Meet Fredrik Munthe | Founder of KLASH

We had the good fortune of connecting with Fredrik Munthe and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Fredrik, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
The thought process behind starting my own business was that I wanted to be free, be my own boss, and with a business of my own, it could become possible to influence the development of an industry. I liked the idea of starting with a blank piece of paper and building something from the ground up. Something that people would love using, that engages people, and I suppose I was willing to take risks and work hard, and from that perspective, entrepreneurship felt like the right way forward.

I graduated with a Master of Science (M.Sc.) in Industrial Engineering and Management from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, and also lived in San Francisco for a few months as part of an exchange program with Stanford and Berkeley universities. In a class of about a hundred students or so, I think it was only me and perhaps one or so more people who took the unconventional decision to not apply for a job.

What should our readers know about your business?
KLASH is a Swedish technology company helping creators in the entertainment industry work faster and better through a combination of cloud-based asset management, collaboration, and feedback. Our customers are mainly in movie production and game development.

Compared to alternative services, you get a studio on KLASH where you can review almost any type of content: moving images, sound, 2D, 3D models, and even real-time live streams. It’s moreover the only platform in the market that brings together dailies/production, post-production, and screening in movie production in one app. You get a sync feature that lets you synchronize the playhead in the timeline between team members in digital meetings, an advanced grade bitmap annotation tool, internal and external chat channels, Slack and Jira integrations, audio linking, and more.

The name KLASH comes from creators with different wills pulling in different directions, or “clashing” with each other. Leading to brilliant creative work.

After 1-2 years of software development, our company name was registered in March 2020, and we launched the first version of the KLASH platform soon afterwards.

One of our first bigger customers was the national broadcaster in Sweden – the Swedish Television (SVT) – where we won a procurement in fierce competition with several international giants in the summer of 2020. With some 2,300 co-workers, the KLASH platform needed functionality in terms of easy user management for large organisations for SVT. With investigative journalism content, literally with danger to people’s lives if the wrong material ends up in the wrong hands, AAA security was a necessity. This was a fairly high mountain to climb for a team of a handful of engineers in Sweden, to say the least.

After successfully onboarding SVT, KLASH continued to grow with some of the biggest names in the industry. Not only in movie production, but also in game development. Among our customers are the BBC, Remedy, Funcom, and Behaviour Interactive, to name a few.

KLASH is a proud member of the Trusted Partner Network, powered by the Motion Picture Association (MPA), and committed to building and supporting a strong community network dedicated to keeping content safe.

It has not been easy. I remember all those days arriving home to family, being physically there but mentally someplace else. We were almost always out of money, sometimes having to secure financing on a month-by-month basis. Financing and talking to investors could mean almost a full-time job. In a team of five, with three developers, a UX designer, and a CEO, that meant that one person had to be responsible for sales and marketing, financing, recruiting, and reporting to the board of directors.

We are most proud of successfully building and launching a platform that is winning customers from alternative services, and that is not only as good, but in many areas even better than our competitors. We did this with a team of five, and with almost no money. Our competitors could allocate hundreds of engineers, and had large sales and marketing muscles. We are also proud of winning customers from all over the world, from a relatively small company in Sweden.

Lessons learned along the way are to raise more capital than what is currently needed, you never know when you run out of money, and you don’t want to have your back against the wall when raising new money. Don’t be surprised if building your product takes twice as long and costs the double amount of money as you originally planned for. Build a team of people who are great in their fields and who complement each other. People who are highly motivated, driven, and are willing to walk the extra mile. Keep your core activities in-house with employed staff that are committed long-term, in our case, software development, operations, sales, and marketing. Our experience is that consultants are usually not so good for start-ups.

Our headquarters are in Stockholm, Sweden, but the team works from all over the world.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I work from both Göteborg, on the west coast of Sweden, and from Stockholm, which is the capital of Sweden and located on the east coast. Here are my favourite spots in each city, and the places I would take you to.

Stockholm
We would hang out on Södermalm, the neighbourhood where I live and our office is located, visit Nacka nature reserve, the alleys of the old town, eat dinner at Riche, and play a game of chess at Svarta Hästen (“The black horse”) in the Stockholm city centre.

Göteborg
Eat lunch at FOLK by Järntorget, hop on a sailing or motor boat that takes us out on the west coast, with an amazing archipelago with thousands of islands, head up north to the island of Marstrand, where we eat dinner at one of the restaurants along the quay, before heading back to Göteborg.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
My shoutout goes to my mum and dad who overwhelmed me with love, my mum told me I gave her grey hair, and for buying me that Commodore 64 where I wrote my first lines of code, I must have been around 9 years old, and for taking me to a computer club with like-minded kids in my hometown Göteborg in Sweden around the same age, sparking my interest in computers and technology.

My uncle and aunt, who were entrepreneurs and made me want to one day have my own company.

My shoutout also goes to my childhood friends, we are a group of friends where several of us have known each other since preschool and remain close friends even to this day, and out if which several became successful artists and entrepreneurs. Opening up my eyes for culture and creativity.

In terms of literature and film, I like biographies and documentaries. Specifically in music and sports. I suppose the plot of the typical music or sport biography was what I was looking for as an entrepreneur; starting with a blank piece of paper, building something from the ground up, the free spirit, the ups and downs, the competition, and being on stage. There are so many I could mention. Out of the top of my head, I come to think about biographies of Patti Smith, David Bowie, and Miles Davis. Among the documentaries, the ones off the top of my head are BBC’s Seven Ages of Rock, Queen: Days of Our Lives, and Ayrton Senna: Beyond The Speed of Sound. From the field of entrepreneurship, Richard Branson’s Losing My Virginity is a must-read, and you should watch Steve Jobs’ “Stay hungry, stay foolish” Stanford speech about a mindset of continuous curiosity, and a willingness to take risks.

Website: https://klash.studio

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/klash_app

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/klash-studio

Twitter: https://x.com/KlashBusiness

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@OfficialKLASHStudio

Image Credits
ALFIERI-Cannes
Anschul Brandt