Web 2.0 has been all the rage for quite a while now. And concerns are being raised that this may be yet another bubble. But to me it makes no difference, as I probably wouldn’t know a web 2.0 if it grabbed me by the eyeballs (yes, I too remember the previous round of “stickiness” and “monetized eyeballs”).

I care mostly about hard technical problems with equally elegant technical solutions. Like the stuff we do at Safewhere. We are building an advanced and very cool suite of infrastructure products. We make a lot of hard, complex things simple, and we address problems that have not previously been addressed in a consistent and unified manner. Usability we don’t know enough about – and we will hire clever people to do this. But when it comes to hard computer science problems we employ the brightest comp sci graduates you can get.

Which brings me to the “and why in Denmark” part. If you ever want to put smart people to work on a hard problem, go with the Danes.  Danes may suck at doing marketing on a grand scale, but they excel at solving complex problems in small teams. Every person on the team will feel that he or she is as smart as the next guy, and they will all take responsibility for creating the best solution –as a team. Danes tend to accept only a very low power distance, and they are generally more anarchistic than many other nationalities.  When you build software this may be leveraged to create great results much more efficient, than would be the case in countries with higher power distance.

So why aren’t these fantastic Danes to be seen anywhere? Well, eh, the Danes have this other habit of being on vacation most of the time, getting off work early – and most importantly we have no confidence that we will ever be successful. And if you still manage to succeed on a grander scale, you better be prepared to be put down for it – badly and promptly.

At Safewhere we are betting, that we may leverage the collective intelligence and lack of power distance to become successful fast enough that nobody has the time to lose their nerve.

– And by the way, we do have one successful businessman from Denmark. He has big boats and sometimes uses them to transport guns to Iraq –for free and for love of USA and freedom.