Together with Claus Rosendal and Jakob Østergaard, I founded SMS PASSCODE A/S in 2004. The idea was simple, but far from mainstream at the time: use the mobile phone — something everyone already carried — as the second factor in two-factor authentication. Today that's a given. Back then, we had to convince the market of it, point by point. Very few believed we could pull it off, not least because of the large global players in the field.

As CEO, I held primary responsibility for internationalisation. It wasn't a theoretical exercise. We competed directly with far larger, global players — RSA, SafeWord, Microsoft — all of whom had market position, capital and name recognition we didn't have. What we could do was move faster, understand the customer's problem better and build the right relationships in each individual market. We were diligent and hands-on, and we carried solid knowledge from the Conecto years about how a vendor motivates its partners.

A go-to-market model built to compete with the giants

We built the business through a global partner and distribution network rather than a large, expensive sales organisation. That meant we could have a presence — through our own activities or strong local partners — across the Nordics, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the UK, Australia, Dubai and the US, without scaling costs at the pace a traditional enterprise sales model would have required. That strategy was what made it possible for a Danish company to reach customers in more than 50 countries.

The growth wasn't just about geography. It was about building a product and an organisation that could support hundreds of partnerships and thousands of customers — without losing the technical quality and security standard the whole business was built on. At the time of sale, we had around 60 employees and a partner ecosystem that reached far beyond what that headcount alone would suggest.

Exit — and where the technology ended up

In 2016, SMS PASSCODE was sold to CensorNet. In 2018, the technology became part of Entrust — today one of the world's largest players in identity and security solutions. Seeing a technology we built out of a small Danish office end up as part of the infrastructure global companies rely on today is one of the things I'm proudest of from that period.

What I took with me as CEO through those years wasn't just experience in product development or sales. It was an understanding of how to scale something internationally without capital or a name behind you — and how to compete with far bigger players by being more focused, not better funded.

— David Hald