The Founders, WHY?

Over the past year, I’ve been on a mission to learn new skills to build and scale my vision-driven business Probotic. I’ve read countless books and talked to experts and business owners all over. And hopefully, during this time, I have gained some knowledge. Yet, despite spending hundreds of hours trying to learn business skills, I feel like I don’t know shit! – and, surprisingly, I love it!

However, trying hard to learn, some things have stuck. Besides learning to build systems and processes for everything in the businesses and try to make them self-sustained, it is the word WHY that holds magic powers for me. And that’s WHY I know that stating, «-I don’t know shit,» can be truly powerful because this allows me to take down my guard and ask all the stupid questions no one else asks. -and that’s when innovation happens.

Making everyone understand the WHY in a process is critical to scaling sustainably, and building a solid understanding of WHY is what I think will bring the most value to my future successes. That’s WHY I’m writing this post – to clarify my drive and motivation for myself, my current and future employees, my partners today and tomorrow, and of course, all other rokters and fish farmers I work with and plan to work with in the future.

WHY passion for salmon farming?

For me, the passion started when I was a kid. All my life, my father and grandfather took me fishing all over Northern Norway, and I got completely obsessed. They had to catch me in from the rivers so I would eat something. The obsession was sometimes unstoppable, and I used all my energy to understand the prey to be better suited to catch them. – Now, I think that I boosted my primal instincts and built a rewarding system where my brain gave me high doses of dopamine every time I was on «the hunt,» regardless if it was fishing for salmon or hunting grouse.

Now in retrospect, learning from a young age fishing and hunting may be the one thing that has tuned my brain to get an extra drive, also in business. This «hunt» addiction has transformed my thinking and made me think ahead and imagine many scenarios autonomously. It may also be why I developed a strong passion and became a visionary. -or it may all be coincidences; who the fuck knows; -right?

But let’s jump back to the WHY Salmon farming; this was not intended to be a post about «the hunt» and dopamine drives, but maybe later I will write about that 😉

My salmon WHY started in my mid-twenties when I worked as a salmon research assistant. For many summers, I spent hundreds of hours underwater in snorkeling gear, floating down rivers in Northern Norway, counting wild salmon and harpooning any escaped farmed salmon we encountered. We also did all kinds of biological projects regarding wild salmon. Truly a time of my life that taught me a lot, even though I didn’t understand the value I was building before years later.

The unique thing about counting salmon was that I interacted closely with the salmon in their habitat over a long period of time in a vide variation of situations.

Let me translate this into a salmon farming language; I experienced hundreds and hundreds of hours studying how salmon react to critical environmental data. And I felt It all on my own body while studying their behavior.

How did they respond to cold water, hot water, sunny days, rainy days, muddy water, clear water, high currents, low currents, deep water, shallow water, wide spaces, narrow spaces, salinity-mixtures sones where the rivers meet the ocean, and visibility disappears completely, shadows, and sounds, all in different mixes and variations, a dynamic mixture of data, all experienced thru hundreds and hundreds of hours being submerged underwater with the salmon.

This is today the data all fish farmers use to tune feeding and decisions on their production. How will the salmon react to the coming conditions, and how should we plan for it?

So having experienced all that «data» from counting thousands of salmons in the rivers, I may have caught a skill or two that I hope to transform into bettering the salmon farming industry. In the years I counted salmon, I continued to stack knowledge and skills about salmon biology, but gradually I was more and more attracted towards learning more about technology.

From Research to salmon farming

After my years working every summer as a research assistant, I started working in the fish farming industry; I had some experience from salmon farming earlier on when I went to «the fisheries school» in Lofoten Islands. -here, I had fish biology as a subject, and we had weekly practices on a fish farm. Also, I worked after school on the salmon slaughter. But let me jump back… – So I started working in fish farming at a service company, where we specialized in inspecting and cleaning fish pen nets. Again, I spent a tremendous amount of time underwater and observing salmon, but now behind a screen, steering robots are doing operational services. Doing these tasks, I saw the same behaviors applied to the farmed salmon as in the rivers. It was interesting to see how the farmed salmon in huge numbers did precisely as I predicted when it started to rain or was getting darker. After all that time I spent with the salmon, I felt I could do more, but I didn’t know what?

