Ste­fanía Bjar­ney Ólafs­dót­tir

"Women Should Be Exactly How They Want to Be"

Stefanía Bjarney Ólafsdóttir, CEO and co-founder of the Icelandic innovation company Avo, was 35 weeks pregnant when we met at Arion Bank headquarters. We postponed our meeting slightly so she could let her two-and-a-half-year-old child sleep longer at home.

After years of racing through the innovation world, family now competes for first place in Stefanía's life – and the competition with work is constant and fierce, making it difficult to slow down.

"My friends tell me I should pause work and focus on the final stages of pregnancy. But when you have such passion for your work – and enjoy what you do so much – it's difficult to step away from the office."

Entrepreneurial Drive in Her Genes

Stefanía is educated as a mathematician and philosopher with a flourishing career in innovation. Before founding Avo, she worked at DeCODE and QuizUp.

"I didn't want to go into finance, where many mathematicians went, but rather into something more creative."

She didn't necessarily dream of starting her own company.

"Starting a company wasn't a goal in itself, but I inherently have a deep need to fix things I find inefficient. Both my grandfathers were self-employed and had great passion for what they did. Like them, I've always had energy and drive, along with a desire to change what I find frustrating or unfair. And I struggle to follow rules I disagree with."

Experience at QuizUp Sparked Avo

Stefanía led the analytics department at QuizUp, which designed a digital quiz game where users worldwide could test their knowledge. Many readers likely remember this venture that gained significant attention at the time.

"There I worked extensively with the marketing and product development teams to improve the user experience. We wanted to better understand user groups and use data to make informed decisions."

However, "maintaining data quality," as Stefanía puts it, proved extremely challenging, and in that challenge lay the seed for Avo.

"After my time at QuizUp, I interviewed countless product managers and developers, including those at large companies like Airbnb and Spotify, and all these talented people were struggling with the same problems. We got the idea to build a solution that could work for everyone, rather than having each company fighting this battle internally, each in their own corner."

Today, well-known companies worldwide do business with Avo: Adobe, Fender, Ikea, Rocket Mortgage, Moody's.

"Our software helps them ensure that the data they use internally is reliable."

Rewarding to Help Others Take Flight

But how did securing initial funding go? And what guided your decisions there?

"I wanted to seek foreign capital because I wanted knowledge with the money," says Stefanía. They took money from funds specializing in developer tools and data infrastructure. She wanted to go where the expertise and specialists were. "There are probably more potential customers and investors in our field per square meter in San Francisco than in all of Iceland," she says with a smile.

Things really started moving when they became the first – and still only – Icelandic company to participate in Y Combinator, a renowned startup accelerator in Silicon Valley, and subsequently secured funding from world-famous investors who have also invested in leading developer solutions like Anthropic, Stripe, Vercel and PagerDuty as well as consumer solutions like Airbnb, TikTok and Slack.

"There are so many idealistic people in California. The first question there is often: How can I help? It's rewarding to lift others up and help them take flight, and that mindset really shapes the atmosphere in Silicon Valley."

Stefanía had one foot in California since 2016, but COVID largely brought them back to Iceland.

Blazing Trails and Being a "Real Woman"

Stefanía says she has sometimes wondered what drives her most. On one hand, it's certainly what was mentioned earlier: the desire to solve difficult problems and thereby try to improve the world. On the other hand, it's the responsibility of being a role model: being a CEO and founder of a high-tech company who happens to also be a woman.

"When I had my daughter two and a half years ago, for example, I knew only one other woman who was also a CEO and founder of a venture-backed company on an international scale who had had a child."

This resulted in Stefanía postponing having children for a long time. It took her a long time to overcome the mindset that it would be irresponsible toward shareholders to become pregnant and potentially need to step away from work temporarily due to a difficult pregnancy or demanding first year with a child. In the end, everything worked out well, but she says it depends on having good "partners," both at home and at work. "It was a wonderful time. My Ólöf Bjarney was with me a lot at the office during the first year, thanks to my husband who took most of the parental leave and brought her to me every three hours for breastfeeding. He gave me a lot of room to be a good mother while still driving Avo forward. Mom guilt was still so strong that I took all the night wakings during the first year." Alongside this, Stefanía's co-founder caught all the balls she needed to throw away during this time. "It's important to surround yourself with smart, driven, and strong people." Stefanía subsequently heard from many women who thanked her for sharing this on Instagram and providing inspiration – proving that it's possible to run a company while having a small child.

"The world is always telling women how they should be," Stefanía continues. "But most of it is just nonsense. For example, women are always being told what they should be interested in – but many women find no resonance in such messages. They even convince themselves that certain interests aren't 'feminine' and therefore feel like they're not real women and won't be able to identify with other women. But that's obviously not true. Women are just as diverse as the entire human spectrum." Undoubtedly part of Stefanía's drive comes from there: from the need to blaze the trail.

"In California, I always dressed in jeans, t-shirts, sneakers, and a cap. I absolutely didn't want to dress according to the stereotype of a woman because then I felt like I wouldn't be taken seriously. That focusing on appearance diminished my brain and reduced my credibility. There's some truth to that. Just like in Silicon Valley, nobody takes a person in a suit seriously. But it's okay to enjoy having beautiful hair or wearing nice clothes. You can be feminine but also a mathematician and CEO of a tech company."

Important to Choose Advice Carefully

Do you have any advice for young women who might be in the same position you were once – in the midst of laying the groundwork for a new company?

"I have a favorite piece of advice and then two well-connected mantras that I use a lot. The best advice I've received is to carefully choose which advice I follow."

"You want to surround yourself with people who have previously done similar things to what you're dealing with. You want to seek advice from as many people as possible, but then it's your job to filter out the advice that best serves you. You can't mix everything together, or you'll just get some mediocre middle ground. That's the best advice: listen to all advice but only follow what suits your situation at this point in time – most advisors simply don't have the complete picture."

"The first mantra is: It never gets easier, you just go faster."

"This comes from a conversation I had with Patrick Collison, founder of Stripe, and originally refers to cycling. The reason I find this important is that it can kill your fighting spirit to think that things will someday get easier. New challenges always arise, and it's not constructive to assume that 'once I solve this task, it will be smooth sailing.' Instead, we build up muscle and thick skin along the way, and things that seemed difficult a year ago seem easily solvable today. It doesn't mean we cruise through it; we just go faster up the hill that was terribly difficult a year ago."

"The other mantra is: Enjoy the burn."

"This is a good continuation of the cycling analogy and the hill. Annie Mist described this so well once. When she's pushing herself, she reminds herself to enjoy the burn in her muscles because it means she's growing them. That's exactly what I use too. When things are difficult, I think, 'enjoy going through this period, you're learning something very important here.' So the next time I go up this hill, I'll go faster."