For years, 3M had no idea what to do with it, until one day, another employee, Art Fry, used it to mark pages in his church hymnal. The low-tack glue held his paper slips in place without tearing the pages. And just like that, the idea for the Post-it Note was born.
Today, it’s a billion-dollar product. But it started as a failure, one that was patiently carried, repurposed, and reimagined until it became a success.
TicketCo’s origin story isn’t so different. We never set out to build a ticketing company.
Back in 2012, my co-founder Kaare Bottolfsen and I were working in the restaurant and nightlife industry. At our peak, we ran 22 venues — everything from high-energy nightclubs to busy cafés. We had chefs yelling in the kitchen, 150–200 employees on the payroll, and events happening every single weekend. Tuesdays kicked off with café parties at Contra bar, and by the time we hit Saturday night at Mood — one of Norway’s biggest nightclubs — it was full throttle. Kaare had even started building his own till system to keep things running smoothly, blending his commercial mindset with a love for tech and speed. I, on the other hand, just wanted to bring people together for unforgettable experiences. That was the rhythm: 8am to 4am, no problem.
Somewhere in the middle of that chaos, we came up with the idea to organise a winter festival in Hemsedal. Just for fun, on the side. We booked 1,000 beds in the mountains, lined up some of the biggest artists in Norway, and ran radio ads across the country. It felt big. But when it was time to put tickets on sale, the whole thing ground to a halt.
We were told to send a form — by fax — to the ticketing provider. Or more precisely: the ticketing provider. Back then, ticketing in Norway was basically a monopoly — not because of regulation, but because there simply wasn’t any competition. The form had an error, so we had to resubmit it a week later. Another week gone.
Around the same time, people were returning from the US with their first-generation iPhones. I remember sitting at Contra when a guy walked in with one, and thinking: why are we faxing this when that exists?
So we said: screw it. Let’s build our own ticketing system! Something built for organisers like us, that actually works the way we work. We thought it would be simple. It wasn’t.
So, there we were. Two co-founders with rock-steady jobs in the restaurant and nightlife industry, going high-risk as winter festival organisers — and building our own ticketing solution on top of that.
The festival flopped. Financially, it was a disaster. We lost more money than we even want to remember. Worse than that, we lost face. It was embarrassing. We’d hyped it, gone all in — and when it didn’t work, everyone knew it. I remember walking through Festplassen in the rain, completely deflated. I knew I’d failed. But even in that moment, one thought started forming in the back of my mind: we still had the ticketing solution.
That one actually worked. So I thought — what if we try to sell it? Who would be the easiest target?
My (now wife’s) sister was on the board of a student organisation, and they needed a ticketing tool. She said yes — possibly because she felt sorry for me, or maybe just liked me a little in a friendly way. But when the event came around, the system crashed. Completely. It was a mess.
Still, we kept going. There was something here. We just needed to fix it, and figure it out.
At that point, I made the decision: I quit my job on January 1st, 2013. All in. No backup plan. My mum thought I was insane. “You’ve got friends in the oil industry making millions,” she said. “Why not do something safe and sensible?”
Instead, we applied to Nyskapingsparken — a startup incubator that looked like a cool place to build something new. They rejected us. Said we weren’t innovative enough. We tried again — and got in.
Our first day there was a little less glamorous than expected. Dark hallways, bad coffee. But nice people. And that was enough to get going. I remember thinking: let’s grow out of this place as fast as we can.
They pushed us to sell. Every day, someone would walk by our office and ask, “Did you sell something today?” It drove me nuts. We didn’t even have a finished product — but we were pitching anyway. Setting up customer meetings, doing demos, figuring it out on the fly. We even put up a roll-up banner outside the building just to make the company feel bigger than it was.
Eventually, we brought in a sales coach — not just a seminar, a real coach who could help us build something that worked. And slowly, things started to move.
The meeting room was tiny. No windows. Two chairs. Two phones. One sales coach. I was sweating. Just months earlier, I’d been running clubs and throwing parties. Now I was cold-calling student organisations. It felt like I’d hit rock bottom. But we picked up the phones and made the calls.
