About the Author

I failed my way forward.

Jens-Jakob Sandgreen (JJ) was born in Ilulissat, Greenland, in 1988. Much of the business experience behind this book comes from Greenland, a market many readers rarely have the opportunity to see from the inside. His work has since taken him between Greenland, Denmark, and the United States.

He has never sold a startup. His experience is not built on one big exit, but on developing products, solutions, and companies for private- and public-sector clients through companies of his own.

In December 2009, at the age of 21, he co-founded the media company TiuTiu ApS in Nuuk. Its main product was a free weekly newspaper distributed to households across the city. He had given the company one financial year to prove that it could turn a profit. If it could not, he would begin his university education. At the end of the financial year, the bookkeeper presented a grand total of 156 DKK (≈ $24) in profit.

The amount was modest. The signal around the company pointed the other way. Greenland's largest supermarket at the time wanted more center-spread ads every week, and the Government of Greenland wanted to move its regular job ads to the weekly paper as quickly as possible. He no longer had to do all the chasing. Some of the country's largest clients began asking the company to deliver more.

He chose one more year as a founder and put university on hold. What looked like a temporary postponement became the decision that set the direction for his future.

At its peak, TiuTiu had 32 people on the payroll. Six or seven worked in the office, while most were newspaper distributors. The company grew, met fierce price competition, and later went bankrupt.

The bankruptcy ended the company. It did not end his interest in building.

Between 2014 and 2019, his company Let It Snow ApS developed 42 software products and platforms for iOS, Android, and the web. His own international products included Reply, a messaging app in which each new message replaced the one before it. At its peak, around 20,000 messages a day were sent through the app.

Another product was Balloon, a collaborative social media platform developed as a startup in New York. Balloon was accepted into the Made in NY Fellowship and operated from an office in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

His own companies, however, account for only one part of the experience behind The Startup Compass. Through product development, advising, project management, and business operations, he has worked inside many other startups and established companies. He has also taken part in public development projects, where something new had to move from idea to use.

The public projects were not startups in the legal sense, and the project managers did not necessarily own what they built. But they often faced a task much like the founder's: turning an unclear need into a solution that could survive its encounter with financial reality, the organization, and the people who were meant to use it.

From December 2019 through the end of 2020, he worked as a business development consultant at Innovation Greenland A/S, now known as Nalik Ventures. There, he assessed and advised founders and established companies, from businesses in Greenland's outlying districts to internationally oriented companies based in Greenland.

The work gave him access to the difference between the company as it is presented to the outside world and the financial and operational conditions that determine what it can actually continue to do. While administering public business relief packages, he also saw how an unexpected crisis can make years of decisions visible in a very short time.

As CEO of Arctic Umiaq Line A/S, he later led a period of transformation in which strategy had to be translated into operations across finance, organization, booking technology, product development, and market testing.

His board work has taken him from some of Greenland's most visible companies to businesses where the product, production, and market still had to be built. He has served on the boards of Air Greenland and Visit Greenland. In 2022, he became chair of Milak Productions and followed the company's development through his board work, from building up production to winning the 2024 Entrepreneurship Award and the King of Denmark's subsequent visit to the company. He also co-founded the entrepreneurs' association Sakkut and later became its chair.

In 2026, he founded Tracey ApS in Denmark. There, he designs and builds products from scratch for clients, while continuing to use his own projects to push new assumptions out into reality.

The Startup Compass is not a collection of his greatest successes. It was written from a working life in which companies have been built, closed, advised, led, and observed from several sides. From the founder's idea to the customer's use. From the project manager's plan to the organization's reality. From what the company says about itself to what its actions and numbers have already made visible.

There is a difference between knowing a company's story and having stood inside it.