Title: CEO
Company: Humly
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Overtime: When he’s not solving the next problem for the hybrid workplace, you’ll find him on the slopes downhill skiing (or mountain biking when it’s warm), occasionally fitting in a video game if there’s time.
Why You Need to Know Him: With Humly’s innovations, you don't need to think about how the technology works—Karlsson’s team focuses on the human side of technology.
Anders Karlsson is doing big things for the hybrid world. Under his lead in its almost four-year journey, Humly has kept an ear to the ground and a foot on the pedal to bring people some of the solutions they need most in the evolving workplace.
While Karlsson has always been into technology—whether it was computers or cell phones—a leader in Pro AV wasn’t what he necessarily aspired to become. “I started off as an entrepreneur,” Karlsson said. “As soon as I was 18 and could legally start a company in Sweden, I did that.”
After a few startups and trying it out, he turned to Pro AV, right? Wrong. “I'm actually trained in the legal profession—I started off on the road to become a lawyer. I guess I was inspired by the TV shows,” Karlsson recollected with a laugh.
Initially, he set out to be a defense lawyer or prosecutor, but quickly turned to intellectual property law—and learned it wasn’t like the TV shows. “It's very interesting questions some of the times, but it's also just a lot of meticulous checking of agreements and a lot of repetitive work,” Karlsson said. “That did not really suit me well with my profile.”
Luckily, especially for Humly, Karlsson made the choice to cut ties with the legal profession. “I think it was a little bit by accident at first,” he recalled. “I was approached by an IT company looking for a CTO, and they knew about my experience in running a couple of businesses. I went into that and that grew. I ended up in a situation where I had to make a choice: What do I think is most interesting?”
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t law. Though Humly started in 2020—just months before the COVID-19 pandemic struck—its roots can be traced back almost 15 years prior.
Karlsson had an IT consulting business on the side even while practicing law, so technology was always part of the plan. Around 2007, he and his team began working on room scheduling software that led to screensharing technology, which they licensed to third-party vendors. Roughly a decade later, he realized all those components should be one platform, and the idea of Humly was born.
Of course, a global pandemic is certainly going to hinder getting your name out there. “Our whole four-to-six-month plan was out the window,” Karlsson said. “We had a really hard time talking to anyone. People were concerned with their own things. The benefit, of course, is it became a top-of-mind issue at the C-level of many organizations because when we planned this out, we were pushing a hybrid way of working.”
Karlsson said Humly was able to stay ahead of the curve because the company tends to do things differently. “We’re trying to be a role model in this segment and focusing on the human side of things in the world of technology, so to speak. For us, it's a lot about the design and the intuitive experience, but also the confidence—or the calm—that comes from things just working, being secure, and easily able to scale,” he said.
What advice does Karlsson impart on the future wave of Pro AV? “With all that is going on with AI today, it's going to be more important than ever to focus on the creativity side and actually provide solutions to end customers that focus on the experience,” he offered. “Because you can deliver technology and you can deliver an experience. In the best scenario, you want to use the technology to create an experience.”
