us, we were reluctant and not ready to sell. A year or two later we started to feel the need to pass over some responsibility and also to try to expand and develop the company. We didn’t really know how to do that, and then Richard called again...

Marathon Software seemed ambitious and serious, yet realistic. We found them competent, nice and honest and this appealed to us. They were planning for the long term, and they gave us a fair offer.

The benefits with Marathon have been many. We are now a more stable and professional company, and less dependent on Helena and me. We have a great board that helps with many decisions regarding product development, recruitment, pricing and business models.

One key benefit has been to find the team that is now in place. We could not have made these recruitments on our own. Marathon has been extremely helpful with this. I also like the whole Marathon environment where we gather similar companies and create formal and informal meetings across the group.

A big thank you to Erik Hasselberg for sharing his journey with us!

You can read more about Login Hasselberg at https://www.loginhasselberg.se/