Jonas Kjellberg
Most companies can describe the venture they want to build. Far fewer can pressure-test whether the business model will actually scale, where the unit economics break, and which of the next twelve decisions will quietly kill it. Senior teams need someone who has stress-tested ventures from the inside, at scale, and who can show a leadership group how to do the same with their own bets.
Jonas Kjellberg is a co-creator of Skype and Stanford lecturer who helps leadership teams pressure-test new business models and turn them into ventures that scale.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jonas Kjellberg
- He has lived the full venture cycle at the level most leadership teams only theorise about: founding member of Skype’s leadership group, head of Internet Investments at Kinnevik backing Zalando and HelloFresh, then founder again at NORNORM.
- The Gear Up framework, developed with Stanford’s Tom Kosnik and Lena Ramfelt and published by Wiley, gives executives a structured way to diagnose where a business model will break before they commit capital.
- He brings the operator’s view on how Skype actually generated revenue and scaled commercially, not the founding myth. That distinction is what makes his sessions useful for boards thinking about commercial models, not just product.
- His current work at NORNORM puts him inside a circular, subscription-based business model with IKEA as a co-founder investor, which gives him a current case study on how subscription and sustainability economics interact.
Biography highlights
- Co-creator and former member of the leadership team at Skype, with operating responsibility on the commercial side.
- Co-author of Gear Up (Wiley/Capstone, 2014) and Business Creation, with Stanford’s Lena Ramfelt and Tom Kosnik.
- Lecturer on entrepreneurship and sales culture at Stanford University and the Stockholm School of Economics.
- Former Head of Internet Investments at Kinnevik, leading roughly EUR 700m of investment into Zalando, Rocket Internet, Avito, Lamoda, Jabong, and HelloFresh.
- Founder and Chairman of NORNORM, a circular, subscription-based office furniture company co-founded with Inter IKEA, which raised EUR 110m in scale-up funding led by Verdane.
- Founder of Player:IO and former senior advisor at BCG Digital Ventures.
Biography
Skype was a small Stockholm team trying to work out whether voice-over-IP could ever be a real business. Jonas Kjellberg sat inside that team as part of the founding leadership group, focused on the commercial engine that turned a free product into a company eBay was prepared to pay for. That experience, of seeing exactly which business model decisions made the venture scalable and which nearly broke it, became the raw material for everything that followed.
After Skype, he moved to the investor side as Head of Internet Investments at Kinnevik, deploying around EUR 700m into Zalando, Rocket Internet, Avito, Lamoda, Jabong, and HelloFresh. That seat gave him a comparative view across consumer internet bets that most operators never get. He saw which models survived contact with real markets and which collapsed under their own assumptions.
Out of that operating and investing work came Gear Up, written with Stanford’s Tom Kosnik and Lena Ramfelt and published by Wiley in 2014. The book sets out a nine-component framework for testing whether a business model is actually viable before scaling it. It is now used in entrepreneurship classrooms at Stanford and the Stockholm School of Economics, where Kjellberg lectures on venture creation and sales culture.
He is now back inside an operating business as founder and chairman of NORNORM, a circular, subscription-based office furniture company built with Inter IKEA as a co-founding investor and now backed by Verdane in a EUR 110m round. For executive audiences, this matters because it gives him a live case study on subscription economics and circular business models, drawn from a company he is currently running.
Key speaking topics
- Business model innovation and venture design
- Scaling consumer technology businesses
- Sales culture and commercial growth
- Circular and subscription business models
- Corporate venturing and intrapreneurship
- Entrepreneurial decision-making under uncertainty
Ideal for
- Boards and executive teams evaluating new ventures, spin-offs, or commercial model changes
- Chief Strategy Officers and Heads of Innovation responsible for new business creation
- Corporate venturing units and incubators inside large companies
- Founders and senior operators inside scale-up companies preparing for the next stage of growth
Audience outcomes
- A clear way to stress-test a business model against the nine components of the Gear Up framework before committing capital
- A first-hand account of the commercial decisions that made Skype a scalable business, useful as a reference case for current bets
- A working view of how subscription and circular models change unit economics, drawn from NORNORM
- A sharper sense of which venture decisions are reversible and which lock the business in
- Direct comparison points from a portfolio that includes Zalando, HelloFresh, and Rocket Internet
Talks
A session on how to take an idea, structure it into a viable venture, and grow it to scale using the Gear Up framework.
Key takeaways:
- How to map a business idea against the nine components of the Gear Up framework
- Where most early-stage ventures actually break, drawn from Skype, Zalando, and HelloFresh
- What founders and corporate teams should test before raising or committing internal capital
A working session on how incumbents respond when new business models reset their industry.
Key takeaways:
- How disruptors choose which part of the value chain to attack first
- What incumbents typically miss when they treat disruption as a technology question rather than a business model one
- How corporate venturing units can be set up to test new models without being smothered by the parent
A candid talk on the mistakes inside the venture and tech ecosystem, and what they reveal about how real businesses get built.
Key takeaways:
- Why most venture failure is a business model problem, not a product problem
- What investors look for once a venture has signal but no scale
- How founders should read and respond to bad investor advice
A talk on emerging business models and why some companies succeed where others stall.
Key takeaways:
- How circular and subscription models change the underlying economics of an industry, using NORNORM as the working case
- What separates real business model innovation from feature-level change
- How leadership teams can build the internal conditions for new venture creation