Our sales coach changed everything. I used to think sales was all about smooth talk and flashy smiles — charm your way to a deal. But in tech, it’s different. Real sales is about listening. Asking questions. Understanding what’s actually broken before pretending you have a fix.
That shift gave us something we hadn’t had for a while: confidence. These organisations had problems. And for the first time, we believed we might actually help solve them.
Around the same time, Kaare told me to read The Lean Startup. I thought it sounded like Silicon Valley fluff. But I read it — mostly to make him happy — and I’m glad I did. It taught me something I still carry: build fast, learn fast, and don’t waste time perfecting something no one wants. Fail fast. Fix faster.
Our coach challenged us: pick up the phone, cold-call someone, and book a meeting.
Kaare went first. No luck.
Then it was my turn. One call, one meeting booked. It was a tiny student organisation — probably worth five thousand kroner tops — but I got the meeting. And that feeling? Instant high. Confidence through the roof. I wasn’t a loser anymore. I was moving. I was selling. I was part of something again.
That’s when we made it official. I’d be CSO. Kaare would be CEO and CTO.
Not because of some strategy document or late-night boardroom discussion. But because someone had to sell and someone had to build — and we were honest enough to let merit decide.
Besides, Kaare had 100 times more leadership experience than me. I’d led some student groups and organised cruises. He’d run one of Norway’s biggest restaurant chains. He’d built his own tills. The guy knew how to lead and how to ship product. It was obvious. He builds. I sell and support. That’s how we split the roles — and we never looked back.
That one phone call, as small as it was, changed everything. It took us from two guys with a failed event… to two co-founders of something worth building.
Fast forward to February 2022. It’s 5:00 AM. I’m in the basement gym, sleep-deprived and running on fumes.
I crack into the usual warm-up. Squats. Push-ups. Burpees. Normally that’s enough to shake off the fatigue. But not this time.
Because this time, everything’s changed.
I’ve just been appointed CEO of TicketCo.
This was not the plan. Not even close. It was never on my radar. But the brutal facts were in front of me. And the decision had been made.
Since day one, I’d always been number two. I worked shoulder to shoulder with Kaare, deep in the engine room. I was part of all the big decisions. I knew every corner of the business. But I always had a filter. A layer between me and the top.
And I respected that. There can only be one boss. And that boss was Kaare. It was his name on the dotted line. His head on the block.
Until now.
Before we go any further, I should probably say this: This is my very first founder letter.
The idea is to write these quarterly. To reflect, to share, to document. But I don’t want to write polished PR pieces. There are enough of those in the world already.
Instead, I’m going to be mercilessly honest. That’s my promise. And honesty requires being personal, even when it’s embarrassing. Especially then.
Because you can’t talk about real success without talking about failure. And you definitely can’t build trust, within a company or around it, without letting people see behind the curtain.
These letters will be exactly that. Curtain-less.
Now, back to the chaos.
It started with a phone call. The chairman of the board. The message: “The CEO is stepping down. Would you be willing to give it a try?”
Earlier that year, Kaare had made the decision to sell his shares. I don’t know exactly why, but moves like that inevitably send signals — the kind any board has a responsibility to respond to. And they did. That’s how TicketCo and my longtime co-founder ended up parting ways.
“A six-month trial period," the chairman of the board said. Maybe to see what I could do. Maybe just to buy time until they found a “real” CEO. I didn’t ask, but I had the feeling that they wanted me to keep on selling and find some other CEO after 6 months.
What I do remember clearly was the state of things.
We were just emerging from the pandemic. Or rather, stumbling out of it. There was no real strategy for a post-COVID world. It wasn’t normal, but everyone acted like it was. We were stretched thin. Really thin.
We had to let people go. We had to pull out of markets we’d just spent time and money to enter. Our investors were skeptical at best. Our customers were shaken. And all employees had been recruited under the previous CEO.
Who would stay with me? Who would leave? Who could I afford to lose? Who couldn’t I afford to lose?
Every answer felt like a bet.
It wasn’t the first time I had seen things fall apart. I grew up in the shadow of a collapse.
