Viking Venture promotes Ingvild Farstad to Head of Operational Excellence

Well-known and highly respected among the Viking Venture portfolio companies, Ingvild Farstad now takes on a new role as the Head of Operational Excellence. Having built up and led Europe’s best B2B software community over the last years, we are sure Ingvild will take our operational excellence team to the next level. 

Driving growth through practical consulting initiatives

In 2020, Andreas Sandbu introduced our Operational Excellence (OpEx) team with a clear mission: to strengthen the growth of our companies by refining their operations through hands-on consulting projects. These projects are run at no cost to our portfolio companies and have consistently generated substantial value. Taking the helm as the Head of Operational Excellence is Ingvild Farstad, who has been part of the OpEx team the last years. Concurrently, Andreas Sandbu will be transitioning to a new position as Senior Investment Manager. His new focus will be establishing partnerships with promising Nordic business-to-business (B2B) software companies.

Leading and nurturing Viking Venture’s Community

Since joining Viking Venture in 2018, Ingvild has led our Viking Venture community to become the leading B2B software community in Europe. This community serves as a platform for our companies to exchange knowledge and ideas. Our activities encompass a range of initiatives, including regular best practice sessions, an ongoing leadership program, and a specialized CFO academy. Additionally, we organize an annual Viking Day event in Trondheim, where all our management teams gather for a collaborative exchange of ideas, networking, and much fun.

– Being part of the Viking Venture team for the last five years has been such a ride. I entered a world of finance and tech, which I knew very little about, and the learning curve has been steep in so many aspects. Learning and development are important to me, and at Viking Venture, I’m part of a team that always push each other and thrive to get better. Before Viking Venture, I was part of a highly competitive sports environment as a pro hockey player. There are many resemblances to the culture and how we operate at Viking Venture – aiming for big, hairy goals, knowing they come with consequences, working as a team to nail those goals, and celebrating and learning from the experience, says Ingvild Farstad.

What do you look forward to as the Head of Operational Excellence? 

– I’m very excited about the opportunity I have been given at Viking Venture. Since I started at Viking Venture in 2018, I have been fortunate to spend much of my time with our portfolio companies, heading the Viking Community and as part of the OpEx team. It is really inspiring to exchange ideas and knowledge with highly skilled, ambitious, and motivated people. They push our thinking every day, and I look forward to further developing our work with our companies, continues Ingvild.

From Head of Operational Excellence to Senior Investment Manager  

– It’s been great heading up the Operational Excellence team over the last years – and working closely with our portfolio companies to help them scale. Looking back, I’m proud of the more than 20 projects we have conducted across our portfolio on topics such as strategy, pricing, churn reduction, sales and marketing, and post-merger integration. The Operational Excellence team is in the best hands with Ingvild, and I am happy to hand the baton over to her. Equally, I am excited about my new role, focusing more on establishing partnerships with new great Nordic B2B software companies and supporting their growth journey as active owners, says Andreas Sandbu, about changing his role at Viking Venture from Head of Operational Excellence to Senior Investment Manager.