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Norway start-up founder in multi-million sell-out

Norwegian start-up entrepreneur Magnus Jepson has sold WooThemes, his Wordpress template company, for a rumoured price of around $50m (400m Norwegian kroner) making him an instant multi-millionaire..

Published: 22 May 2015 00:47 CEST

Norway start-up founder in multi-million sell-out

The WooThemes team celebrating the sale. Photo: WooThemes

The company has been bought by Automattic, the company behind WordPress, in a cash and shares deal, and Jepson and his partner Mark Forrester are expected to continue working on developing their market for WordPress themes.

“It's a good deal,” Jepson told Stavanger Aftonbladet newspaper, “But it is in the agreement that we should not go public with the sums involved.”

Jepson began as a web designer using WordPress to make simple websites in 2007, but soon moved on to designing plug-ins for the platform, in 2011 developing a tool called WooCommerce, which allows users to turn WordPress sites into online shops.

According to Jepson, WooCommerce is now used by one in four online shops worldwide.

Announcing the deal on his blog, Jepson said that he had had “an incredible ride” and had never expected “the rocket-propelled voyage into the self-hosted eCommerce unknown that lay ahead” when he started the company in 2008.

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Why you'll soon be able to set up a company in Spain with just €1 rather than €3,000

How you can start a business in Spain for just €1. Photo: Javier Soriano/AFP

Currently, you must have to have a minimum of €3,000 to form a Limited Company in Spain, but if passed, the new bill will require you to only have €1, allowing the process to be completed electronically in just 10 days.

By doing this, the law includes measures to diversify sources of financing and promote non-bank financing, on which the majority of companies depend.

The bill’s main objective is to remove obstacles in the creation of companies in Spain.

The draft bill also looks at expanding activities for which you won’t need to obtain a license and promotes the use of electronic invoicing between companies and the self-employed, which will contribute to the digitisation of business activities.

Another aspect that the bill covers are ways to support financing for business growth, such as venture capital and crowdfunding platforms.

The Vice President and Minister of Economy and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, has indicated that this is one of the “most important” structural reforms of the Recovery and Resilience Plan which Spain submitted to the EU, and is aimed at “improving the performance and productivity of companies, as well as job creation “.

Defaults are one of the main problems that threaten business solvency for many Spanish companies because invoices are often not paid by the maximum legal term of 60 days. This problem particularly affects the self-employed, who allow large companies to take much longer to pay invoices for fear of losing more work or damaging relationships in the future.

For this reason, they do not usually demand legal compensations such as recovery costs or indemnities, even though it puts pressure on their margins.

To combat the wide non-compliance with this maximum period between companies, the new bill also suggests an incentive system for meeting payment deadlines and implementing electronic invoicing.

Together with the Startups Law and digital nomad visa, which the government also recently proposed, it aims to promote entrepreneurship and tackle the problems faced by Spanish companies, which makes it difficult for them to grow, go international or restructure debt.

READ ALSO: Tax cuts and special visas: Spain’s new law to attract foreign startups and digital nomads

Spain ranks only number 30 out of 190 in the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ report in terms of business climate, behind many other EU countries.

The bill is expected to reach the Congress of Deputies at the end of this year and if passed, will come into force in 2022.

COMPARE: Could Spain become the best country in the EU for digital nomads?

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