Filip Mark
Filip is a Vice President based in Stockholm. Filip follows an agnostic approach but is particularly interested in products and businesses with the potential to define culture.
As a Swede growing up in the US - my house was what could best be described as a “Swedish foreign territory”. When my friends downloaded songs on iTunes (read: Limewire) - I was the kid in skinny jeans jerry-rigging a Swedish Spotify license 2 years before the US launch. As if things weren’t Swedish enough, my mother was a self-made entrepreneur, and my father was a competitive sailor and skier. Hence, I naturally gravitated toward swinging big and putting all eggs in one basket. This led to some big failures early in my life with my sailing apparel imports business getting destroyed by tariffs, and a couple of skis getting snapped as a Ski Guide in the French Alps.
The moment I realized being a Ski Guide wasn’t a sustainable career path
During these years I repeatedly saw Nordic products like Spotify and Kahoot crossing the Atlantic and making a mark on US culture. So when it was time to start my studies at Berkeley in the bay area, I un-enrolled and moved to Sweden - making me perhaps the first person to leave the bay area to get into tech.
In Stockholm, I spent the first three years of my career in consulting and private equity at Bain & EQT working on the electrification of heavy-duty trucks, life sciences - and yes, a fair deal of B2B SaaS. All roads lead to Rome…
At this point I had looked at hundreds of companies and industries - but most of them were adjusting to a new world, not building it. I’ve always been fascinated by products and businesses that define culture (or enable it in the background) - and to create something that you see in real life - whether it be music streaming on Spotify or iZettle terminals powering small businesses - is deeply exciting. I wanted to be a part of building something like that.
Enter Passionfroot. In 2023, the creator economy was taking off and Creandum introduced me to Jen & Jens who had the ambition of building the backbone of the creator economy - helping creators make a living off of their passion. This was one of the biggest cultural shifts in media history. Naturally, I decided to pack my bags and move to Berlin.
My dear Passionfroot team - talented founders, designers, and engineers from 4 continents!
Stepping in on the ground floor of a startup with zero product and customers was exciting, but quickly became a slap in the face on what it actually means to go from zero to one. However, it was here in our beloved basement in Berlin that I found another love: building product.
From our basement, I was part of building our first MVP, realizing we missed the mark, pivoting, and then ultimately finding product-market fit with our agentic influencer ad network. On the back of this product we built a business with the biggest brands in B2B tech like Notion, Linear, and HubSpot - paying out millions to creators across the globe.
Building such a deep product (with AI agents, search, messaging, global payments, and more) with constrained runway, as for any startup, was like trying to paint a Picasso with half a Crayola crayon. You better get the strokes right before the crayon runs out. It was during this time I felt the power of having the right people like Sabina in your corner. It’s in the earliest of stages when you need someone who believes in you regardless of what’s “hot” and where capital markets are at. Now back at Creandum, I want to continue to help put culture-defining products into the world, and stand in the corner of those founders before they’ve made their future a reality.
Filip and the rest of the Creandum team on top of a mountain