norway
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Knut Eliassen
Knut Eliassen is a Norwegian-American snowboarder turned marketing executive who serves as Chief Marketing Officer at Nitro Snowboards. Born in Minneapolis to a Norwegian father and a Minnesotan mother, he won a USASA national boardercross title at 15, moved to Norway at 16, and rode professionally for Nitro while completing a business degree at Handelshoyskolen BI. He joined Nitro in 2005 as a rider and rep, became the brand's global team manager, and worked his way up through sports marketing, marketing director, and VP of global marketing roles before being named CMO in 2025. Based in Salt Lake City, he oversees brand, media, social, video, and team departments for Nitro and L1 Outerwear, has produced and appeared in snowboard films including Hyped!, Boom, The Bad Seeds, and the documentary 28 Winters, and hosts Nitro's ten-part Learn To Snowboard tutorial series. His stated goal is simple: get more people onto snowboards.
Erik Bakstad
Erik Bakstad is the CEO and co-founder of Ardoq, an Oslo-based SaaS company reinventing enterprise architecture for the digital enterprise. A developer and software architect by training, he spent the company's first six years as CTO before moving into product leadership and, in February 2021, the CEO seat. Under his watch Ardoq raised a $125 million Series D, earned repeat placement in Gartner's Magic Quadrant, and now serves global brands such as ExxonMobil, MUFG, and Primark. A self-described former hockey player turned geek, Bakstad is a recognized voice on the intersection of enterprise architecture and AI.
Thomas C. Holst
Thomas C. Holst is a Norwegian-American business architect, investor, and entrepreneur who built Huddly - a Norwegian deep tech computer vision company - from a four-person startup into a publicly listed global enterprise with offices in Oslo, Palo Alto, London, Austin, Washington, and Bangalore. With a career spanning management consulting (A.T. Kearney), private equity (Reiten & Co, Orkla Finance), and deep tech venture building, he has collaborated with Amazon, Intel, Microsoft, Google, and Zoom. After departing Huddly, he co-founded Northscaler - a B2B tech venture firm connecting Nordic startups with global corporations - and became a Partner at ICON Asset Management AG in 2024.
Sondre Rasch
Sondre Rasch is the Norwegian co-founder and CEO of SafetyWing, a Y Combinator-backed insurtech building a global social safety net for remote workers and digital nomads. Starting from a teenage web hosting business run through an online video game community, he studied economics at NHH Bergen, served as a sniper in the Norwegian Army, advised the Norwegian government on social policy, and co-founded Superside before launching SafetyWing in 2018. SafetyWing has raised $46.6M (including a $35M Series B in 2022) and generates over $34M in annual revenue serving tens of thousands of customers across 180+ countries. His ultimate ambition is to build 'a country on the internet' - a software-based welfare system and digital nation called Plumia.
Dilawar Mahmood
Dilawar Mahmood is a machine learning engineer at ZeroEntropy (YC W25) in San Francisco, best known for four years at Apple where he optimized on-device models for Siri and Spotlight - work he once presented directly to Tim Cook at the Steve Jobs Theater. A Norwegian-educated engineer who left a comfortable career track to attend the Recurse Center and rediscover what programming actually feels like, he builds distributed ML frameworks in his spare time and is on record hating vibe coding.