Olivia Jacobsson is a 27-year-old with a crucial role at this year’s hottest startup in Europe.
Jacobsson works at Lovable, the Swedish vibe coding startup, which in the summer became the fastest-growing software startup ever.
Lots has been written about the 2023-founded Lovable this year, most of it focused on its youthful-looking 34-year-old co-founder and CEO, Anton Osika.
But there are other personnel powering Lovable’s “rocketship”, quietly performing the unglamorous, under-the-hood work that has propelled Lovable to global attention.
One of these is Jacobsson, who has evolved into Lovable’s lynchpin, a kind of Miss Fixit-cum-CEO consigliere, ready to turn her hands to anything the hot startup throws at her.
“No one day has been the same, and it has kind of been like that ever since the start,” says Jacobsson, speaking over video.
“Ever-evolving” role
Since joining Lovable at the start of the year, Jacobsson’s breathless “ever-evolving” bizopps role has included managing people, finance, operations, investor relations, including ensuring staff get equity, helping out with comms and marketing, and leading an office move.
She also recently “brainstormed” ideas with Osika, ahead of a meeting with the Swedish PM and Ursula von Der Leyen, president of the European Commission.
As a rule of thumb, startups, particularly in their early days, require a mucking-in mentality, but the 27-year-old has shown more elasticity than most.
Founded in October 2023 by Osika and Fabian Hedin, now CTO, Lovable leverages GenAI to help people without specialist coding knowledge build apps and websites.
In the summer, it became the fastest-growing software startup in history, reaching $100 million in subscription revenue (on an annualised basis) in just eight months since its launch last November.
$5bn valuation
It was valued at $1.8bn in July this year, after a funding round led by Accel, also involving Creandum and Visionaries Club.
Sweden-born Jacobsson’s CV before joining Lovable is a patchwork of roles, including interning at McKinsey, a spell at a trucking manufacturer, and recruitment and teaching roles.
The self-confessed maths and science nerd switched to startups and tech after being “super inspired” by a speech by Apple co-founder and renowned keynote speaker Steve Wozniak at a tech fair.
At the fair, she also came across another hot Swedish start-up, legal tech firm Legora (then called Leya), where she took a summer placement after being wooed by Legora proclaiming “we’re building the next Spotify”.
At Legora, she was tasked with recruiting engineers, employing a “trick”, whereby she would sift through the winners of a programming Olympiad to find the best candidates.
She says, “Those profiles all seemed to work for one company. And that company was Lovable.
“And I remember going to their website thinking ‘what is this? And why are so many talented engineers working there?’”
Second “non-technical” staff member
A coffee with Osika later, she became Lovable’s second “non-technical” staff member.
Lovable is now a 75-strong outfit, hoping to grow to 100 by the end of the year.
Jacobsson says she is no software ingénue, pointing out that her best grades at university were in Software Engineering, so it hasn’t been too difficult getting up to speed on the tech.
She says: “To me, it hasn’t been starting from scratch what we are building, and I am also very curious, and I ask a lot of questions.
“And we have really helpful people who are really smart and so can explain things in simple ways, which of course helps.”
Privileged role
Given the hype around Lovable, coupled with Osika’s penchant for “cracked” hires (high achievers at work and outside of work, be it in sport, linguistics and other areas), Jacobsson is cognisant that she is in a privileged role, one that others would want.
But she says she doesn’t feel pressure to deliver, just the “immense amount of pressure” mostly from herself.
Lovable is famed for its close-knit workforce, around two-thirds of which are engineers, with staff having lunch and dinner together most days in its Stockholm headquarters.
Echoing what sounds like the company PR line, Jacobsson describes the culture as “unique”, “mission driven”, which is not “fancy pantsy” and has not lost its “scrappiness”.
One “myth” she brings clarity to is Lovable’s shoeless work culture.
As she tells it, Jacobsson helped secure a rental agreement on Lovable’s new, bigger office, given its increasing workforce, relocating from its co-working space.
Identifying a new short-term lease space, with a centrepiece rug, she was concerned that her colleagues might muddy the rug, so she hotfooted it to Ikea to buy everyone slippers.
She says, “It has created a feeling of everyone feeling a bit more relaxed, but it was very practical from the start.”
The future
Amid stiff competition from startup rivals like Replit and AI labs like OpenAI, and investor demands to maintain its stellar growth, there is plenty for Jacobsson to do in the near future, be it helping it with geographical expansion and recruitment.
On Lovable’s future recruitment, she says the startup has previously hired “cowboys”, which she describes as energetic, founder-type people who get things done fast.
Moving forward, she says Lovable is recruiting for more specialist roles, who are “really good at one thing and can focus on that”.
Lovable has become synonymous with startups building on it, but its users also include product managers using Lovable to cut workflow as well as finance and back office teams building internal tools with Lovable.
In total, it has amassed over 2.3m active users and 30,000 paid subscribers.
Jacobsson says Lovable is seeing new use cases each day.
The coming months are likely to be busy for Jacobsson, who has also represented Lovable on stage at conferences, as Lovable looks to marry expansion with expertise.
She adds: “We have customers across the world. We are more and more entering the enterprise segment. We are hiring and levelling up our teams on a global level.”
