A look at investor and entrepreneur Lars Jensen's life reveals at least one consistent trait: He always does the least safe thing.
Lars Jensen is unlike most people. He has never stayed in the same place in the world for long. He has never sought to be with those who resemble him. He has never been content with just one job. It hasn't been driven by a clichéd self-development advice about "always being on the move," but rather it has come naturally to him to always seek unfamiliar surroundings.
"I don't see it as being unsafe. I am most comfortable in change. I feel best when I'm on my way to a new place. When there is the most change in my life, I am the calmest," says Lars Jensen.
Set out alone
These days, the leading partner in the investment fund Scale Capital is on a short visit to Denmark from his residence in Zug, Switzerland, partly for this interview about how he, the farm boy from Falster, got there.
The first defining event occurred when he was 20 years old. Together with a couple of friends, Lars Jensen had arranged a long trip to Australia. On the day of departure, everyone except Lars Jensen had backed out.
"I didn't care, I just had to go. And being alone, I am really grateful for today," he says.
"In the first five weeks, I felt I learned more about myself and life than I had in the past five years. Suddenly, the farm boy was exposed to city life in Sydney with street performers, beach bums, and drug addicts, and I just thought 'wow!'. I became a doorman at a nightclub across from the Opera House. One night we had some rugby players come in one by one, and they just tore the place apart. The learning in handling those people was immense."
"That trip was an eye-opener for, wow, the world is big, and the world is different. That's when I got hit by the travel bug and thought that life is outside Denmark for me."
What life do you want to live?
For the last 25 years, Lars Jensen has consciously thought: "I need to start with the end".
"I start by asking myself, what do I need to do to live the life I want? For me, it's very much about lifestyle design. It may sound clichéd, but I've had that in mind for the last 25 years. My career has been very driven by what I personally wanted. Where I wanted to live. Who I wanted to be with. What I wanted to experience."
Early in his youth, Lars Jensen put concrete words to his goals. His upbringing on Falster was filled with love and security, but money was tight.
"We really didn't have much money, so my first goal was to become financially independent. Not because of the money, but because of the opportunities it would provide."
A two-year work stay at the Danish consulate in Chicago in 1996 became defining for the then 25-year-old man. Suddenly, Lars Jensen was sitting at the table with highly educated business people and diplomats, whom he had to converse with.
"I came from a working-class family, so the two years in Chicago were an educational journey. I opened my eyes to what you could achieve if you did well and were meticulous with your things. I learned to write completely correct Danish, as the consulate was very traditional, and they did not accept linguistic errors."
Subsequently, he decided to take a HD at Copenhagen Business School, and after a few years in London, an MBA at the renowned Babson F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business in Boston.
"I thought I wanted to rise to those heights. I wanted to be in a place where I could test my leadership skills and gain influence over decisions. That became very important at that time."
Out of the hamster wheel
In 2006, Lars Jensen was hired as a management consultant at KPMG in London. The following year, he joined Saxo Bank in London. His career was on track, and his income was growing. He was well on his way to designing the life he had dreamed of.
Or was he?
One day, Lars Jensen got his hands on the book "The 4-Hour Work Week" by Timothy Ferriss. He read it quickly.
"It's a bit of a silly book, very American, but the idea of designing your own life, being involved in many activities, and generating passive income so that you don't always have to produce, spoke to me. It helped me think that now I need to leave Saxo Bank. Now my corporate career ends."
Lars Jensen felt he had no choice. In his corporate career, he wasted his time on internal politics and paper-pushing between departments.
What if he used 100% of his time trying to create value for customers and society instead?
Not just one project
Returning to Denmark in 2008, Lars Jensen founded the teleconference company TelefonMøder. But he quickly realized that it wasn't enough to satisfy his need for professional challenges. He co-founded two other companies, the internet portal Virksomhedszonen and a chat service, which was acquired by TDC a year later.
If financial independence was the first component in Lars Jensen's life design, the second component became clear to him during that time: Being engaged in several different projects and choosing exciting people to work with.
"I have quite a large bandwidth for what I can handle, and I get bored quickly if I do nothing. It's very stimulating to work on several different things and has been an essential part of my life for the last 10 years."
The passion-driven life
Today, as a leading partner in Scale Capital, Lars Jensen is involved in a number of companies. He is the chairman of the board in some of them, including the Danish tech start-up Airtame, which with over 100 employees is one of Denmark's new, great entrepreneurial success stories.
He can look back on a career where he has always sought to place himself where there were the most opportunities. The most crucial thing hasn't necessarily been what he could personally achieve now and here, but rather where it could lead him.
It hasn't come to him without resistance. Having to build new social networks again and again because he has lived abroad for 15 years is exhausting. Not all his girlfriends over the years have been on board with it. And he has early on decided that he cannot compromise on his own way of life.
"You can't live someone else's life," he says.
Doesn't it get lonely to constantly uproot yourself?
"I am really comfortable in my own company. I love being physically active and mountain biking. But it is lonely if you are not open to meeting others. In Chicago, I joined a social club with beach volleyball and Friday drinks, and it wasn't always the coolest thing, it was just as much to meet people."
The exercise of getting to know new people has now started over in Switzerland, where Lars Jensen and his wife moved last summer. Before making the decision, they looked each other in the eyes and realized that they didn't see much of their busy friends in Denmark anyway, so why not move out again? Down to the mountains in Switzerland and the central location in Europe. Three months later, the choice was made.
Later on the day of this interview, Lars Jensen travels back to their apartment by Lake Aegeri. Back to his home office, where he looks up at the surrounding mountains every morning. Despite hectic workdays with many meetings and quite a bit of travel activity, he always finds time to hike in the mountains or ski in the winter season. If there's plenty of fresh snow and the inbox can wait until late morning, he straps on his skis from the start of the day.
That was the life the young Lars Jensen dreamed of creating.
Lars Jensen in The CEO
MAN IN THE SHIRT
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood" - quote by Theodore Roosevelt in Paris, 1910. In the portrait series "Man in the Shirt," BARONS meets business people who have in common that they have put themselves in play and at risk. Where do they find courage? What is the most important thing they have learned along the way? And what can the rest of us learn from them?
