Stefan Skoglund and the Business of Making a Beginning

Stefan Skoglund wanted somewhere to play guitar. Arvika offered too few opportunities, so he helped make some. While still at upper-secondary school, he joined the group that founded Arvikafestivalen. Before there was an accelerator, an investor panel or a handbook, there was a musician with a fairly practical complaint: the stage he wanted did not yet exist.

“I really wanted to be on stage, like many other organisers,” he recalled. The admission is rather better than a polished origin myth. Ambition here had an instrument attached. Organising created the opportunity to perform, and the work of creating that opportunity became a career of its own.

Today, Skoglund is co-creator and CEO of DigitalWell Ventures, based in Karlstad. He helps build programmes for founders and connections between young companies, advisers, investors and public organisations. It is a considerable distance from finding a gig. Yet the interesting part of his career is how often the same problem returns: someone has an idea, and needs help making the surrounding arrangements.

The practical business of making a beginning

Festival work led Skoglund and Marcus Frödin into training other organisers. Their experience became courses, coaching and books through Universe Imagine. A project could have ended when the audience went home. Instead, its working knowledge became something they could teach.

Their book Arrangera det du vill appeared in 2005. Its title amounts to an invitation to organise what you want. A later edition describes a handbook concerned with both the mechanics of an event and the motivation of the people making it happen. Leadership and planning sit alongside the business of keeping a group moving.

There is an unglamorous generosity in that format. A successful event disappears into the memories of its audience. A useful handbook leaves instructions behind. The reader gets to start a little further along, with someone else's mistakes already worked into the method.

Studieförbundet Vuxenskolan has listed the material for groups learning to plan and carry out their own events, with a leader's guide to support it. The intended outcome is a group actually delivering its idea. The book belongs on the table where the work happens, within reach of whoever has just discovered that enthusiasm requires a schedule.

The factory supplied its own homework

The chocolate business gave that teaching a physical counterpart. Skoglund co-founded Rawchokladfabriken in Arvika with collaborators including confectioner Lovisa Andersson and Frödin. This time an idea had to become a product someone could taste, stock and buy again.

The early work was patient. Reporting from the factory in 2016 described almost a year of experimentation before the team was satisfied with its chocolate. Ingredients were stone-ground for 17 hours before tempering and moulding. A business presentation can be revised in an afternoon; a manufacturing process has its own opinions about speed.

The founders took their products to fairs, gave talks and organised tastings. Retailers grew to include cafés and gift shops as well as the outlets they had initially expected. Learning where a product belongs can be a distinctly social activity. Someone has to try it, understand it and decide there is room for it on a shelf.

For a teacher of entrepreneurship, the appeal is evident. A factory supplies regular examinations. Customers mark the papers. There is little opportunity to hide behind an elegant diagram when the next batch still has to be made.

A daughter edits the founder's story

Then Esther Skoglund had an idea about her father's idea. The result was Pappa och chokladfabriken, a children's book they wrote together, published in 2016 and illustrated by Anneli Blüme Josefsson. Entrepreneurship had acquired a smaller reader and a different narrator.

The story follows a chocolate-loving father who spots an abandoned confectionery factory in Arvika and decides to begin. Based on a true story, it presents the venture from a daughter's perspective. The premise has the advantage of being immediately understandable. Wanting a chocolate factory requires very little explanation to a child.

It also makes an agreeable adjustment to the usual founder biography. The daughter proposed the book. The father became part of its subject. A business that might otherwise be described through production and distribution became an adventure involving a parent, friends and a building with possibilities.

Across these publications, the audience keeps changing. Organisers need a working guide. Children need a story. Someone contemplating a first business needs a beginning that feels possible. Skoglund has worked in each of those forms, carrying practical experience into a language another person might actually use.

Questions became another kind of workshop

His work as a host of Be digital-podden brought other people's experience into the conversation. The programme, associated with Compare and DigitalWell Arena, gave him a setting for exploring how businesses develop in a digital world.

