Hi, I’m Sven.Â
Building companies is my thing.
For more than 20 years, I helped build and grow seven startups across online marketing, advertising, lead generation, and creator monetization.
I joined when the important questions were still unanswered. Who is the customer? What should we build? How will it reach the market? Why will people pay for it?
I led product teams, brought new ideas to market, and built customer-acquisition systems that turned attention into growth. Several of those companies were acquired. Each acquisition took me back into corporate life. Three times, I left to build again.
Building companies became my thing. I learned how to turn an idea into something people understand, trust, and buy—and how to make strong decisions with limited time, money, and certainty.
That is the company-building experience behind Midlife Founder Academy and the experience I now bring to every founder I work with.
Why I built Midlife Founder Academy
When I left corporate for the third time, I still wanted to build. I wanted the decisions and the company to be mine, and I wanted a business that gave me more control over my life than the career I had left.
As I looked at the online-business world, much of the advice I found came from people in their 20s and 30s whose goal was to maximize everything: more revenue, more reach, more scale, faster. Their starting point and priorities were completely different from mine.
I had spent more than 20 years building companies and leading teams. I was leaving corporate because I wanted to work differently. There was no point in replacing the corporate hamster wheel with an online-business hamster wheel.
Too many of the businesses I saw were optimized until the person behind them almost disappeared. The same offers, the same scripts, the same pressure tactics, and the same obsession with growth. They may make money, yet they have very little personality, integrity, or anything they genuinely stand for.
I wanted to build a serious and profitable business with a spine. A business that reflects your experience, standards, opinions, and personality. One that makes good money while giving you a life you actually want to live.
That is why I built Midlife Founder Academy.
It is for experienced people who still have ambition and want to build something of their own without becoming someone they do not respect in the process.
In midlife, you are deciding far more than how to make money. You are deciding what the next part of your working life stands for, how you want to live, and where you belong.
I am a lot more than just your LinkedIn coach.
In a senior corporate role, you were rarely expected to figure everything out alone. You could pick up the phone and call someone in sales, marketing, product, finance, or operations. There were people around you who knew the company, understood the problem, and could give you an experienced opinion quickly.
When you build your own business, all of that disappears. Every decision comes back to you, and it becomes very easy to spend days second-guessing yourself.
ChatGPT can organize your thoughts and make almost any idea sound reasonable. That can be useful. At some point, you need a person who understands your business, has real judgment, and is willing to tell you when your thinking is wrong.
Inside the Academy, I build your brand and client-acquisition strategy with you. I also become the person you call when you need to think through a business question.
That question might be about your offer, pricing, a potential client, a partnership, a difficult sales conversation, whether to change direction, or whether you are simply losing confidence in a decision that was right in the first place.
Because I know your business, I can give you a clear answer without starting from the beginning every time. I can challenge the assumption behind the question, point out what you may be missing, and help you decide what to do next.
That is why the Academy is private and one-on-one. I work with only a limited number of founders so I can stay close to the business and give you the honest, experienced feedback you need while the decision still matters.
