Innovation Hero - Stina Ehrensvärd

For International Women's Day 2021 I am writing about one female innovation hero per day for the week of 8th to 12th of March. Some of them you might have heard of, some of them not but they are all super inspiring in their own way and in their own domain. 

Day 3: Stina Ehrensvärd (LinkedIn Profile)

Day three and it's time for another good friend and super successful innovator / entrepreneur, one that succeeded by "not letting herself be distracted by all the pessimists".

The company she founded together with her husband Jacob (a KTH alumni btw) some 10 years ago is Yubico which today is considered to be the world leader in hardware security keys.

It all started over 10 years ago, when Stina was sent instructions on how to log on to her internet bank account. It was a software based solution that used username and password. Jakob looked over her shoulder and said "If you use that I can hack into your account within 24 hours, the security being so low".

That spurred the idea of something safer, something hardware based, and was the starting point of what was to become the Yubikey, similar to a USB stick in size and shape but with the only functionality of generating a new password every time you log in. And that without being connected to the internet.

But only connecting it to one bank wouldn't fix the bigger problem, so the couple decided that if they were going to create a world standard, they needed to move to where world standards were being created, namely Silicon Valley. The idea being that if they could get Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon as clients, they would reach the whole world. And four of those five had offices in Silicon Valley, in or close to Palo Alto.

So they moved to Palo Alto with the family and Stina started going to conferences.

During one conference she was standing next to a guy on an escalator and took the opportunity to give him one of her keys and an information pack.

Little did she know that the guy had a podcast called Security Now! and the week after the conference he mentioned this super cool security key called the Yubikey. Something someone at Google heard and after having bought a couple of keys online, Google reached out to Yubico and wanted to buy 20 000 units. Which was a joke since the company was a tiny Swedish company, had no presence apart from the family in Palo Alto and hadn't finished setting up their production yet.

But Google trusted them to deliver, and when asked how on earth they dared trust a tiny company with a home office in Palo Atlo, they simply said "because you're local, you are here where we are" and that made all the difference.

Stinas bet paid off, they now have the largest tech companies in the world as their customers and they have created a new world standard for hardware based cyber security.

Another fun story was when Stina was in Washington to speak at a security conference and she got a call from an unknown number, she picked up and the voice said "The President would like to speak to you" which led to a meeting with Barack Obama and a discussion about online security.

In 2016 she was awarded The KTH Grand Prize for her innovation and business success.

Finally, with all this said, Stina is of course a worthy name to put on the list of awesome female innovators, but the main reason she is on MY list is that she is also a wonderful, positive, down to earth nice person.

Every year that we at KTH Innovation have traveled to Silicon Valley with our internationalization program Brighter, Stina was kind enough to come and spend an hour on the first Monday morning with our startups, giving an intro to Silicon Valley and talk about her journey.

We are talking about an executive of a multi-million dollar company, a unicorn, finding the time to bike or walk over to us in our hotels and say hi and speak to just-about-to-start entrepreneurs.

That's very humbling in itself.

She truly proves the point that you don't need to be an ****** to be successful, on the contrary, she is one of the nicest unicorn CEO's I know.

Stina, you are so worth being on the list of five awesome female innovators!