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# Rebecka Löthman Rydå on why venture capital must risk being first
- URL: https://fomo.observer/rebecka-lothman-ryda-on-why-venture-capital-must-risk-being-first/
- Published: 2026-10-01T07:21:24.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T07:21:24.000Z
- Author: Triin Hertmann
- Tags: Investors, Investing

*When Rebecka Löthman Rydå talks about early-stage investing, she reaches for an unexpectedly lovely comparison. A local VC should give a founder a “first-love moment”: the feeling that somebody sees the possibility before there is enough evidence for everyone else to see it too.*

Her own career has been built on accepting jobs slightly before she felt ready, from becoming a young CFO to taking over as CEO and later spending more than a decade in venture capital. Today she is a General Partner at Norrsken Evolve, a European pre-seed fund focused on resilience and sustainability. She is equally direct about timid investors, small ambitions and the 10,000 small cuts that still make tech harder for women.

### **Before venture capital, you described yourself as a nerd from Stockholm. What shaped you?**

I grew up in Södermalm before it was gentrified. Neither of my parents had a university degree, and we did not have much money when I was little. For a while we received a housing subsidy. My parents planned every meal carefully to make the money last.

Both of them rose above their circumstances. My father built a successful career in the Navy. My mother went to university when we were older, became a teacher and found work she loved. They showed me how fulfilling it can be to serve something you genuinely care about.

I was very good at school and a complete nerd: science fiction, board games, a few equally nerdy friends. Being good at school was not considered cool where we lived. Then my father was posted to Australia as a diplomat and the whole family moved.

I arrived as an introverted Swedish teenager and met Australians, who are extremely extroverted. I had to build a new group of friends from scratch, so I learned to be much less afraid of meeting people. I still carry that with me. I am fearless about approaching someone new, and I like the Australian habit of being socially generous.

After high school, I worked in a bar, a hostel and a café, then travelled alone through Southeast Asia and Central America. In El Salvador I reached a small town with no hotel, and a family let me sleep on their sofa. That gave me a fundamental belief that most people want to help. You just have to ask.

### **You studied finance. Was becoming an investor always the plan?**

Not at all. When I studied at Uppsala University, entrepreneurship was not particularly cool. One friend started a company, and the rest of us thought, “Oh, he cannot get a real job.” We still talk about it. He was incredibly brave, and we were the idiots.

Nobody around me knew what venture capital was. People wanted to join the Big Four auditing companies, so I went into audit at Ernst & Young. It taught me to handle pressure and gave me early responsibility for teams. I don't believe people should work like that forever, but it helps to know you can survive a difficult stretch.

I wanted to be closer to the business, so I accepted a job as CFO of a financial group. I was young, and the job was probably slightly beyond me. My attitude was: what is the worst that can happen? I will learn a huge amount, and I will probably survive.

I think of those jobs as interval training. You push until you can taste blood, but afterwards you become faster on the long runs. The assignments that stretched me most did the same thing.

We began preparing the company for a listing. Then the owners changed their minds, parted ways with the CEO and asked me to take over. So I became CEO. By the end, I was nine months pregnant and had discovered that being CEO of a financial group can be glorified administration. A lot of shit flows to the top.

Before I went on maternity leave, the Chair told me he was starting a venture fund and asked whether I might consider joining. I thought the private companies in our portfolio had always been the most fun: passionate founders building strange and interesting things. I said yes, returned from leave and went straight into venture.

### **What eventually made you walk away from generalist investing?**

I learned venture at Zenith, then moved to Industrifonden and later Inventure. But after almost ten years, I was sick of seeing another incremental B2B SaaS product. Yet another “next-generation AI CRM” or “AI business-intelligence platform” began to feel soul-crushing.

Around the same time, my son became seriously ill. He was five, and we almost lost him. That makes you examine what deserves your time. Venture requires travel, long hours and a lot of grinding to find deals. If I was going to give the job that much of my life, I wanted the work to mean something.

I also knew that I had gaps. I understood investing, fundraising, finance and boards, but I had never been a startup founder. The right partners would bring what I lacked.

Johan Attby had spent 20 years as a founder, and I knew him from Fishbrain's board. He has the optimism founders need. If someone says no, his immediate reaction is to work out how to turn it into yes. 

Alex Bakir brought a different kind of experience. He had invested for Pierre Omidyar and later became VP of Product at Planet Labs, staying through its IPO. He knows how to raise money while satellites are still blowing up and how to sell when the product barely works.

The three of us have very different strengths. That is what I wanted in a venture team, because identical people tend to share identical blind spots.

### **What kinds of companies do you now want to fund as an investor?**

Norrsken Evolve invests at pre-seed in founders building a more resilient and sustainable Europe. Resilience does not mean weapons or kill chains. It means helping society function through shocks.

> Europe needs secure access to critical materials, better healthcare for an ageing population and energy grids that survive repeated crises. These are enormous business opportunities.

