The Accidental Founder: Journey of Sondre Pedersen and Mintix

Jakob Wredstrøm

Today at Sound Connections, we're going to explore the theme of the accidental founder. We're going to have a guest. It's going to be Sondar Pedersen. He is the co-founder of Mintix, a blockchain ticketing system that we have developed here on the Cable Entertainment. I hope you get some perspectives on how it is to be a new founder.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Oh, you guys, I've been looking forward to this episode. It's with a couple of my friends, a couple of my colleagues. Um, and as most of you probably know by now, we have some episodes that's interviewing industry leaders. And then we have some episodes interviewing ourselves and probably not industry leaders, but I think we're on a journey to become something. And what we're going to talk about today is something really interesting. Mintix, which is one of our companies, uh, which is a blockchain based And Sondre here, who is the CEO of Mintix, we're gonna talk about your journey and sort of where we are now. And it's gonna be the overall theme of the Accidental Founder. Because today is gonna be really fun, I think, because it's been a project I've been extremely passionate about. So Sondre, who are you? Where do you come from? Just a brief introduction to you. Yeah, I'm Sondre, I'm 26 years old and... I've been doing a lot of different stuff over the years and tried out some different studies, found out it wasn't for me. And then I suddenly got into the whole blockchain web tree space with learning more about how crypto works and NFTs and just seeing a potential for the future. And that's sort of where we met. So you, Jonny, you almost need to tell the story. How did we meet Sandler? Yes. So I mean, I met him. I met him. a good couple years before you, but, uh... We worked together at a bar for many years, um... And yeah, you did go to some school, but at some point you just kind of got very into all the ticky, ticky savvy stuff that I don't really know anything about, but... And then me and you, we had a conversation about how interesting all this Web3 and crypto stuff is. And then I just briefly mentioned that, hey, I know this guy. We were actually roommates also, sort of. You lived upstairs in the upper apartment. In the old town. And then we just, you know, we brought you in for a coffee and... Yeah. And because, you know, to give some context to why Mintzik started, I was a trip in LA in February of 2022, doing some stuff. I was attending a wedding and then doing some sessions.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And then I had a lot of meetings with industry professionals there and everyone talked about NFTs and everyone talked about all these kind of music, NFT projects. And honestly, I didn't really understand why that was a thing. Like, I just don't understand why that would be something worth anything or people would actually put worth into it. What I've shown later is, well, it wasn't really any worth, but that's a different conversation. But what frustrated me is that excitement about new technology with no real application, in my opinion. So it's kind of like, there's got to be some practical use case that we can do something about it. So we kind of had that conversation about Sundown, like, let's invite them in and have a conversation. And you came by our small office at that time and can't even remember what we talked about. Well, yeah, the thing was that we were supposed to just look at ways for Capella to... stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the technology and see if there was any ways for you guys to get into it. If that be streaming or actual NFTs or something like that. And then we just kept on talking about what can we use this technology for? What should you guys be looking at? Yeah. And I think that's where the conversation is like, okay, so what can we actually use it for now if we want to venture into it? And we quickly concluded on ticketing. Um, I think as we speaking and doing this podcast today, like that is one of the only real like practical, practical use cases in the music industry where you can, where you can use it. So it was like, okay, let's do it. And I had started a few kind of, I've started one technology company before, uh, that failed, but, uh, I had some experience of how to approach it. And that's sort of just what we did. We defined a project. Uh, we, we've got some investors that believed in, you know, using. NFTs and blockchain for ticketing. And then we started, you know, started from scratch. We didn't really know anything. Of course we knew a bit about the music industry and we knew a bit about the technology, but besides that we didn't know much. So the way I see it, and I like to be a bit prerogative with my words, but we tricked you into becoming a founder. Yeah, you kind of did, but I'm happy you did. Yeah, it's good because I think I knew what it took to be a founder because I've been pursuing this full time for five years.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And I think I was trying to be honest about what it took, but. I think you were trying to be honest, but at the same time, you said that it was a something that you would kind of have to experience yourself. You can just take anyone else's word for it. Yeah. And what's really interesting in this is because you previously to this had no ambition of becoming a founder. No, I wanted to hopefully just continue what I was doing at the time. I stopped working at the bar. I stopped my studies, I was just sitting at home and working my own hours, just finding out what was happening in the whole ecosystem. Yeah. And just working mostly nights and just sleeping long and then staying up for hours and hours on end. How did you make money from that? Well, I made some money with... It was a lot of luck. It was, for example, I could buy into one project, a crypto