Christian von Koenigsegg is the 50-year-old whose company Koenigsegg builds perhaps the world’s most distinguished super sports cars in Ängelholm.
It’s about his life dream this summer talk is about.
His entrepreneurship journey.
Exactly at that word, you start sweating on your back: should it be another entrepreneurial summer talk – from an almost patented script about an outsider who after a difficult start and 14-hour days manages to convince everyone – like a Maverick in “Top Gun”.
And that is usually told in healthy corporate bullshit terms with a light American accent.
The program really begins with the 20-year-old starting his beloved car company without resources and experience – and after a few deep setbacks (where his father goes in and saves everything) reaches the goal of his dreams.
There is no darkness hereneither in the story nor in his son’s music, which he proudly plays, and nothing is new to the inmates.
At the same time, it is impossible to defend himself against his passion for cars – where it all started with his father Jesko taking him to the cinema as a six-year-old to see the animated Norwegian film Flåklypa Grand Prix, where Reodor Fälgen built a race car.
Christian von Koenigsegg began to dream, and build.
He returns several times to the fact that he always goes to the bottom with everything and builds at his own discretion – from scratch. Maybe it’s that quality that makes him completely lack the boyish hay hay attitude that is so common in the sports car industry.
He feels friendly. Kind.
Only once does the air vibrate with emotion, when he tells in a hoarse voice about a close friend and co-worker who died of cancer last year.
But he omits what made him “Koenigsegg” with the whole Swedish people a decade ago. He then led a group that would buy the crisis-ridden national treasure Saab Automobile in Trollhättan. Everything was interrupted at the last second during a great tumult.
It had been interesting to hear about his well-documented fears of becoming a nationally known Saab CEO, about getting to know that he was just the one who fronted in the Saab purchase – and that the one who actually controlled and had the money was an unknown American named Angie Fabela.
Most interesting would have been to hear how it feels to actually be forced to give up something very big, and what it does to one, as a human being.
Read more about this year’s summer talker and more texts by Jonas Fröberg.