The useful number in the Lenus story is not €50 million, though that is the number that traveled. It is 70/30. Bertram Thorslund uses it to describe how a leader should divide the labor of strategy: 70 percent making the plan, 30 percent communicating it. The ratio sounds lopsided only until a startup becomes a company, the company opens offices across an ocean, and the founder discovers that an idea can be perfectly clear in Copenhagen and land differently in New York.
Thorslund has spent a decade making that discovery in public. He founded Lenus in Copenhagen in 2016, the same year he completed a master's degree in economics and business administration at Copenhagen Business School. His thesis won the school's HBH Troubleshooter Prize. Before Lenus, he had worked in student sales roles at IBM. The path looks tidy in retrospect: analytical training, a large technology company, then a software business of his own. The actual work was messier and more revealing. He had to learn when restraint creates speed, when culture needs translation, and when a founder's old strengths become a company's new limits.
The years before the big number
Lenus gives independent fitness and nutrition coaches a software platform and operational support for running their businesses online. Coaches handle their client relationships and expertise; the company supplies infrastructure around administration, planning, communication and growth. The model puts Lenus one layer behind the public-facing professional. Its product is partly technology and partly leverage.
That positioning shaped Thorslund's early discipline. Lenus grew for years without significant institutional financing. He later summarized the company's operating philosophy in a phrase that deserves to survive the pitch deck: “nail it before we scale it.” It is less a slogan than a sequence. Prove that the product works. Protect the culture that made it work. Add fuel only after the engine can use it.
In 2020, Lenus brought in a group of experienced Danish founders and operators, including Jakob Jønck and Rasmus Ingerslev. The relationships mattered beyond capital. Thorslund has called both men important sparring partners as his own management job expanded. He also credits Lenus's people partners with giving him unusually direct feedback. The pattern is easy to miss beneath the funding headlines: the young chief executive deliberately installed people around him who had already seen versions of the movie.
Then came the acceleration. In 2021, EQT Ventures led a €50 million Series A, reported at the time as Denmark's largest. Lenus had roughly 220 employees and operations in Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the United Kingdom. The capital had named assignments: develop the platform, recruit, and enter the United States. New York and Los Angeles were next.
The round made the company easier to describe and harder to run. Money compresses a story into a single event; organizations expand one hire, one market and one misunderstanding at a time. By 2022, Thorslund was talking about a workforce approaching 500 people from about 60 nationalities. The small group that could once settle strategy around a table had become a network of offices across Europe and the United States.
A flat hierarchy needs an interpreter
Thorslund moved his operating base to New York while continuing to lead Lenus globally. The relocation placed him inside the market the company was trying to understand, but it also made an abstract leadership problem concrete. Copenhagen and New York did not assign the same meaning to hierarchy. In Denmark, a relatively flat organization could feel familiar. In New York, Thorslund found he had to spend more time establishing trust and explaining why fewer visible status barriers were valuable.
This was not a matter of exporting Danish manners. It was a lesson in translation. A company can copy its org chart to another country in seconds; shared assumptions travel slowly. The founder's task becomes noticing what everyone at headquarters stopped noticing years ago, then naming it clearly enough that a new office can choose it rather than merely inherit it.
Distance complicated visibility too. European offices had been a short flight from Copenhagen. New York introduced a seven-hour gap with parts of the company. Thorslund responded with more digital meetings and a commitment to keep visiting offices, supported by cofounders who traveled as well. “I strongly believe in visibility in leadership,” he has said. It is a practical sentence. At international scale, being seen is not vanity; it is maintenance.
The same instinct appears in a small onboarding story told by a Lenus colleague. Thorslund asked him not to execute during his first month. Listen first, map how teams connect, earn trust, then decide where intervention will matter. For a company associated with speed, it is a telling instruction. Motion and progress are different categories. Sometimes the fastest operator in the room is the one willing to delay the first move.
When the job keeps the title but changes the work
At the beginning, a founder can carry context personally. He knows why a feature exists, which candidate almost joined, what a customer meant by an offhand complaint, and which compromise was supposed to be temporary. Scale turns that memory into a liability if it remains trapped in one person. Thorslund's 70/30 rule is his answer.
The communication correction
The point is not the arithmetic. The point is budgeting enough time for understanding.
He once framed the bad version as 99 hours making a plan and one hour explaining it. The improved version spends 70 hours on the plan and 30 on communication. Repetition, in this view, is not evidence that the first message failed. It is part of how a message becomes shared operating knowledge. A board chairman's reminder stayed with him: the receiver defines the message.
This is the second education of Bertram Thorslund. The first produced a prize-winning thesis and gave him tools for analysis. The second happened while the unit of management kept changing: first his own work, then a small team, then managers, then leaders with deeper functional experience than his own. He describes approaching the expansion with an open and learning mindset. That phrase can sound generic until paired with the mechanisms: board-level sparring, people partners, deliberate feedback, recurring communication and visible presence.
Lenus added another DKK 200 million in 2023 from a group that included Denmark's EIFO and 3Shape founders Tais Clausen and Nikolaj Deichmann. That year the company won the TECH category at Denmark's EY Entrepreneur Of The Year awards. In 2024, Thorslund was named to Berlingske's Talent 100, while Lenus continued its American expansion with Miami joining a footprint that already stretched from New York to Los Angeles.
Awards and new offices mark distance traveled. Thorslund's stated milestone reveals the distance he still sees: one million people active on the Lenus platform at the same time. He has said the company remains early in its journey, despite the valuation and capital. The aspiration is useful because it keeps the funding round in its proper place. A round is an input. An office is a node. Neither is the finish line.
His connections tell a parallel story. Early colleagues Christian Høeg, Kristoffer Dorph, Sebastian Colsted and Theodor Lindekaer appear across Lenus's founding account. Experienced builders Jønck and Ingerslev became sounding boards. Institutional investors arrived only after the model had years behind it. The network expanded in layers, much like the company: peers close to the original problem, mentors familiar with scale, then capital built for acceleration.
Sequence is a strategy
There is a portable operating system inside Thorslund's story. Start with a problem specific enough to organize years of work. Refuse to confuse funding with validation. Build the foundation before acceleration makes every crack more expensive. When geography expands, translate culture instead of assuming it is universal. When headcount expands, replace proximity with deliberate communication. When the founder's job expands, place experienced truth-tellers nearby.
None of those moves is cinematic. Together they explain how a founder can remain useful while his company repeatedly outgrows the version he learned to lead. Thorslund's central project is Lenus. His quieter project has been redesigning his own role at roughly the same pace.
The big round will remain the easy headline. The more durable idea is smaller and available to any operator: know what deserves to move fast, know what must be ready first, and leave enough time to make sure everyone else heard the same plan.