Homepage of

Henrik Johnson

aka Mauritz Persson

Congratulation, you found the "easter egg" in the homepage. This photo is actually not taken by a camera but taken put putting my head in a scanner. I took it while making my first ever web page because I needed a picture and didn't have a camera available. It came out great though which is why I still use it.

About me

The beginning

The photo taken for my ID during the military. I can totally see this guy holding up a 7-Eleven.

I was born in 1973 and grew up in the small Swedish town Karlskoga. I left there 3 days after graduating high school where I studied electronics for 3 years at Bergslagsskolan.

Before that though a monumental moment in my childhood was when I at the age of 10 got my first computer. A Commodore 64 which I completely fell in love with and which started an obsession in trying to learn as much as posible on how it worked... An obsession that have only in part abated now even though the computers have changed during the years the facination with their inner workings have not dissapeared. My first stop after leaving the town I grew up were in the military service where I served 12 months as an electrician and I can honestly say in retrospect that that is a year of my life that I want back. As some of my friends in Sweden know I hold nothing except the highest distain for anything military.

Me and the gang at Chalmers. Counting from left to right: Jorgen, me, Peter, Stefan and Jerker.

Going to school

After my military service I managed to get my first job at AB Tore J Hedback where I worked for the summer helping to administrate their UNIX workstations and develop CAD solutions. A job I continued doing off and on for the next couple of years. After that I was off to Gothenburg where I started attending Electro engineering at Chalmers University of Technology. It was also around this time that I started to suspect that there might be more to life than just computers (Not to say computers aren't important).

During this time I also started my first company Underscore AB which was originally just a way for me to be able to earn a little bit of money and still keep my student funding.

At school I met a great bunch of guys which I spent a lot of time eating pizza and pretending to study with for quite some time.

While at Chalmers I also met up with another group of people who seemed to agree on the fact that you should probably be able to make some money on this "new" internet thing (Which was just starting to reach the mainstream at the time in Sweden) and after some carefull consideration we started a company working with it which was GlobeCom (In 2005 GlobeCom was bought by Bahnhof Internet and has ceased to be a separate corporate entity).

I started working full time with GlobeCom somewhere around 1995 which was my second year at Chalmers. This unfortunately did affect my studies eventually and I never managed to graduate from Chalmers. In the end I finished around 3 out of 4 and a half years of full studies... But I did it in 6 years and then they stopped sending me mail. To my defence though before I started with the GlobeCom project I was on target with my studies. It was while starting with GlobeCom I got my nickname Mauritz to distinguish me from one of the other partners called Henrik Johansson.

Around this time I also picked up another hobby which is inline skating. Something I am still passionate about and I've been more or less involved in trying to get people to do more recently in part with the good people at Inlines.Net.

Our first boardmeeting in new offices with GlobeCom. From left to right: Janne, me, Tobias, Henrik

Going to work

Initially, as with all startups, it was rough in the beginning. And it took a long time before we could get by on our incomes reliable. All the time everyone I knew was adament about that I really needed to finish my studies no matter what. And there was a lot of strife and hardship getting GlobeCom off the ground. But in retrospect I don't regret a second of it, because I made some of the best friends I've known during the process and I came out the other end with a lot of experience in real life. Something you just do not get from a regular College education.

As we started getting off the ground with GlobeCom I moved away from pure ISP and website building into being a regular computer consultant. This is also what I've been spending most of my professional life doing since this time. I have been working in a lot of different industries and locations. From finance and telecom to tourism. From Singapore and Greece to Los Angeles.

In 1998 I spent a year in Athens, Greece working for a local mobile phone operator. By the time I was going back to Sweden, everyone I knew had pretty much moved from Gothenburg to Stockholm... And so did I, because that was where all the work was. And this is also where I ended up staying until 2002 when I finally left GlobeCom, mainly because I felt like I needed to try something else having worked with the same company for 7-8 years (Depending on when you count I started for GlobeCom).

Working for the man

After I stopped working for GlobeCom I got my first "real" job. At the age of 29 I for the first time wasn't at least partially my own boss. I went to work for the small cell phone operator Spinbox AB and it was quite a large change for me at least. Before this I had started on a small project that would change my life considerably in a year or two though. During a previous project I worked on at PPM. I needed a tool for querying Oracle databases and started on a program called TOra. By the time I started at Spinbox I had started selling this application over the internet and it brought me pretty much as much money as my regular day job salary.

During this time I also really fell in love with the city Stockholm and even bought my own appartment. That was not to last though. In the spring of 2003 I was contacted by the company Quest Software which basically wondered if I wouldn't mind selling a competing product to their product Toad and come working for them. Basically they made me an offer I couldn't refuse and I was off again. This time the destination was southern California.

View of Laguna Beach, you can almost make out my house in the middle here (My house is just behind those trees by the arrow).

Crossing the pond

In february 2004 I made the leap of moving from the comforts of home to join Quest Software in the city of Irvine just south of Los Angeles. After moving around a bit I finally found my new home in the city of Laguna Beach where I now live 5 minutes walking distance from the beach and am loving every minute of it.

To be continued...