My dad was a founder too — a salmon sausage founder. For years, he was successful. We lived in a big house. He drove a nice car. The neighbours were envious.
He was, according to many, a man ahead of his time. He had big dreams, told even bigger stories, and welcomed people from all over the world into our home. As a kid, that made a huge impression. It gave me an early taste of how exciting — and unpredictable — an entrepreneurial journey could be.
But then things started to slip.
Instead of dealing with reality, he ran from it. He avoided it. Delayed it, until there was no delay left to do.
We lost the house. We packed our things and moved out — with the neighbours watching. I can still feel their eyes on us.
I remember sitting in the car, pulling away with the last of our things in a trailer behind us. That was the house I grew up in. And they just stood there, watching.
That moment etched into me. It carved out this deep, unshakeable truth: failure is not an option.
Success is not a dream. It’s not even a goal. It’s a requirement. No matter the cost.
Before we proceed… a word on the ticketing business. This whole founder letter could easily be about the ticketing industry. And one day, maybe it will. But for now, just a few words.
The market is crowded. You’ve got the legacy giants—slow-moving but deeply embedded. You’ve got the start-ups—scrappy, eager, still figuring out what they want to be. And you’ve got the scale-ups—growing fast, grinding for market share, trying to punch above their weight.
When I took over TicketCo in February 2022, the entire ticketing business was in a deep crisis. Some had closed their hatches during the pandemic, and were just opening up again. Others, like TicketCo, had spent tons of money during lockdown in various attempts to stay open.
Now the world was out of lockdown. Football wasn’t just back on TV, it was back in the stadiums. Full capacity. No distancing. No QR code entrance flows.
And suddenly, everyone needed something from us.
New product demands came flying in. The problem? We’d just spent months building things that only made sense in a COVID world. Now that world was gone, and our roadmap looked painfully outdated.
At the same time, we needed to rebuild trust on every front: Trust from our customers. Trust from our owners. Trust from our own employees.
We had a new CMO (no longer with us) and a CTO (still very much with us), both hired just weeks before my co-founder left. They’d barely unpacked their laptops.
And under the hood, the platform wasn’t looking too great. Over the hood? Also not great. Around that time, we went through a technical due diligence. The verdict was clear: the platform, in its monolithic 2022 form, simply couldn’t scale.
So where do you start when you’re a newly appointed non-tech CEO? You simply have to trust the people around you.
And how do you prioritise when everything is urgent and nothing is ready? How do you decide who to believe, what to fix, and when? How fast can you learn?
I wasn’t walking into this blind. In my former life, which was management in the event and nightlife scene, I had run large budgets and managed big teams. I knew the pressure of HR responsibility. I understood P&L, not just in theory but in practice.
As co-founder and CSO at TicketCo, I knew the company from the inside. I knew our customers, because I’d helped closing many of them myself. I knew our investors, because I’d been part of every funding round. Some of them were even friends and family, and that kind of investor relationship hits differently.
And above all, I had the motivation.
I believed in what we were building. I was already deeply invested — financially, emotionally, personally. I couldn’t afford to fail. And honestly, I couldn’t imagine walking away. Even the slightest thought of quitting got killed the moment I pictured the alternative. What would I do — apply for a normal job? No way. When you set out for a marathon, you finish it. You don’t stop halfway. You cross the line. You succeed. That’s it.
Our owners were pissed. They’d invested in a journey built around key people — which, let’s be honest, is one of the most important investment criteria. And now, one of those people had left. I’m pretty sure most of them thought the money was gone. But then a few reached out. They said I had their full support. That meant the world to me.
One thing I learned in that moment: overcommunicate. So I did. I started acting like little TicketCo was a big corporation — sending monthly newsletters, quarterly reports, and hosting regular update meetings. It didn’t fix everything overnight, but it started to rebuild confidence. Slowly. Steadily.
I also learned something else — something I hadn’t truly understood until I stepped into Kaare’s shoes: just how lonely it is at the top. For the first time, I felt the weight he had been carrying for years. And with that came a new kind of respect. Looking back, I get why he must’ve been pissed at me sometimes — while I was running around making mistakes and doing stupid shit, he was the one holding all the responsibility.
