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Into Oslo for a meeting at the headquarters of Norway’s largest financial services group for a meeting to discuss corporate restructuring of Sixty North. How much corporate structure does a two-person company need? More than it has now apparently. The refactoring to get from where we are, to where we want to be, seems to require several levels of indirection and interesting manoeuvres with names like “drop-down merger” and “triangular merger”. We learn about share-issues, and non-obvious techniques for obtaining different equity splits. Diagrams are drawn with up to five companies in interesting topologies, each of which exhibits different trade offs. After 75 minutes we leave with a much better understanding of what’s entailed, and with confidence boosted. Our advisor seemed this think we are doing very well, are asking all the right questions, and are heading in the right direction. Naturally, the short term winners will be the lawyers we’ll need to pay to make all this work.

After lunch in a part of Oslo that feels more Manhattan than Norway, we head to our next appointment, a meeting with a potential employee. It’s not so much an interview as a get-to-know you discussion. We have no qualms that they have the technical chops we’re looking for, but do they want a job with the particular qualities we can offer? Only they know the answer. We’ve been open and straightforward about the situation, so they should be able to decide on the facts.