Originally published in A Journal On Audacity, a publication on design, business and everything in between, by EY Doberman.
From an early age, Anna Haupt would sit in cafés observing how people navigated the world around them; how they moved, how they tied their shoes, how elderly people held their walking sticks. As a child, she would also think about objects around her. Being left-handed, she questioned how rulers are designed for right-handed people. “Why not simply make a ruler that you can turn upside down and then, for left-handed people, have the scale running the other way so you don’t have to count backwards?” she points out eagerly.
This natural sense of awareness of life around her would later become a superpower she brought into her professional life. “Intuition is accumulated experience,” she says. “A good designer is an interested person—someone genuinely curious about people and behaviour.”
Haupt has always used her role as a designer to map out the world around her. After co-founding Hövding, the airbag bicycle helmet, she worked for five years in the automotive industry, developing a mobility system for self-driving vehicles in urban environments. Today, she uses her strength as a designer to encourage societal transformation. As an Investment Director at Industrifonden, she strives to bring change from within, often with a focus on business models with a sustainable future.
When worlds collide
As the only investor with a design background, Haupt knows how important her role is. She believes that designers, in general, are needed in more positions across the business world and within executive teams in all types of companies. She believes designers need greater commercial confidence, otherwise there is a risk of only being treated as artists. “Design is a commercially driven profession,” she argues. “Otherwise, one would work as an artisan or pursue something else entirely. At its core, the profession is about understanding the needs of often very large groups of people and creating relevant products and services that enhance quality of life.”
When Haupt co-founded Hövding with Terese Alstin, she had just graduated as a designer. The duo had a clear vision: cyclists needed an invisible helmet. Looking back, however, Haupt believes she was too young to have the pedagogical ability to explain to investors what they were trying to build. She remembers one investor’s response: “We’re not here to bloody save the world—we’re here to bloody sell helmets.” Haupt’s motivation, on the other hand, was that “If we save the world, then we will sell helmets.”
There wasn’t really any contradiction in their goals—they simply wanted to build the journey differently. “Today I would have found it much easier to manage the relationships with the various stakeholders we had—particularly investors—than I did back then,” she says. “I didn’t understand their perspective, and I didn’t think it mattered. There was, quite frankly, an ocean of misunderstandings between Terese and me on one side and our investors on the other.”
The power of perspectives
Haupt stayed at Hövding for ten years and left at the time of the IPO—it was a painful exit. “It wasn’t voluntary,” she reveals. “There were strong personalities involved. Terese and I had lost our majority ownership, and I felt they took Hövding away from me. Today, however, I can see how different their perspective was from mine. I now have a deeper understanding of why they acted as they did. I still believe they made serious mistakes, but I also understand that, partly because of my own uncompromising and young attitude, they felt they had no alternative but to employ a more mainstream CEO.”
Despite having experienced some of the struggles of being an entrepreneur herself, Haupt believes she has learned the practical way. Her biggest learning curve was understanding that to be successful, companies not only need to create product experience, but also product value. This is crucial if you want to endure as a company over time. “You need products that people are actually willing to pay for,” she says. “You need a solid understanding of that.”
The ten-year journey that Haupt experienced as an entrepreneur taught her what it truly means to work relentlessly towards a goal and what it takes to succeed—an important message to the companies she invests in. Haupt stresses the importance of communicating with investors, something she has learned from running Hövding. “The less information you receive as an investor, the more difficult you become,” she says. “So, in order to maintain a good relationship and have investors who don’t interfere too much, you need to keep them continuously informed.”
When Haupt and Alstin were raising funds for Hövding, they almost exclusively met older men. Today, there is greater diversity in both gender and age, as well as greater consideration for female founders. There is also more recognition that female founders still face greater challenges than their male counter parts. “That’s something you need to take into account as an investor,” Haupt says.
User needs as investor advantage
Having a design background also means Haupt brings new perspectives to her role as an investor. Designers are trained to understand their users. That, Haupt would argue, is the very core of any company. Companies have to understand their target audience, their needs, and what they are asking for. “Then you must interpret that insight,” she says. “As designers,we are trained to listen in qualitative interviews: what frustrates people in their everyday lives? What does not work? Which problems can we help solve?”
