At Face Value

The Marathon Runner

In the mid-1990s, the European mobile telecoms industry was hiring at a pace that was breaking its own buildings. Ericsson, the Swedish industrial giant building the networks that would put a phone in everyone’s pocket, was opening offices abroad faster than it could fill them, and hiring new engineers in Stockholm faster than it could send them anywhere. On a long corridor at the headquarters, Nils Granath had a problem. The corridor was filling up faster than he was getting out of it. “After three months, the whole corridor was filled with people that had been hired,” he recalls. “If you spent more than a year in the head office before being sent abroad as an expat, you were a complete loser. I was nine months in the headquarters before I got an expat contract in Brazil.” Nine months from new hire to São Paulo. That was the pace of mobile telecoms in the 1990s, and Nils’ early career was a sprint. The venture business he describes today, thirty years later at Swisscanto Private Equity in Zurich, runs at a different pace. “It’s a marathon,” he says. “It always takes longer and costs more. There’s ups and downs. You get tired, then positive, and then you run again.”

What Brazil Teaches You That Stockholm Can’t

He went where the company was expanding, which in the 1990s meant almost everywhere: Russia, Brazil, markets wiring up mobile networks from close to nothing. Before that he had spent years in the military, also abroad, also doing technical work.

“You have to go global,” he says. “You cannot just sit in the office and win foreign markets. You have to go there. Just pack your bag and go there.”

The same line surfaces decades later when he explains why a Swiss startup cannot sell into the United States from a desk in Zurich, why his portfolio companies need American investors on the cap table, what actually has to move when a company decides to grow. The engineer who landed in São Paulo at nine months still does not believe a market can be won from somewhere else.

From Operator’s Spin-Off to the Boardroom

Before Switzerland became a chapter in the marathon, it was almost an accident. After an MBA at INSEAD, Nils had joined a real Stockholm startup with international investors, the kind of place that still carries the promise of the MBA brochure: global, ambitious, just risky enough to feel exciting. Then it went bankrupt. “You just graduated from INSEAD and you think you’re the king of the world,” he says. “Then one year later you’re unemployed and you walk out the office without a laptop and mobile phone.” So he called the headhunter who had been working for Swisscom. Switzerland was not the grand plan. It was the next open door.

Nils first came to Switzerland in 2001, to a company that had just been pushed out of the nest. It was a software business spun off from Swisscom, with its own offices and external management, around thirty people when he joined. “We grew really successfully,” he says. “We built offices in Singapore and Moscow, we acquired a company in France. We were like 200 people when I left.” He was in the management team, reporting to the CEO, running the kind of expansion he had watched from the inside at Ericsson, except now he was the one doing it.

That growth-stage company became the template for everything he would later look for as an investor. “That’s still my home turf,” he says. “You invest at Series B, they have a few millions in revenue, but they need to scale globally. I did it myself. And now I do it more as a board member.”

The move into investing was less a leap than a short step across the hall. The French acquisition had put him in front of Swisscom’s senior management, and when the group started building out its venture and M&A activity, he was already in the room. “It was very easy for me to transition into that, because I knew all the people already,” he says. He joined the founding team of Swisscom Ventures in 2007, in a Swiss startup ecosystem that barely resembled today’s. Redalpine had only just started. VI Partners was among the first venture funds in the country. “The ecosystem was so small back then, the number of companies too,” he says. “That’s twenty years ago now. It’s crazy.”

Spotify, Marshall, and the Ecosystem Next Door

Then he went back to Sweden, and this is the chapter he keeps circling back to. At Telia, the Nordic telecoms group operating across seventeen countries, he headed investments and worked on a large strategic investment in Spotify. He sat on the board of a Spotify spin-off, and on the board of the company that makes the Marshall loudspeakers and headphones. “That company was living the dreams of a rockstar,” he says. “That was really exciting.”

The Nordics had produced Skype, Spotify, Minecraft. There is a functioning growth-stage IPO market like Stockholm’s NASDAQ , where a company could list without being a blue chip. There are also large local funds like: EQT, Northzone, Creandum, etc. to fund the growth stages.

“It’s a completely different ecosystem,” he says. “The fundraising they make, the network they have.”

Asked whether his personal bias might influence his verdict, he replies: “You can read about it on PitchBook. It’s not my personal judgement.” Granath’s front row seat of the Nordic expansion guides the way he thinks about the Swiss ecosystem- more about that in part three.

After the rock’n’roll of the Swedish markets, it was his family that ultimately drew him back to Switzerland. But Granath didn’t stop his marathon there- he simply switched the yellow cross for a white one. And joined Swisscanto’s first scaleup-focused growth fund.

One of the Few in an Empty Room

That fund was the Swiss Growth Fund, launched in 2018: CHF 180 million, now more or less fully invested across eighteen companies with seven exits. The follow-on fund reached a second close at CHF 190 million, its investors mostly Swiss pension funds with some family offices. Nils runs the direct technology side, , typically investing at the Series B and C stage, where a company has real revenue and a real product and now has to become large. Growth is a thin band of the Swiss market. Most domestic money sits earlier, at seed and Series A; by the time a company needs fifteen or twenty million to scale, the room tends to empty out. It is also the band Nils lived through twice, first as an operator, then from the boards of companies trying to go global.

What he looks for there is not a plan. It is a team that holds together when the plan breaks.

“With a good team, the management and the board, you can have an honest discussion,” he says. “When you hit a difficult situation, okay, this is not working, what do we do now? You find a common plan, everybody works together. You sit down around the table, nobody’s emotional, these are the facts, what can we do, what are the scenarios. That’s super important.”

He is also clear about where he stops. He is a board member, a sparring partner, the person who makes the introduction to potential board members or the co-investor a growth company suddenly needs. He is not a founder’s shadow. The companies he talks about with the most warmth are the ones whose teams could run their own race while he kept supporting alongside.

In part two, “Backed to the Future,” Nils walks through three of the companies he has backed at Swisscanto, and the moments in each where the race nearly ended.