People sometimes ask whether climate tech is dead. It is not. What died was the ability to raise money merely by saying “We are ESG.” A founder can now say, “We will supply Europe with copper wire,” and explain why the product is cheaper and more reliable. If the best process is also the greenest process, great. The commercial need comes first in the pitch, but the environmental value has not disappeared.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/08/7f/087f88ab-cb17-44cc-928d-9cfca14a3fb9/content/images/2026/10/55170227475_10b0a12405.jpg)

### **Why has Estonia become important to a Swedish fund?**

I have been coming here for five or six years and fell in love with the ecosystem. Estonian founders are scrappy and hard-working. Startup events begin at six in the evening because people spend the day working. In Sweden, we can apparently sacrifice an entire workday to talking at an event.

There is also a real pay-it-forward culture. Ministers and unicorn founders are accessible. Successful people give their time, money and attention back to the community. Plural has helped push the ambition level, and the Kasvuhoone tech hub is the kind of bold project the region needs.

Norrsken Evolve wants to make roughly three to five Estonian investments each year. Twice a year, we bring founders from our portfolio into an intensive sprint. It is not an open program; we have already invested in the companies. We identify what blocks each one from selling more or raising the next round, then design support around those bottlenecks.

We connect them with around 100 specialist advisers. Most VCs are half-smart generalists. Sometimes a founder needs somebody who has solved that exact technical, hiring or sales problem before.

### **What is Estonia still getting wrong?**

There are not enough women among VC partners or angels, and that has barely changed. I also worry about local funds. Estonia depends heavily on public capital; pension reform did not help, and SmartCap can only do so much. Too few exits have returned too little liquidity.

I would also like to see founders attack bigger problems. There are too many me-too ideas: another AI app for accounting, another one for legal work. I am always happy when people build, because their second or third company may be amazing. But the world is not short of serious problems, and a serious problem often comes with a serious market.

Energy is an obvious Estonian opportunity. You have disconnected from Russia, added renewables and created difficult new problems for the grid. That makes Estonia a fantastic sandbox for energy technology. We met the former energy minister and the head of Enefit and heard how much needs to be solved. Yet I still do not see enough energy startups.

### **Sweden has produced several generations of unicorn founders. What can Estonia learn?**

Sweden is perhaps on its fourth generation now, so it has a much larger mass of experienced founders and operators ready to invest and help. Estonia cannot manufacture that history overnight.

One lesson is to make failure survivable. Daniel Ek once explained why he kept pushing record companies with Spotify even though his proposal should have sounded impossible. They had a profitable CD business, and he wanted music to become almost free. He could take that risk because if Spotify failed, the Swedish state would make sure he landed somewhere. Bankruptcy would not destroy his life.

That safety allows people to try, fail and build again. Founders also need optimism. In Estonia, Russia and the war feel physically close, and I sense more fear about the future. To build an ambitious company, you still have to believe there will be a future worth building for.

### **With AI changing the market every month, how can you still choose a company for a ten-year journey?**

I go back to basics. Predicting the future has always been freaking hard. I am not smart enough to tell you what happens next year. Anyone who claims to know what the world will look like in ten years is lying.

So I bet on the founder. Do I believe in this person’s obsession, drive and ability to keep learning? The founder will help shape the future, whatever it becomes.

Then I look at the problem. It needs to be huge, with a market worth tens of billions, and the founder needs an insight that comes from genuinely obsessing over it. For us, the problem must also matter. Helping someone make email marketing slightly better is not the kind of change we exist to fund.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/08/7f/087f88ab-cb17-44cc-928d-9cfca14a3fb9/content/images/2026/10/55170227495_144c30f314.jpg)

### **Has venture capital become afraid of doing its actual job?**

Sometimes, yes. I see early-stage funds tell founders, “We might invest if another fund comes first,” or give a commitment that only becomes real when somebody else joins. But being first is the job.

Being the first believer is the magic of venture. It is like first love, which sounds cheesy, but something happens when you tell a founder you believe before everybody else does. That conviction may help them make the first hire or persuade the next investor. Local funds should give founders that spark, not wait for an international brand to validate them.

High risk should correlate with high reward. We manage risk by building a larger portfolio, not by being fearful about every individual investment. If you remove the risk and still expect venture returns, you are kidding yourself.

### **You have described life as a woman in venture as 10,000 paper cuts. What do you mean?**

It is rarely one dramatic case of harassment or open discrimination. It is the accumulation of small comments. “We are so glad you joined this SaaS board because you are a woman.” Not because I have spent ten years investing in software and served on 20 boards? Or: “At least you are good-looking, so if you fail as CEO, that is something.” Or introducing me as “the good-looking investor.” Each comment is small enough to dismiss, but they keep coming in an industry that is already difficult.

My advice to women is to become unfuckwithable. Stay grounded in what you know and in the experience you have earned. Call people out when they diminish you. I am old enough now to say: stop fucking with me. Talk about what I bring to the table.

I wish the next generation had solved this, but I see more tech-bro communication, anti-equality rhetoric and rooms full of men whose organisers do not ask why. Successful founders and investors set the tone. If they decide equality is boring or “woke,” the paper cuts continue, and talented women will find better ways to spend their lives.

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