project. and it would just do well and then I could sell some of it. And it was the same with some NFTs. I found some projects that I thought was cool. I just wanted to test it out, but just for a couple of dollars and it paid off. Yeah. That's cool. So we, we try to take that knowledge of your knowledge of, of how the technology was moving and how it can be used and how you could, you know, integrate it with other things. And we, we built Mintix. And as we said, we built some. some got some investors build a small first product. Fast forward to today, we've been going on for 14 months or so and have like a product launched. It's the first company in the Nordics that's doing this and one of actually the few companies in the world that's venturing into this space. We've gotten some more investors. We've gotten a very good team and we're like the start of the journey but far enough to like prove that we can actually do something. So recently we actually won an award. So startup of the year at the music tech conference in Bergen. Um, probably a year within what I don't quite know, but it's, it's something to do with like Norway, the Nordics, there was some different companies from different countries and an international jury, but nevertheless, there's like an industry recognition that what we're building has a potential and a purpose. Yeah. But then again, me as the, the least tech savvy guy.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So for the listeners that don't necessarily understand anything about blockchain or crypto or anything, maybe one of you guys could talk a little bit about what does potentially the blockchain technology contribute to the ticketing industry? What's the actual problems that we are trying to solve? It's an interesting question and I just wanted to start with actually commenting one thing. It has nothing to do with crypto. Yeah, and that's good. Yeah. So it's good to know. And thank you for asking that question. We're using blockchain as technology. If you can just briefly explain the technology, then I can explain the industry application. Well, it's all of, when you say cryptocurrency or blockchain or NFTs, most people just think of it as one thing and that's crypto. Yeah. But it's all about the technology that it's built upon and the blockchain technology that is what's underneath. And it's kind of like you can view it as a book of transactions where everything can be viewed. And if something is being transferred from one person to another, it's gonna be in this book, and it can't be altered. And so to just speak in simple terms, you have very much transparency, and it can't be... act in that way and so you won't have any fake tickets and you can have a better understanding of who are your actual fans if they have been to your show and you can show that you have the tickets. Yeah and now we're venturing into the industry application and we've been around like there's so many applications with this technology in the music industry but the storytelling we're doing now is that the primary purpose for us like having a relevance as a ticket company is that through blockchain technology, we can enable venues, promoters, and artists having access to the secondary market. What that means is when you buy a ticket, that's called the primary market, that directly from a ticket service, from Ticketmaster, whatever, it's a primary sale. You buy that ticket from the service provider. If it's a very popular show or you can't go, you want to sell that ticket to someone else. That is called a secondary market. And how the industry is kind of...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Set up right now is there's some primary market providers, or we know them, Ticketmaster, blah, blah. And then you have the secondary market providers who are like either platforms such as TicketSwap, or it's like in Norway you have Fin, like basically just a public marketplace, or you know a friend and you send them money, transfer them money. Or you just post it on Facebook. Yeah, that's called the secondary market. The primary issue, well, there's a lot of issues, but the primary issue that we're addressing Outsiders, promoters and venues see none of that revenue. So up to 20% of popular shows, those tickets are resold, which means there's a lot of tickets, you know, big shows, there's thousands of tickets that are being resold, and the people who created the works, the content of what you're buying tickets to, sees none of that revenue at all. So by using Plugticking technology, we can tap into being primary platform, as anyone else, but also tap into that secondary sale revenue. What that means is that these creators that makes these shows see money they have never seen before. That's a huge argument of why this is important. Yeah. For the customer, the audience actually having some security in the trades, you can have a secure platform or marketplace where you can sell your tickets, is also really important. And then there's multiple other aspects that we'll talk about. I think I also talked about it with a podcast with Josh Greenberg, it's about fandom. So we believe as a company and I think in general, most of the thought leaders in the music industry think about fandom as being the next thing in the music industry. And it's basically back in the days when you were a fan, you could buy CD on LP and you could really buy a lot of things from your favorite artists and contribute to that economy. When streaming came in, a lot of that disappeared. Now we can go back into especially utilizing Web3 or blockchain to get into communities or drops or like exclusive material as a fan that you can access. And that you can do that through our tickets as well. Well, we can be, that's called the onboarding process into those utilities of blockchain. Gets a bit complicated. Yeah. But what we're trying to say is we believe that there, we have or the technology and our service