No matter how close you are to your team, your co-founders, your board: At the end of the day, it’s you. The final filter. The last stop. The weight.
And that weight is heavy. The nights get long and sleepless. Stress takes over. Your patience wears thin, even at home. I’d find myself snapping at the kids, mentally checked out while being physically present. I was tired in a way I hadn’t experienced before — not just lack-of-sleep tired, but the kind of tiredness that comes from carrying something alone. And through all of this, I was watching the startup world inflate like crazy. Companies throwing money around like the party would never end. I remember thinking: this has to stop. We need to start making money, not just chasing growth for growth’s sake. That’s when I wrote a piece for the tech start-up magazine Shifter about sustainable growth. And that’s when I started looking for others who felt the same.
And that’s where the Pavilion network became invaluable. To be surrounded by others walking similar paths. To learn that I’d already experienced more chaos in my first founder months than many had in years. To find that I wasn’t crazy for feeling what I felt, or afraid of what I feared.
That kind of support is rare. And essential.
When I’m sharing this first founder’s letter with you, I’ve been CEO at TicketCo for a little more than 1,000 days.
That’s over 1,000 days of steep learning curves, some real frustrations, and a fair number of sleepless nights. But above all, it’s been 1,000 days of great joy and a deep, personal satisfaction in knowing that we’ve turned this ship around.
And I haven’t done that alone.
I’ve had unwavering support from my family, from our board, from our customers and owners, and from the people inside this company. Our employees have stood tall through difficult transitions, through pandemic scars, through change and uncertainty. I’ll never forget that.
And now, it’s time to deliver. To honour that support by taking our rightful place on the podium — not just as a challenger, but as a true contender in the European sports industry.
I’ve also had the pleasure of operating in an industry that, while competitive and fast-moving, is driven by a surprising level of respect and professionalism. At least by most of us.
And while TicketCo may not be in the heart of showbiz, we’re certainly orbiting the spotlight. We’ve carved out a place where we can genuinely help organisers deliver better fan experiences and smoother commercial operations — more effectively than they could before we entered the picture. That’s a privilege, and one we take seriously.
Because our ambition isn’t just to improve what exists. It’s to build the best customer journey in the world — from the first ticket click to the final whistle. Seamless. Insight-driven. Fan-first. That’s the vision driving us forward.
Over these 1,000+ days, we’ve seen significant growth. We’ve started making money, built a healthier and more robust foundation, and created the kind of forward momentum that’s hard to stop once it starts rolling.
I’ve seen untapped talent inside the company grow into strength and leadership. I’ve watched people build their careers at TicketCo—then venturing into new roles and new challenges elsewhere. And I’m proud of both.
I’ve also made friends—many of them.
As host of our Don’t Forget Your Tickets podcast, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and learn from dozens of the sharpest minds in ticketing. Their generosity and insights have enriched me, and I’ve been grateful to share their stories with the wider industry.
Have I made mistakes? Without a doubt. But I believe the right decisions outnumber the wrong ones. And the momentum speaks for itself.
To put it simply: I believe I’ve made a difference. And I’m deeply grateful to have been trusted—and enabled—to do so.
Just like Spencer Silver’s glue, my adventure as a founder didn’t stick the way I thought it would at first. Not even close. But I held onto it. Not because it was perfect, but because something about it felt right. It felt like it could matter.
I didn’t set out to build a tech company. I certainly didn’t plan to become a CEO. But I kept going. I kept showing up. And over time, it started to make sense — not just as a product, but as a path. One I could walk. One I could believe in.
More than a thousand days in, I’m still here. Still learning. Still leading. Still sticking with it.
Because sometimes the glue that almost didn’t stick is exactly what holds everything together.
Let’s stay in touch
I regularly share thoughts on technology, club operations, and what it really takes to build better matchday experiences.
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn — whether you're curious, want to share your perspective, or simply have a passion for improving how clubs work off the pitch.
Carl-Erik Moberg
Co-founder & CEO, TicketCo