IT Life: Shifting To A Long Term Plan

Christian Lanng is CEO & Co-Founder of Tradeshift., a web-based business network and free invoicing platform, which started in 2010. He started his first company at the age of 19.

What has been your favourite project so far?
Building Tradeshift into the global company that it is today. We provide the world’s largest, free open network for companies to connect, find and do business. Our open app development platform also allows users to bring any number of business processes online.

Open source tools

What tech were you involved with ten years ago?
PHP and Drupal

What tech do you expect to be using in ten years’ time?
I believe machine learning will be very dominant.

Who’s your tech hero?
Elon Musk, Tesla. I would have loved to have come up with the idea to build an electric car as it will have a major impact on the world long term. And I think what Elon Musk managed to do with Tesla was to make electric cars sexy and make them something that everybody wants.

Who’s your tech villain?
Anybody who doesn’t promote interoperability and the free flow of information.

What’s your favourite technology ever made? Which do you use most?
Favorite: Internet
Most used: Internet and communication tools like Skype, Go-to-Meeting and Fusion. These have been invaluable for us as we have offices and employees in San Francisco, Copenhagen, London, Suzhou and beyond. These tools really help us all stay connected and to get the work done that we need.

Long term vision

Apart from your own, which company do you admire most and why?
SpaceX. They are daring to build something with a long term return and it is bold and crazy.

What’s the greatest challenge for an IT company/department today?
To not get caught up in the short term. You need to build big long term solutions

To Cloud or not to Cloud?
An obvious one – Cloud! Tradeshift is a 100 percent cloud-based platform which allows us to provide transparency, and real time insight to our customers so they can run all their business processes efficiently.

What did you want to be when you were a child?
I always wanted to be an inventor as I love solving problems by creating new solutions. I’m able to fulfil that dream through my entrepreneurial endeavours. I think both of these roles, inventor and entrepreneur, are very much driven by creativity.

How did those tech companies get their names?