There is a version of this story that starts with a solar cell. This isn't that version. This one starts with a queue.
Spring 2015, Venture Arena, Konsert & Kongress in Linköping. An idea had just been pitched to a room full of investors and entrepreneurs. The interest was immediate, and a small crowd formed to ask questions. Most people asked their questions, nodded, and moved on.
One person didn't.
Mattias Josephson stood in that queue and kept asking questions, something about what he'd just heard stayed with him. He hadn't come to the conference looking for a new company to build, yet he left thinking about little else.
By that summer, Mattias had joined the small group of researchers and engineers who would go on to build what we now call light energy harvesting into a real, deployable technology. Looking back at those ten years later, he put it simply:
"The vision made me invest. The people made me stay."
We're not going to tell you what convinced him just yet. To understand that, we need to go back decades earlier, to a laboratory at Linköping University that few people outside the research community had ever heard of.
That's where we're going next.