Jakob Wredstrøm

Upon that technology has a much better solution than what is existing today. Does that make sense? You have enough explanation? I'd say so. Cool. So this episode is obviously not just about Mint 6. It's really about you or taking you as an example for what we're doing. So Sanda, you have been the CEO of a company and what that means we can also talk about. But basically your responsibility has been leading Mintix. Has that been overwhelming for you? Yes, very. If you would have asked me just a couple weeks before we even started Mintix, if I was ever to become a CEO of some company, I would have just laughed and said, no, that's not me. Yeah. And... To be honest, to this day, it's still a weird feeling to have that much responsibility, but it kind of grows on you. And you'd learn that it's not so much about what you see in the movies about the title CEO. And it's more just you take responsibility and you make some decisions. Yeah. And we do a lot of those decisions as a team. Yeah. Because I'm not. qualified for a lot of the stuff that we do, but we have a very qualified team. And so we have people that knows something and that makes it easier for me to. Except that if someone comes with a decision about something, then I can agree with them because I know that they are the best in their field. Yeah. And I think that's, that's really the point because what we have had some talks about recently is about you as a CEO, because I think. You know, we've talked a bit about imposter syndrome, about, you know, why am I here? Am I qualified? And one of the really important talks we've had is you don't need to be perfect. Like that picture you have of that, you know, CEO from a movie, you don't need to be that. And what you can be as a CEO is you can be the one who drives the decisions and drives the momentum of the company, but use all the resources available around you to do it. And Mint Six,

Jakob Wredstrøm

At times it's quite large, like a team. Like, you know how you have around just look at this office, we have five people working on the company. And you know, when we have developers and our development team, like we're up to like 12, 13 people that are involved in a project. So it does require a lot from you because at the end of the day, if someone needs to get, something needs to get done, it's you. Yeah. It's true. Yeah. One of the things that's also I think important to talk about is also the money side. So. How has that been financially for you being the CEO of Mintix for 14 months? Yeah, I had some money saved up and I could use that for basically paying for all of my necessary bills in the beginning. And that was from all of my crypto stuff. And eventually the market started going very much down. Oh really? Yeah. I guess everyone has seen that, but so it was kind of lucky that I got to sell most of my stuff while. It was still in a relatively good market. But so I managed to live off that for a while. And then just recently we started, I started taking out a small salary and that was perfect timing. And so it's been kind of like the American way of living with the smallest amount possible while starting up. Yeah. And it's been a challenge, but it's definitely worked out. Yeah, because that is a thing we at Capella, like we're based in Norway, but we have multiple nationalities represented in a company. And I think we are at least very much American when it comes to the startup mentality compared to like how Norwegians normally think. Of course, we try to have security and we try to, you know, allocate budgets for salaries as much as we can. But the reality of it is if it's a risk, if it's a risk, and we own it together. And that does cost a lot of your own personal funds to take that risk. So, yeah. And I also think it's important for founders to realize that the more money you want to take and salary to more money, you have to get in from investors and you're going to lose a bigger share of the company. Yeah. And yeah. So at the end of the day, like we believe in it so much. We, we don't want to just, you know, get a lot of investors early on at very low valuation and then.

