yes and podcast July 3, 2026 43 min

Decoding the Tech-Startup Conversation, and What Nobody Tells You About Becoming a Company | Eirin Knoph Larsen

Most work conversations spend half the time pushing back. This one spent all of it building.

My guest is Eirin Knoph Larsen, a lawyer who spent a decade in corporate law before walking into the tech startup Unloc, which also meant learning a whole new language. She came out the other side as Chief of Staff & Legal, got named to the Legal500 GC Powerlist Norway, founded her own fractional practice, Ufficio, and wrote a book about the culture shock along the way: What the f*ck are they talking about? Decoding the tech start-up conversation.

Eirin and I met at the Splash Careers Unconvention, where she moderated the panel I joined, and we've been continuing the conversation ever since.

You can build a product in a weekend, but you can't build a company in a weekend. The moment you become a company, you're suddenly party to everything. Client contracts, a shareholders' agreement, the government, your own employees. Eirin refers to this by the Norwegian word, "selskapslivet," and she frames it as showing up to a party where you're on the hook for more than you realized.

We get into the three things every builder has to answer for at once: product, people, and money. Why legal and business were never actually in conflict. And why answering the tough questions early stops being a brake and starts being an accelerator.

In this episode

  • Why "you can build a product in a weekend, but not a company in a weekend" is the whole game
  • Selskapslivet: the roles you take on the second you become a company, and why each one carries its own responsibility and risk
  • Product, people, and money, and the questions you have to answer across all three at once
  • The translation problem: investors, clients, and your own tech and commercial teams all speaking different languages
  • Complex versus complicated, and why the hard question you skip today compounds tomorrow
  • The 90-day payment terms example, and how one clause ripples through cash flow, salaries, and supplier contracts
  • Why answering these questions early buys you focus and protection instead of slowing you down

A few moments

I circulate around the Norwegian word "selskapslivet." You're suddenly one big party. You're party to the client contracts, you're party to the shareholders' agreement, you're party to being a legal entity where the government suddenly has something to say about how you run your business.

Eirin Knoph Larsen

Complexity is good. That's something we can break down and simplify. But complicated is just making things difficult. It's taking the easy route and saying, nope, it's complicated, we'll get to it later.

Eric Stein-Beldring

Find us

Find Eirin on LinkedIn: larseneirin. Her book is at ufficio.no/book.

Whether you're building your first thing or scaling your fifth, you'll leave with something you can use the next day or talk through with your team. And if you're sitting in this exact spot and you're not sure where to start, write in. I'd love to hear about it.