AD88

Jesper Kouthoofd envisioned living in a one-room apartment without any ­money. But life wanted something different for the Swedish ad-man and ­founder of ­music-tech company Teenage Engineering. We were granted an exclusive ­audience in Kouthoofd’s 18th-century house in Stockholm.

Every company faces some version of the “cold start problem”: How do you get started from nothing? How do you acquire customers? How do you create network effects — where your product or service becomes more valuable to its users as more people use it — that create incentives for even more customers to sign up?