Design takes that input and transforms it into a solution in the form of a product or service. It involves not only the look and function of products, but also how they should be packaged, priced, and distributed to reach their audience. “Designers, in my experience, are also very good at collaborating with engineers,” Haupt says. “Engineers often approach product development from a more fact-driven standpoint and want evidence for the choices being made. Yet they also tend to respect that designers sometimes arrive at a conclusion about user behaviour based on profes sional intuition. There are moments when one simplyknows: this is how it must be. That intuition should not be underestimated.”
Intuition, in other words, becomes an important tool, according to Haupt. “As a designer, one naturally understands the importance of standing out—not just creating something relevant but also creating something meaningful,” she says, adding that to achieve that, founders and companies must be meticulous about their values. “They must build a brand, a culture, an organization that strives for something greater, so that short-term fluctuations can be justified by a long-term vision and a consistent direction maintained,” she says. “Ultimately, the only way to cut through the noise is to be credible in what you stand for—and to have the courage to stand for something at all.”
“The only way to cut through the noise is to be credible in what you stand for—and to have the courage to stand for something at all.”
Haupt believes that companies often underestimate the importance of design management. “The role of the designer is greater than the design function itself,” she says. “It is not design as decoration that matters; it is design thinking and design management. That strategic mindset is essential to success and a huge strength for a CEO.”
Friction as a beacon
The privilege of being an early-stage venture investor is that it offers hope for the future, Haupt argues. Haupt serves on the board of KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, and gains insight into how future engineers are being educated. She sees countless companies with strong ambitions to help solve the climate crisis, which she believes is the most important challenge for technology and business today.
“Those with relevant solutions will succeed,” she says. “As climate conditions worsen, with rising temperatures, storms, and biodiversity loss, we will inevitably have to engage more deeply and find solutions. I remain hopeful that Sweden has a strong ambition to train engineers capable of addressing these challenges. It requires long-term commitment, perseverance, and patience.”
Haupt is drawn to areas that signal change and the emergence of new positions in the evolving landscape. One such field currently undergoing an involuntary transformation due to climate change, is forestry. Employing tens of thousands of people and contributing billions of euros to the economy each year, forestry is one of Sweden’s most significant export sectors. The stakes are high: stricter environmental regulations, consumer demands for sustainability, and new climate targets are putting intense economic and operational pressure on forestry companies.
“I tend to seek out industries under pressure, because that is where transformation happens.”
“Environmental movements criticize forestry companies, leading to polarized debates, even though all parties ultimately care about the forest,” Haupt says. “I tend to seek out industries under pressure, because that is where transformation happens. That is also what attracted me to the automotive industry in 2016.”
Returning to observation
In a way, Haupt represents that disruption in her way of working. Some days she feels like the black sheep at work. “I often think from a different angle. I also believe a diverse, even slightly unruly group is necessary to do good work,” she says, adding, “I do feel appreciated—most of the time. I’ve also learnt to adapt. It comes down to asking: what is my objective in this situation? Should I push ahead in my own way, or package my message so others understand it?”
To succeed, Haupt argues that business leaders also must embrace change and seek out their inner voices. The more secure and grounded you are in who you are and what you stand for, the easier it is to inspire others. “Anxious leaders who search for answers in others rarely succeed,” she says. Cultural experiences, in her view, are among the best ways for people to find answers within themselves. They prompt reflection: How do I want to live? What drives me? Which values do I want to carry into my work? Leaders with ambitions to build large, successful international companies must understand how to communicate their values, Haupt argues. “It’s important to expose yourself to the potential of being inspired in ways you couldn’t have anticipated.”
When it comes to her own inspiration, Haupt still finds pleasure in sitting in a café, observing people. “Beyond following the news, observing how people move through the city—how they walk, stand, what coffee they order—offers remarkable insight,” she says. “There is so much to absorb. I also love hiking in the mountains and spending time in nature. It reminds me of my own smallness and of what truly matters.”
Words: Jonna Dagliden Hunt
