From a truck cab to an Oracle meeting

In 2004 I drove 24-metre Scania rigs. In 2024 I sat in a meeting with Oracle.

In between: twenty years that followed no plan.

I grew up in Eskilstuna. Factory town. Becoming an engineer was the highest aspiration available. I bought that narrative wholesale, applied to Luleå University of Technology, and dropped out after a year.

Two years of maths before anything interesting even starts. It was not a failure. It was a calculation. The cost of staying exceeded the gain.

Instead I drove trucks. Transportledet AB, long-haul, 2004 to 2007. Early mornings, Eskilstuna to Malmö, sometimes further. It taught me how logistics actually works. Not in a model. In a cab.

Then Stockholm. Sociology at Stockholm University, not because I was passionate about it but because it required fewer hours. That gave me room to study in parallel. 250 percent study pace. Exchange in Australia. Two master’s degrees (KTH logistics and Stockholm University sociology, 2013).

The startup

In 2013 I started LUP Technologies. A digital platform for safety and communication in industrial logistics. Customers like Scania, SCA, SSAB, Stora Enso. Customers reported 50 to 63 percent lower accident risk.

We won Open Stockholm Award 2014 for the app LUP City. I gave a speech for the King and Queen through a Nordic entrepreneur network.

If someone had asked me then why I started the company, I would have said I wanted to improve everyday life for truck drivers. That was true. But how much of the motivation it actually accounted for, I do not know.

Money was a strong driver. Freedom another. A DCF analysis at the Stockholm School of Economics showed the company could be worth 300 million SEK in five years. That number did something to me.

LUP was ten years ahead of the market. Five years without a real salary. Either kick-start sales or get a job that makes it possible to start a family. It was the latter. The decision was financial, not emotional.

What the startup taught me was that being right too early is the same thing as being wrong. The product worked, the numbers worked, but the buying side of the industry was not ready to make a procurement decision around a small Swedish vendor with no enterprise references. Technology was never the bottleneck. Trust was.

The public sector and the corporation

After LUP came two worlds I had no obvious reason to enter. Digitalization consultant for the Swedish Parliament (security class 2) and City of Stockholm. Then business developer at Volvo Group, in a venture built with Oracle. ISO 27001 lead. Enterprise negotiations.

The public sector taught me that the explicit reason a project exists is rarely the operating reason. Mandates from above, careful drafting of meeting minutes, security classifications that shape who gets to say what. The work moves at the pace of the slowest signature. The good people inside know this and route around it.

The large corporation taught me that the gap between strategy decks and operational reality is wider than anyone outside admits. A venture with Oracle on the partner side and Volvo on the parent side carries more checkpoints, more roles, and more handover risk than the actual technical problem ever justifies. Most of what fails does so at the seams between roles, between systems, between incentives, not in the technology itself.

Three worlds (startup, public sector, large corporation) and three entirely different ways to watch digitalization fail.

Why I am where I am

Now I am an independent consultant. Not because I think I have all the answers. But because twenty years working with technology, business and people have given me a perspective most consultants do not have. I have driven the truck. I have built the system. I have sat in the meeting with Oracle.

This is not an inspirational story. It is a series of rational decisions, made by a person who knows what he wants: control, competence and financial security. That it ended up in transport and logistics is partly because that is where it started.