Alumni Interview: Armando Abrahamsson
Class of 2012 | Years at ISPP: 2010 – 2012
I’ll make this worth your while…
Straight out of high school I knew I wanted to make what the Hedge Fund guys call #@!% money and work on something which would impact millions of people. Almost immediately, I got wrapped up in a pyramid scheme. Being 19 years old, highly driven, and impressionable, I went all out. Half of my classmates who just recently graduated eventually also got wrapped up in this scheme. Looking at you KK (we’re good though, pal).
That failed pretty soon after I ran out of leads. Two weeks later, while I was coming to terms with the fact that I was not going to be a millionaire by the end of the year, a friend told me something which to this day I wish he had not. He’d told me that one could make a quick buck in exporting a car to his country Liberia where cars sold for 2x what they did in Sweden. However, I did not intend on making ONE quick buck but several, so a light bulb went off in my head and not long after, I registered a company domain, took out two credit cards, bought a car, and began shipping it to Liberia. How hard could it be? All I knew is that I saw an arbitrage I could exploit and all I needed to do was to pick up the phone and call some African dealerships.
Having watched YouTube videos of Jordan Belfort’s pitch in Wolf of Wall Street on repeat, I crafted my own and began calling dealerships. The phone bill that month was north of $600, my father wanted to kill me. Somehow despite my questionable understanding of import/export laws and requirements, I managed to buy a car in Stockholm, drive it to the harbour in Gothenburg and export it to Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Do you know where Liberia is? Up until a month before I registered the domain I didn’t either. I did not have a driver’s license but I digress.
Eventually, this epic venture itself failed but by then I’d gotten a taste for entrepreneurship and technology. Having set up a website for taking car orders and a whole customer service backend I was hooked, tech was cool.
I am not going to lie. I am surprised if you read this far. I am sharing my story with you because almost none of the things I planned post-graduation happened. Most of it was much better and much harder than I could imagine. So to hammer home the point, enjoy whatever comes next because you will not be able to anticipate it even when you follow your plan. This journey was only what happened shortly after graduating. I fell down many more rabbit holes which brought me to where I am today.
Today, I head up publishing at Beyond Frames which invests in Virtual reality (VR) and Augmented reality (AR) developers such as Cortopia Studios. Just two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg presented the new VR headset by Facebook and our game with it to showcase its display capabilities.
I believe Virtual Reality is the next big computing platform. Especially in times such as these, supplementing your online interactions with hanging out with friends in virtual reality has shown how important it is for us to overcome the constraints of 2D. The VR industry is just getting started and the industry is growing faster every year. My company focuses on entertainment, but it’s applicable across industries and we are already short on competence in the field.
If you want to make sure you get into an industry that is just now entering the goldilocks zone, virtual reality is it.
To ISPP students, my email address and the door always remains open.
You can reach me at armando.abrahamsson@gmail.com.
Also if you enjoy games check out our latest game it’s pretty awesome!
