The other day I started to think about all the jobs I’ve had, and the people that helped me get them. I have started a fair amount of projects and companies together with others, but this note isn’t about them. It is about the people that saw me and gave me a chance for a job. This is a little thank you note to them.

GP – Göteborgs-Posten (a newspaper in Gothenburg)
Thank you Johan Rylander, for taking me in as an intern and letting me spend my time making an awful website with my new found HTML skills. And thank you for remembering me when you started working with the web and needed a junior reporter.

Thank you Katharina Johansson, for being a supporter and an internal champion for the whole youth section of the newspaper that I worked for. Thank you for fighting the good fight and for helping to launch so many people’s careers.

Thank you Johan Boström, for offering me the possibility to become a web editor although I hardly had any qualifications for it. It was brave of you to bet on a young guy that had been hanging around the editorial room for quite a while, but didn’t really have any formal experience. My first summer working the night shift at the paper was the crash course in journalism that I had never had. Thank you.

SVT (Swedish National Television)
Thank you Anders Laag and Annika Forsberg, for seeing through the intensely arrogant letter I had sent, proclaiming my existence. Thank you for taking me to an interview anyway, and for hiring me straight away in that meeting. It was a big confidence boost and I lived off that for a while. I had never worked with TV before and knew almost nothing about it. So thank you for that opportunity.

Sydsvenskan (a newspaper in Malmö)
Thank you Jonas Gruvö, for hiring me to the online newspaper that summer. Thank you for helping me get to run some fun projects, and for helping me get a permanent job in a time where there weren’t that many. Thank you for reaching out and acquiring half of Manolo.se – that was a completely new experience for me. And also, thank you for reading The Economist that day and introducing the concept of sudoku to me. I lived off that phone call for years afterwards, literally. Thank you so much.

Bonnier R&D
Thank you Sara Öhrvall, for taking a meeting at Torsgatan and listening to a rant about the future of advertising from me. Thank you for taking me in to do some of the most fun projects I’ve ever done. Thank you for giving me a break and for opening so many doors for me.

Toca Boca
Thank you Casten Almqvist, for betting on that Emil and I could pull off what would become Toca Boca. It wasn’t the most obvious choice – we had never even made an app before. Thank you for being patient when I was stressing out about not making any money and for instilling confidence in my own decision making. It worked. Thank you.

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These people have meant a lot to me and have given me a chance in situations where they had many other options. I hope I can do the same for a few of my own, one day.