Hampus Jakobsson

Who they are

Hampus Jakobsson is a co-founding partner at Pale Blue Dot VC — previously built The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), a mobile UI company acquired by BlackBerry for $150 million, and founded Brisk Enterprise, a sales productivity company.

Person

Hampus studied Pharmaceutical Sciences at Uppsala University before switching direction to an M.Sc. in Engineering at Lund University, graduating in 2004 — an early signal that he follows curiosity over convention. He spent time at Novartis as a QA Specialist, then pivoted hard into mobile tech as Founder and CEO of The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), a mobile UI company whose software shipped on over 500 million devices and sold to BlackBerry for $150 million in 2010. Post-BlackBerry, where he held an M&A Director role for EMEA, he founded Brisk Enterprise in 2012, a sales productivity company, then moved into early-stage investing — first as an angel, then at BlueYard — before co-founding Pale Blue Dot in 2020 when it launched as a seed-stage climate tech VC with an initial ~€80M fund. He sits on the board of AutoUncle (since 2011) and holds a board role at Minc, the Malmö startup incubator. The through-line is a founder who exited hardware-adjacent consumer tech, got pulled into capital allocation, and eventually built a fund around a conviction that climate is the only market that matters. He writes annual year-in-review essays at hajak.medium.com covering investing, personal growth, and climate, and speaks regularly — Good Future Podcast, MCJ Capital's Inevitable podcast, SOSV Climate Tech Summit, SuperReturn Venture in Berlin — always framing climate not as a niche but as the default lens for all entrepreneurship. In 2025 he started writing a book about how people become who they are.

Company

The Target company claims describe a Palo Alto-based neocloud AI compute startup called PaleBlueDot AI — co-founded in 2024 by Jonathan Zhu and unrelated to Hampus Jakobsson's Pale Blue Dot VC fund based in Malmö/Europe. Because all company_air claims attach to that different entity and not to Pale Blue Dot VC, the fund's own recent developments cannot be drawn from these claims.

How they likely show up

Career arc from pharma QA → mobile tech founder → angel → VC GP → climate-focused fund co-founder → book author → suggests he iterates his entire identity, not just his role; he's unlikely to stay in any lane that no longer interests him.
Founded TAT, Brisk Enterprise, and Pale Blue Dot across three distinct decades → high agency; he builds new things rather than optimising existing ones.
Annual year-in-review essays on Medium, regular podcast appearances, conference talks at MCJ, SOSV, SuperReturn → comfortable being publicly reflective and opinionated; he responds well to substantive engagement, not surface-level flattery.
Board roles at AutoUncle (since 2011) and Minc alongside full-time investing → long-horizon thinking; he commits to relationships over years, not quarters.
Described himself on the Good Future Podcast as an 'accidental entrepreneur, reluctant VC, and now climate investor' → self-aware about how he got here; he's likely candid about doubt and evolution rather than projecting a polished narrative.
Started writing a book in 2025 on how people become who they are → introspective operating style; he probably thinks about motivation and identity more than most investors, and will engage deeply with founder psychology.

Conversation tips

→ Reference a specific annual review essay from hajak.medium.com — he'll notice immediately that you read it, not just skimmed his bio.
→ Ask about the TAT-to-BlackBerry transition on his terms — he frames himself as a 'reluctant VC', so the path from operator to investor is a story he's thought about carefully.
→ Lead with climate conviction, not climate opportunity — his framing is 'there is no us vs them in the climate crisis', so market-size pitches land worse than mission-alignment conversations.
→ If you work in AI or deep tech, acknowledge the energy/compute tension directly — he's invested in climate and watches AI infrastructure's power demands; that intersection is live for him.
→ Ask about the book he started in 2025 — it signals genuine curiosity about his thinking outside the fund, and he'll likely have something real to say.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on the TAT acquisition — he built a mobile UI company that shipped on over 500 million devices and sold to BlackBerry for $150 million in 2010, then described himself as a 'reluctant VC' afterward. That tension between operator and investor is the hinge of his whole career.
Mention his 2025 book project — he's writing about how people become who they are, which is an unusual thing for a VC to be doing and signals a dimension of his thinking that most people overlook.
Reference his Love Tomorrow Summit talk framing: 'there is no us vs them in the climate crisis' — it's a specific philosophical stance that separates him from most climate investors who lead with TAM, and it's a direct opener into how he thinks about portfolio construction.

Discovery questions

You've described yourself as a reluctant VC — now that Pale Blue Dot is several years in, has that reluctance changed, or does it still shape how you run the fund?
With Brisk Enterprise you were in sales productivity and with TAT in mobile UI — how much does your operator experience in non-climate sectors inform how you evaluate climate founders today?
Your essays cover AI, energy markets, and personal development alongside climate — where do you see the most dangerous blind spots in how the climate tech investment community is currently framing the AI compute energy problem?

Avoid

Don't pitch him on climate as a financial opportunity alone — he frames it as a civilisational default ('Climate First'), so a pure returns-framing without mission substance will read as missing the point.

Make it yours