Rasmus Mortensen is unusual.
In more ways than one.
The 36-year-old entrepreneur has invented a machine that, in his own words, can revolutionize the food industry. And there may be something to the conversation.
The customers already include large, worldwide groups. Several prominent names have invested in Rasmus Mortensen’s company, Lyras, and the number of employees has grown to over 70.
Incidentally, these are the same employees that Rasmus Mortensen hopes to turn into millionaires. Each and every one. They have been offered employee shares at a bargain price as an “extra carrot to create something together,” as the director says.
Or rather: The former director.
Because when Rasmus Mortensen is unusual in more than one sense, it is not only linked to his unique invention. I also refer to the decision he recently made.
The decision to hand over the directorship of the company he has built from the ground up.
Rasmus Mortensen, the man behind Lyras. And now former CEO.
PR photo: Lyras.
As an owner-manager, it can be difficult to know when to let go of the reins in your heart child. History is littered with examples of someone hanging around far too long. And where the decision ultimately turned ugly.
Perhaps because the decision to pass on the baton requires a good deal of self-awareness. And without recognition, no action. It is your business, you have to understand.
Often it is built on thousands of hours of toil, sacrifice and deprivation, and who better to drive it than he or she who knows it inside out, right to the core and out to the deepest nooks and crannies?
But then there is Rasmus Mortensen.
The owner-manager, for whom nice director titles mean nothing. In fact, since the beginning, he has worked to make himself redundant, he told Nordjuyske back in 2022, and now he finally succeeded.
What is Lyras?
- During his last year of engineering education, Rasmus Mortensen developed a technology where ultraviolet light is used to replace the otherwise energy-intensive facilities that the dairy industry uses today for pasteurization.
- Belief in his unique product made Rasmus Mortensen drop out of the studio and found what is today Lyras.
- A company that has raised over 100 million kroner in investments, landed customers all over the world and has over 70 employees on the payroll.
- The sustainable pasteurization plant that Rasmus Mortensen has invented uses only a fraction of the energy and water compared to traditional pasteurization, because heating and cooling of milk, for example, becomes redundant when using ultraviolet light.
- Rasmus Mortensen owns 48 percent of Lyras. The owners also include the Bagger-Sørensen family and the brothers Lars and Peter Colding-Kristensen.
The point of it all is that Rasmus Mortensen’s early realization – and that he has now acted on it together with his board – not only means that his child at heart will have better conditions to grow and become a world success.
It also means that, as the newly appointed Chief Vision Officer, he is allowed to deal with something that is far more valuable and rewarding to him than what an all-consuming chief executive job entails.
In this way, Rasmus Mortensen is an exponent of a new mindset, which to a large extent shapes and drives the younger generations on the labor market. Namely that prestige and fancy titles that you can decorate your business card with are not decisive.
What is crucial is that there is a meaning to the work you do. The feeling of doing something that energizes you – not drains you of it.
In Rasmus Mortensen’s case, to make a real difference to the climate.
How pretentious and naive it is, someone will say. How liberating, I say.
2024-04-09 04:01:03
#unusual #37yearold #learn #directors