The Salmon Escape

During this period in my work career, I sadly experienced a delizing operation going completely wrong, leading to an enormous salmon escape accident, where thousands of salmon fled. Seeing thousands of farmed salmon jumping in that fjord, swimming towards the rivers with wild salmon, made me feel guilty. Guilty for not doing more and guilty for the rivers I knew would face hardships with the escaped salmon coming. Being part of this salmon escape accident was heartbreaking and set a profound mark on me. Whenever I think about it, I still feel guilty. This drives me to contribute as much as possible to prevent it from happening again, and I genuinely don’t want anyone else to feel the same. The company firmly pressed the leader in charge of that specific operation on time, and I don’t think this episode would have happened today. We now have more robust systems and procedures applied in the industry. But that episode still strongly motivates me to build systems and products to prevent salmon escapes in the future.

The Big Step

After years of inspecting and cleaning fish pen nets, I finally connected enough of the dots and understood I could provide more value elsewhere. I understood that stacking all this knowledge I had invested time in had more value elsewhere than what I offered to the Service company. In 2017 I decided to resign and took the most significant step in my career; I started my own business. (this section actually can be an entire blog post cause I probably did everything you possibly can do wrong, but somehow I managed to get going) Also, a massive reason for quitting my job and starting a business was pure frustration with the technical solutions we used for the net cleaning and inspection operations, where I saw tremendous improvement potential. I also was bored to death by the nature of the job itself; sitting for hours doing repetitive work seemed to be something everyone could do, even a robot could do it 😉

And for sure, it was hard to see that our operations negatively affected the salmon. And especially, the net cleaning had a lot of adverse effects -the processes with high-pressure cleaning stressed the salmon, and the wastewater got sucket into the salmon gills.-not something you wish for, Right?

Also if the cleaning where neglected, the salmon got a suboptimal environment with less clean water flushing through. So the cleaning operation had a loop of negative effects on the salmon. So I started with the idea to build a robot that keeps the nets clean all the time, like a robotic vacuum cleaner.

Fast forward -Today

Luckily today, I have learned more and built a better understanding; I firmly believe that fish farming is one of the answers to our global crisis, where a growing population needs more food. (I will write a lot about the reasons later in my blog) And I’m getting continually more excited to be part of that solution. My ambitions continue to grow as I continue stacking on my knowledge and my newborn understanding that value is created by just giving back to others my learnings; -it’s no magic.

Spend your time where it matter most

I must continue learning more skills about salmon production and utilize them to generate value and turn them into healthier and safer salmon. But It’s not just about providing safe and healthy salmon for the salmon itself or the consumers; it’s also about feeding a growing population. And it’s about ethics, our responsibility to do what we can for our fellow species—the salmon, and the importance of spending our time where it matters most. I have most skills around salmon, so this is where I feel I can contribute the most. -and doing just that is important!

The Rokter

The Rokter is the name of my investment and consulting company, overseeing my portfolio companies and projects. The name Rokter is my variant of the Norwegian word, «røkter»; a name for a fish farmer. The Rokter AS is involved in multiple companies I am proud to be part of today. And I am honored to learn from the incredible teams in my companies and partners who are passionate about creating positive change in the world.

I am working on manifesting my goals over to others to speed up the improvements for the salmon farming industry and bring it to the next level, providing safer and healthier salmon and promoting a more sustainable future for everyone.

In conclusion, maximizing and sharing my skills with as many others as possible drives me and is becoming my new «hunt,» and this is what I will continue to concentrate my time and efforts on for the upcoming years. Hopefully, I soon get to a point where we see some payoff in turn of solutions and products that improve the days for fish farmers and the salmon; at least, I will try my best to deliver on that.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my first-ever «personal» blog post.

I hope you will understand better what drives me, WHY safe and healthy salmon farming matters to me, and WHY it should also matter to you. -If not, stay tuned, and I am sure you will get there in my next blog post 😉

Have a great weekend to you all 😀