When he first asked me to take the job, I remember telling Conni: “Before I start on the 1st of January, I would like to travel to the other offices and meet with our colleagues.”

I wanted to speak to everybody, from the people I knew well, to the back office teams in the Netherlands, to the front of house in Hong Kong. I needed to understand this company from the inside out, not from an ivory tower sitting in Stockholm. This journey was about getting a firsthand view of our operations across the globe. I wanted to learn about not just the known, but the obscure challenges worldwide, and I wanted to understand how to fix them.

I won’t sugarcoat it. My travels revealed a fantastic, but sometimes disjointed organization. I’d best describe us back then as a bit of a “federation.” In Asia, for example, our teams were too cut off from the main operations in Stockholm. The digital infrastructure was inadequate, highlighted by the fact that it took three minutes to download a SharePoint site. That delay made it cumbersome. This was more than an IT issue; it was a fundamental barrier to effective communication and knowledge-sharing across the company. And we needed a documented, well-functioning corporate memory.

Everyone was working heavily off of their own email, which, as you can guess, meant everyone using their own personal filing system. Thousands of branches, every person separately storing parts of the company’s collective memory, and every time someone left we deleted their inbox and it was as though we’d trimmed off a bough and potentially lost a ton of really valuable information.

This problem crystallized for me when, early into my tenure as the CEO, we had an agency in Sweden looking into replacement software services. No sooner had we asked them to look into it than we found that our German office had independently asked them to do the same thing four months earlier. The agency recycled 50 percent of their findings and tried to charge us twice. We simply couldn’t work like that.

So we sought advice from experts and innovators. Knowing a few of our biggest limitations from my tour, we met with the big strategy consultancies because they were supposed to be the masters of data collection, but their partners were spending 10 percent of their time punching numbers — a highly inefficient way of working and not what we wanted. We started to discuss, “Who, in any industry, is doing it right? Who has cracked corporate IT?”

At the same time, a good friend, Hjalmar Winbladh was doing some really interesting work on behalf of EQT with Springer Nature, the German scientific journal publishing company. He led them to digitize and ultimately changed their company forever. Shouting and screaming about the new world, he told me, they managed to transform an old-world German publishing company –EQT actually owned Springer for a while and this digital transformation was highly profitable.

He advised us to go out to San Francisco to meet the venture capitalists out there. In Europe at that time, venture investing was idling (or, in some places, absent entirely). There was a great deal of angel investing going on but the VC world was firmly based in the U.S. The benefits to this community were clear in terms of their access to tech and new ways of working. But there were also downsides. The VC world was a tight circle in Silicon Valley but, until we made the journey, we hadn’t quite realized just how tiny that world was. Major VC companies like Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark and Kleiner Perkins were located on a single road: Sand Hill Road (often shortened to just Sand Hill or SHR by locals). It’s ridiculous.

We met with a few of them but I always remember one guy said to me: “Oh yes, we invest in Europe. But we demand that the companies move to San Francisco.” Perplexed, I asked him why. He said: “Because I don’t want to go to Europe. It’s a three-day waste of time. I can have eight board meetings in three days so I demand everyone move here.” It was the most bewildering thing I’d ever heard. So, after hearing those comments, we decided that EQT needed to start a powerhouse venture firm in Europe.

Fixing our IT issues or starting a venture fund wasn’t just frivolous change for the sake of change. There were sharks in the water and we needed to put on a pair of goggles to see what was beginning to circle us, or else we were going to get eaten!

I told Conni we needed to make changes and start making money. He warned me: “We’re an investment organization; we shouldn’t look to make money on fees, we prioritize making money by realizing better capital gains for investors. If we prioritize making money on the capital we gathered, we’re going to corrupt our culture.” “True,” I said, “But Conni, if we make more money, we can build the business and we can do more cool stuff.” He gave me his full support and we went for it.

So, we started the venture fund and recruited people with hoodies, tattoos, nose rings and beards. Different, brightly-colored people who knew how powerful tech could be to a business like ours. And, of course, things started off more crazy than sane.

Hjalmar agreed to come over and help launch EQT Ventures. He came to me, visibly frustrated on a Friday afternoon. He’d asked to get access to the EQT network for his Mac and the CTO told him we didn’t support Apple. This was unacceptable: “How are we going to attract Mac people if we don’t support Macs?” His next words were: “Screw it — I’m going to do it myself”.

I said “Great!”, thinking, “This will never happen”, but he did it. By the following Monday not only was he using his Mac, but he had created secure Google accounts for all of us with the ability to move us to the cloud! If I’d asked the CTO at the time to do the same thing, I’d have been told we needed a Client Server Environment and it was all going to cost $10m and take six months.

Needless to say, the CTO wasn’t very happy. But it was the beginning of a bigger change for us. We realized that to stay relevant, we needed to tear it all apart and build it again.

It was an exciting prospect for people with imagination — the people we wanted to continue to attract. It enabled us to hire Petter Weiderholm, who helped to scale Spotify’s tech stack. We also attracted Google’s former head of adverts and its head of enterprise. We were doing exactly what we needed to do: attracting great people with new ideas and changing the culture for the better from within. But, it wasn’t all smooth sailing.

These changes were hated by some people. The people we were bringing in were great for what we had planned but for some of the old guard, who perhaps didn’t see the bigger picture, it was a different story. To them, the new hires were opinionated. Their solutions cost money, and we didn’t need to fix what wasn’t broken. And they blamed me, the new CEO, for bringing them in.

Strangely enough, the thing that caused some people the most concern was when we swapped Microsoft Outlook for Gmail — that decision got me some hate emails. And the thing is, we really didn’t have to do it. Some people wanted to keep their inboxes the same as they had always been, and they argued against the “supposed productivity enhancement of Gmail vs Outlook.” But that wasn’t the point. The point was that in a coming new world, we had to adapt, build and grow.

It was true and it worked.

The doubters got a bit more complimentary about the process. Moreover, the ventures team said we needed to get into AI, “We only have five people but we need to start to build an AI machine to find upcoming trends and patterns.” That became Motherbrain. It was brilliant. It felt like we were on our way to becoming the coolest private equity shop on Earth. The whole firm’s mindset changed. It further secured our belief that everything can always be improved at all times. In this instance, to become more tech-enabled, more visionary, more gutsy. And our clients also appreciated the moves. Even though we weren’t nearly a global powerhouse, we were modernizing, thinking of the future, and disrupting ourselves.

Of course, the really pivotal moment was the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The whole world ground to a halt. Legacy businesses were suddenly scrambling, trying (and failing) to make up remote-working processes from scratch. But for us, on the day the pandemic struck everyone went home with whatever device they had been using. The next day we had zero calls to IT.

While everyone else was falling to pieces about VPNs and sending staff laptops, we continued working like usual, on the cloud. That was when I got some love letters. The people who doubted the decisions we’d made five years ago were now saying “Thank you.”

That is so evocative of EQT at its best. In five short years, we turned one of our biggest weaknesses into an advantage. We weren’t the biggest firm, we weren’t the loudest, or the one making the most money, but we knew that we could keep improving and we came together to make it happen. This change, initially met with resistance, was embraced, and ultimately proved to be a huge advantage during an unprecedented global crisis.