Christian Lanng is CEO and co-founder of Tradeshift, with the lead responsibility of shaping strategy and vision.
Christian launched Tradeshift in 2010 on the belief that modern business is broken. After leading an initiative within the Danish Government that brought e-business to the 95% of the country, he and his co-founders created Tradeshift to spread what they had learned to every company in the world.
In the short years since then, Tradeshift has become a platform for business interactions among over 150,000 businesses in 190 countries and has opened offices in San Francisco, Copenhagen, London and Amsterdam.
With a background in sociology, then public sector and having already managed a pioneering startup at the age of 19, he brings a disparate but mature range of experiences to the world of business. But it’s from this diverse background that his questioning nature and incisive clarity about the future of business has emerged.
Christian often speaks, writes and is interviewed about the future of business, the future of money, life as an international lean startup and all the topics that are converging in this world. For example, having created one of the first WAP browsers for mobile devices at his first startup, the increasing design shift to mobile first is a logical continuation of that early vision.
Like Michael from Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, the figure that inspired him to become an entrepreneur, his stubbornness and singularity of vision propel the fates of those around him. Or so he likes to think. Either way, as part of the co-founding team, Christian is leading the revolution toward network-powered business.