Cover Story
Something in the water
How Jorn Lyseggen grew Meltwater to $100 million in revenue in eight years by focusing on people
By Kristy J. O’Hara
Smart Business Northern California | May 2010
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When Jorn Lyseggen founded Meltwater Group in 2001, he spent the first two years interviewing more than 3,000 people to hire 200.
“My life was really an endless travel from one recruitment to another,” he says. “I traveled all across the world. I did all of the recruitment of the company well into 2006. The reason I did that was I wanted to make sure that the people joining initially, those were the people I would know really well, the people that I knew would be the future managers and the role models and carrying on the culture and the company values as the company was growing. I think that has been an extremely invaluable investment, and I could see that clearly as the company was growing.”
While a lot of new businesses may focus solely on the business plan and meeting financial targets, Lyseggen instead chose to focus primarily on the people side of his business, which delivers business solutions based on search engine technology, cloud computing and biometrics.
“One of the things I’ve always been thinking about in growing our company is management,” the CEO says. “Growth has been linked closely to our ability to attract, train and develop managers. With management, you also create infrastructure to build an organization.”
In order to successfully grow Meltwater, Lyseggen had to hire, coach and train the right people — and sometimes had to make hard decisions, too.