In 2020, he spoke with Futurion CEO Ann-Therese Enarsson about the changing workplace. The discussion asked what skills people would need and what happens as software changes management. It is a revealing choice of topic for someone whose work involves helping others prepare for businesses that are still taking shape.

Another conversation returned to familiar ground. Skoglund interviewed Tickster's Fredrick Berntsson about digital ticketing and a business whose origins were connected with Arvikafestivalen. A festival creates the need to admit an audience. Ticketing turns that need into a product. The conversation followed an ordinary organisational problem into a technology company.

In July 2022, he interviewed Lina Svensberg about Lean Startup, including common mistakes and how the approach applies beyond new businesses. The medium suited the subject: one person asking another to make a method concrete. Listening is useful equipment for an adviser. It allows the founder's actual difficulty to interrupt the prepared explanation.

Building the place where founders meet

DigitalWell Ventures began operating its accelerator in 2021, with roots in DigitalWell Arena and a Swedish-Norwegian outlook. Skoglund's work there expanded the classroom again. Founders could encounter expertise and investment networks through a programme, with people assembled around the needs of a developing company.

Karlstad places the organisation close to Norway, and Oslo has become part of its working geography. DigitalWell Ventures describes a small team in Sweden and Norway, supported by international relationships. Its advertised mentor network spans more than 80 mentors across 18 countries and four continents.

Those numbers describe access to people, rather than a promise about what any individual company will achieve. Their practical value lies in the next conversation: someone who understands a particular market, has wrestled with a similar decision or can ask an awkward question before an investor does.

The organisation also designs startup programmes with partners and provides specific acceleration services. In that sense, Skoglund helps organise the organisers. The work includes creating the conditions under which another person can give useful advice, make an introduction or discover that a founder needs a different kind of help.

A pitch needs somewhere to land

In March 2022, DigitalWell Ventures announced a strategic partnership with A-match, an investor forum rooted in Värmland with a national reach. Eight selected startups would have the opportunity to pitch. Skoglund was among the coaches preparing candidates for the event.

His explanation connected the region's startup activity with its investment community. More active relationships could improve the flow of opportunities for the accelerator, too. The logic was reciprocal: founders need capital, investors need companies worth understanding, and a region benefits when they can find one another.

By November 2024, he was listed at A-match X in Karlstad for a panel on how to invest, or refrain from investing, in early-stage startups. Its agenda included what investors look for and mistakes founders should avoid. The parenthetical possibility of declining an investment gave the title a welcome dose of realism.

“The real amount is probably even higher, these are just the investments we know about.”

Stefan Skoglund, on investment across the wider DigitalWell Arena ecosystem

A 2025 account put known follow-on investment across that wider ecosystem above SEK 155 million. The scope matters: this was a collective figure covering the arena's supported companies. Skoglund's qualification kept the number tied to what had been counted. Money attracts attention; definitions make the attention useful.

The customer gets the last word

Investment is only one route through a company's early difficulties. Skoglund also serves as project manager for ACCESS, a DigitalWell Ventures initiative with DigitalWell Arena and Compare, supported by Vinnova and Region Värmland. Its concern is how startups and public organisations can work together.

The project explores tools, methods and AI-supported expertise for navigating procurement and joint development. It aims to help founders and business advisers understand opportunities without requiring everyone to become a specialist. The recurring ambition is recognisable from the organiser's handbook: make hard-won knowledge available at the moment somebody needs it.

In May 2026, Skoglund was listed alongside sales coach Helena Wiktelius and two startups for a session at Sveriges Innovationsriksdag in Skövde. Its subject was why so few ideas become businesses with early customers. The programme emphasised customer value, sales and the experience of companies securing their first buyers.

That is a fitting question for this particular career. Stages need audiences. Books need readers. Chocolate needs customers. An accelerator must help founders reach people who have reasons to care about what they are building. Skoglund's work has moved through several industries, but keeps returning to the arrangements that make participation possible. Once, he wanted a place to play. These days, he spends much of his time helping somebody else get ready for their turn.