Photos: Jean Lapin

In an exclusive discussion at EQT Ventures and EQT Growths’ Scale Summit, Alexander Skarsgård and FNDR founder James Vincent explored how Lukas Matsson — Skarsgård’s character in Succession — mirrors the complexities embodied by real-life founders.

At our recent Scale Summit in Stockholm, EQT Ventures Operating Partner Polly Barnes invited Alexander Skarsgård, star of HBO’s smash-hit Succession, and FNDR founder and CEO, James Vincent, to join her for an exclusive discussion on the opportunities and challenges in crafting a founder persona. Drawing on Alexander’s experience playing billionaire tech mogul Lukas Matsson and James’ time working with visionary founders such as Steve Jobs and Brian Chesky, the session explored the parallels between character-acting and leading a fast-growing company, and looked at what it means to be a great founder now that the space has somewhat moved on from the “cult of the founder”.

Here, Polly reflects on the session and the lessons it can provide the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Shortly after Alexander Skarsgård, star of HBO’s smash-hit Succession, joined James and me on stage at this year’s EQT Ventures Scale Summit, we played the audience, all founders themselves, a short clip from the show.

In the clip, Roman, one of the Roy siblings vying to succeed their father, has been dispatched to the Lake Como mansion of Swedish tech billionaire Lukas Matsson to try and salvage a deal for the Roys’ acquisition of Matsson’s company GoJo. Matsson, however, has different ideas, deploying — and performing — a number of subtle and not-so-subtle tactics to unnerve Roman.

Outlier-founder or founder-outlier?

Matsson isn’t representative of most founders — at least not any that we work with. However, he clearly demonstrates the stereotypical traits that we typically associate with a certain type of celebrity founder. The lessons we wanted to unpack for off-screen founders were how and why those traits manifest and develop, and how to strike a balance between authenticity and performativity.

Over the course of the show, Matsson’s outlier status morphs into something else. He becomes more erratic, obsessed purely, as Alexander sees it, with nothing but winning, with ‘the deal’. To hammer this home, during negotiation scenes Alexander deployed a unique method: ‘I would pretend I was a five year old. As soon as I got bored, where normal human adults would politely pretend to listen, I was like, I’m not going to do that. If I’m bored, I’m going to show that I’m bored.’ When Roman flies to Lake Como to meet him, Matsson openly admits to illegally sharing provocative Tweets to manipulate the share price of GoJo. It’s behaviour that wouldn’t be out of place in the biographies of certain real-life headline-grabbing founders.

The issue here, of course, isn’t being an outlier. It’s seeing yourself as an outlier above all else, and failing to understand that the qualities that got you where you are aren’t necessarily the qualities that will grow and sustain your business. It’s also assuming that what makes you an outlier is eccentric behaviour rather than uniqueness of thought and approach. That eccentricity, Alexander says, ‘can be difficult to translate into being a CEO of a company with 500 employees, being in boardroom meetings, talking to HR.’ And while (spoiler alert) Matsson ends the show even wealthier than he was before, Alexander believes his future isn’t as bright as his bank balance might suggest. ‘I think he’s ultimately quite lonely, and I don’t see how he’s going to run a big corporation long-term. I don’t think he has the qualities of a good leader.’

The importance of someone saying ‘no’

While it was writers behind Matsson’s gradual mutation, for real-life founders, James says, the usual driver is a lack of anybody brave enough to tell you no. You start to believe your own hype. ‘With Matsson, he had created this bubble around him. He wasn’t having any realistic conversations with anybody anymore. Nobody was having realistic conversations with him. So he’d lost the sense of reality of his own.’

This is something James has seen up close, where real-life figures, left unchecked, can spiral and start making poor decisions. ‘It’s a shame because it undermines the awesome contributions they made.’

Founders have to adapt and grow. They have to play a different character, James says. ‘When Steve came back [to Apple], he had moved from simply an outlier, which is clearly not enough, to being much more the charismatic CEO he recognized he needed to build a team. He recognized he needed to teach them how to be great. And it wasn’t just him that was great.’

James’s hope moving forward is that Alexander has played ‘one of the last’ founders of Matsson’s ilk, providing a ‘warning sign’ to new founders. He’s hopeful, he says, that the ‘whatever I say goes’ culture, the ‘cult of the founder’ is somewhat over. In a world where funding is harder to come by and AI is changing everything, ‘it’s not going to be enough just to be a mad, zany outlier.’

The right persona for the right time

Matsson’s status as an outlier, Alexander says, was baked in from the start. ‘When I first spoke with Jesse [Armstrong, the show’s creator], he told me “there’s this tech billionaire, and he’s the polar opposite of the Roy family. He’s not from a family, it’s not a legacy, he’s kind of a lone ranger and culturally different.”’

So much of this is communicated through his outfits. In the clip we watched, one of the first things you notice is how Matsson’s tracksuit bottoms and t-shirt contrast with Roman’s tailored shirt and suit trousers. From the Zuckerberg hoodie to the Jobs turtleneck, even Sam Bankman-Fried’s board-shorts, the sartorial choices of maverick founders have become something of a joke both inside and outside the industry. And as much as it’s now a bit clichéd, it is a statement: I am an outlier.

As Alexander sees it, Matsson is no different. His outfits differentiate him not just from the Roys but from the wider Swedish tech scene and its ‘normcore tech look’. Ahead of the first negotiation scene with the Roys, ‘we tried all these different outfits, and a lot of them were a bit flashy and I felt like, no, I think it’d be fun to go in a different direction. To kind of project that he doesn’t care, though of course he does.’ He ended up doing the scene in the clothes he’d shown up to set in and they never looked back.

Throughout the series, Matsson adopts different personas to influence different members of the Roy family. He’ll go from ‘vulnerable and personal and standoffish at times, and then aloof’, says Alexander, in order to create an opportunity to get in between the feuding siblings. Again, this isn’t condoning the behaviour but there’s a lesson there about stepping into the right character for the right situation.

At risk of getting too meta, what Alexander did to create Matsson’s character is exactly what Matsson himself does: projecting a persona to achieve the goals his business needed. Alexander knew the character would appear half-baked dressed in standard billionaire attire. It’s those small details that make the difference. Afterall, this is Succession — a show which famously hired a ‘wealth consultant’ to ensure the Roy’s billionaire lifestyle was accurate down to the last diamond.

Likewise, Matsson knows that by positioning himself as a disruptor, he’ll unsettle the Roys. Throwing the other side ‘off kilter’ is a negotiating tactic James recognised from founders he’s worked with. It’s here, however, that performance stops being enough. Founders, says James, need to constantly be ‘self aware of where you’re at.’ Steve Jobs, for example, would put people off by ‘asking for the unaskable’ and refusing to back down. That’s only possible when you have the leverage and expertise to do so, as Jobs did after he’d been kicked out of Apple. He went away and ‘created NeXT, which had the software that he knew Apple needed in order to bind it all together, which [eventually] became OS.’ He rejoined and the rest, of course, is history.