Jakob Wredstrøm

You know, miss out on that opportunity. Of course it needs to be a balance. Yeah. But so, so Sunda. Capella right now, we're starting other companies and we still have focus on mid-seks obviously, but there's other people coming in the same situation that you came in 14 months ago. If you were to give them any advice, starting new companies, anything that you felt like, oh, I wish I knew, or maybe pair them with it mentally, like do you have something you would say to them? Well, I think one of the most important things is to surround yourselves with people that fill your gaps. And so there can be tons of stuff that you don't know anything about. And a lot of that stuff is going to come gradually by doing and being taught by others. And some of the stuff you don't even have to know that much about. You can know that it's happening, but you don't have to understand why. Because someone else is going to have an education or they're going to have a lot of experience within that specific field. And if you trust them, then yeah, you don't have to do it for yourself. I think that's a great tip and advice because I think in general with entrepreneurs, especially music industry, when starting labels or managements or whatever, there's like a, like one or two people and they try to be everything. And you know, now after summer, we're gonna be over 20 people. And I still feel like there's multiple things we don't have coverage. Like 20 different individuals with 20 different backgrounds and educations, and we still have stuff we don't have coverage. Still have gaps to fill. So how do you think that you as a single person or a couple of people are able to take on all of that? And do it perfectly. So I think that's a great advice. I think that's what we're talking about a lot right now.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, so and always have someone around you to talk about stuff as well. So if you have a hard time and if it's getting too much for you, then be honest about it and let the people you work with know and most likely like in my cases whenever I've felt that way, I've just told you guys at the office how I'm feeling and it's been a great help and one thing is that you get it off your chest. Also you would be surprised to see how much the people around you

are going to step up and help you get to where you need to be. Yep. The number one pro tip, don't do it alone. Yeah. Don't do it alone. Yeah. Okay. We've spoken about you, spoken about founders. We'll just use a couple of minutes explaining to the audience what Mintix, like what is happening in the future, because I think we'll follow this company, you know, through multiple episodes and the journey there. So we, we are the place right now where we've launched.

couple of products. It's live in the market. Right now we're using exclusive partners to actually test the system, but it exists. And we just want to start over the year. And I think that was based on the level of impact that the technology in our system could have in the industry. But what's happening moving forward? What are we focusing on? Well, right now we're gonna have to get some more capital to keep on developing the platform. Yeah.

We have a couple of crucial stuff that we need to get in place before we can actually go out to just random customers. We have some shows with Capella right now and that's great for testing, but to get out into the market we need to hide the blockchain stuff a bit more. What does that mean, hide the blockchain? I think that's interesting. Well, so what we're doing without getting too nerdy is we're using a...

hybrid wallet that is kind of in the background so you won't even know that there is a wallet that you interact with the blockchain. And wallet is where the NFT is stored? Yeah. So yeah, the plan is to make it so that you just log in to our service using either email like Google or you can use Twitter, Facebook, whatever social media you have and then it will be generated a wallet in the background for you.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So when you purchase a ticket, it's gonna look like it's there in the nap. Yep. But there is so much more going on in the background. Yeah. And then if I can comment on that, what that basically means for us, non very tech savvy people that don't really know what it is, it's that it's, you know, it's so user friendly that, you know, the general public will be able to use this system and they don't necessarily need to know that it has something to do with blockchain or Yeah. Anything. Yeah. So it's a long journey and I think there's definitely no security in whether or not we'll get success. I think it's a really interesting project. We believe in the technology. We believe in the team, but there's so many factors to find whether or not we'll have success. But nevertheless, like this is why Capella is here. We're here to take the big risks and start these companies in order to be innovative in the music industry and create new opportunities. And hopefully Mint is going to be a great success. If it's not. We're gonna exist for a long time. And we're gonna have a lot of goes at this. I think this is gonna be a really interesting thing. Yeah. But thank you so much, Sanda. And thank you, Jonah, for joining me as a casual co-host today. Hey, hey. Thank you for having me. Yeah. Yeah, and what we talked about today is the accidental founder. It's about that I believe that a lot more people can be founders than what they believe they can actually be themselves. I think there's this belief that it needs to be a very strict and special type. one out of a million kind of type that becomes this founder. I believe a lot more can become that, but they need to be encouraged and put into systems where they can actually develop that skill and develop that mindset. And hopefully we'll see a lot more and keep up through that. But thank you so much and see you next time.