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Meet Jeanette Söderlund

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Today we’d like to introduce you to Jeanette Söderlund.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Jeanette. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
The journey that has taken me to where I am today probably didn’t begin where you’d think. How does one go from law school in Stockholm and end up an author and consultant, working remotely for 8+ years on the other side of the globe? Here’s how that happened:

After graduating law school, I was pretty certain that working in a law firm environment in Stockholm really wasn’t for me, so when I randomly got accepted to an internship position in LA (which was a place I never really aimed to end up in at all) I figured “well, why the hell not”.

After that, I worked for a while for an intellectual property consultants bureau in Stockholm and through that got introduced to the world of domain names, something that is closely related to trademark rights but for some reason is very briefly mentioned in law school (if it’s even mentioned at all). So, I decided to write a book about it, to guide brand owners through it in an easy to understand way so that they can protect their rights online in a better way. The idea got picked up by one of Sweden’s biggest publishers in legal literature – Norstedts Juridik (nowadays Wolter Kluwfers), and I co-wrote the book with another Swedish attorney, Malin Edmar.

A few years later, when I was living in California again, I managed to pitch the idea for an international version of the book, which got picked up by Thomson Reuters/Sweet & Maxwell in the UK. We rewrote the book to fit an international audience, and one year later also wrote a second international edition of the book. None of these things would have just fallen in my lap or been offered to me out of the blue – they were all a result of simply taking own initiatives and reaching out to people myself, something that I’ve also kept doing ever since. I encourage everyone to try it if you’re unhappy with where you’re currently at.

Starting my own consultancy business here in the US, together with the world of domain names, was what eventually brought my attention to the 2014 launch of 1000+ new domain name extensions to the internet. I reached out to the team behind one of them, Dot GLOBAL, since the idea of enabling anyone to “go global” aligned well with my beliefs and I ended up joining them a few months later. The years with Dot GLOBAL was a journey that included a ton of travel and 100% further remote work over the course of 5 years until the business got acquired. A few months after the acquisition, I gave birth to my son and just being able to be home with him during those first couple of months was beyond valuable. Somehow the timing worked out perfectly. When the baby was three months old (no such thing as paid maternity leave when you’re self-employed) I joined a new venture together with a small remote team, lead by the founder of Dot GLOBAL, and we’ve been working on Desktop.com ever since. Desktop.com is a tool that lets both individuals and teams better organize and manage web-based tools and resources. It also improves the way teams collaborate online, something that I’m passionate about as I’ve experienced first-hand how being able to work from anywhere has greatly improved my quality of life.

Has it been a smooth road?
The beauty of being responsible for your own time and work is also the biggest challenge. You have to find a way to navigate the balance of freedom and productivity, something that has to be done even when “life” happens (and god knows it happens..).

So I’ve definitely had a few episodes where that felt like a real challenge and put me under enormous amounts of stress, but at the end of the day, I’m such a firm believer that this way of living is the right option for me. The important thing is to know yourself and how your own energy ebbs and flows during the day – to give an example: are you the most productive in the morning, mid-day or late at night? Plan your tasks accordingly. Make lists to take things out of your head and to gain perspective. I am, for instance, an early bird. My energy and focus is way better in the early morning than it is late afternoon, so 5am zoom meetings with Europe actually fits me pretty well.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
At Desktop.com, which is my primary focus these days, we’re truly living what we preach. We’re a fully remote and global team and even though we are only a handful of people in the core team, we’re spread out over both Europe, America and Australia.

What Desktop.com does is to provide a way to:

– Create one or several workspaces, or as we call them: desktops.
– Add or drag-and-drop links, bookmarks and apps into your desktop of choice.
– Explore new and helpful web apps in our integrated app store with more than 1900+ apps in it at the moment.
– Organize links into folders, tag them and sort them. Never again scroll through your never ending lists of old bookmarks, search for a lost link in various chat threads or have it saved on the wrong device.
– Share folders, apps or entire desktops with your family (hello easier life and home management), friends (planning a trip or a wedding, for instance?) or colleagues
– Utilize Single-Sign-On and MFA for both convenience and security.
– Clean up your own phone or laptop with everything neatly organized and always accessible under one single icon on your home screen/desktop. Just like that, you’re fully device-independent.
– And much much more to come! Development team is working LONG hours

I love the fact that we’re on a solid path to really help people with getting the most out of all the amazing web tools out there. No need for a complex, bulky system that takes up too much space or require advanced IT skills. You don’t have to settle for one single app to do it all, use ’em all. Reap all the benefits! But do it in a smart way so that your digital environment doesn’t become cluttered, a source of stress and causes you to spend unnecessary time finding what you need when you need it. That’s where Desktop.com comes in. When things are easy and in order, you can spend more time being creative, and when things are accessible from anywhere anytime, you’re free to plan how you spend your time in a different way.

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
Well, I think everyone agrees that we’ll see more and more work being done remotely. The same thing applies to schools/education and our personal lives as well.

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