Norway is not where you would place a venture studio if you were optimising for proximity to capital. The cheque sizes are smaller, the risk appetite is more conservative, and the whole domestic market is roughly the population of Minnesota. Every one of those is a real constraint and we would be lying to say otherwise.
A small market is an honest market
Five and a half million people is not enough to hide a bad product inside. There is no volume of addressable market large enough to carry something people do not actually want. If a Norwegian consumer product is working, it is working because it is good, and you find that out in months rather than years.
The infrastructure is unusually good
Norway has near universal digital identity, banking that clears instantly, and a population entirely comfortable doing serious things on a phone. Payment and identity problems that would eat a quarter elsewhere are not problems here. That is a genuine head start for anything consumer facing.
Building here, operating anywhere
Half our ventures serve Norway specifically. Dishy, Snakke and Avelo only make sense with local knowledge behind them. The other half never touch the Norwegian market at all: our property tax work is Texas and New Jersey, and the trading system is US equities. There is no contradiction in that. Where a company is built and where it operates stopped being the same question some time ago.
The unglamorous part
The winters are long and dark and there is not a great deal else competing for your evening. It sounds like a joke. It is a real input into how much gets finished between October and March.