My full name is Janus Rægaard Nielsen and I am a Danish IT entrepreneur with a strong management background gained from over 20 years in the IT Consumer & Security industry.

I am in many ways a special character. I don't believe I am as most people are. Either you love me or you hate me. I have always been very independent and have had my own beliefs and ideas. I have also always been very ambitious and have had a clear plan with my life. I wanted to be my own boss and create and be in charge of my own future.

I always think business, I always think "inventing" and I think about sales 24/7. I believe one of my strongest skills is selling, and I believe I do it quite well. I indeed find the joy n finding people's need in what I have to sell, and getting them to agree gives me satisfaction.

I was born in Frederiksberg, Copenhagen, 10-09-1970. I was raised in a typical family: father Alex and mother Jonna, together with my little brother, and today best friend, Anders.

I grew up and lived all my childhood in a very small city, Ejby, 3-4000 inhabitants, in the middle of the island Sjælland, approx. 40 kilometres from Copenhagen. I went to the city's only school, Ejby primary, for 10 years.

After primary school I decided to carry on in collage/highschool and went to Solrød Gymnasium, with specialty in math. After High School I studied International Business Economy for another two years.

MY PASSIONS

All my life I have been very interested in sports and nutrition and until I was 27 my passion was Handball and personal fitness. I was very, very dedicated, but unfortunately not blessed with the fortune of having the biggest talent….I had to work very hard and train a lot. Anyway I somehow through hard work and dedication manage to make it all the way to a semi-professional stage and to the highest legue, "Håndboldligaen" in Denmark. At the same time I for approx. 10 years was very passionate about personal fitness, especially weight training and running.

But after making it to the highest level in Handball I completely lost interest as it was obvious that I wouldn’t be able to make a living out of it, nor make it to the national team. I decided to quit completely and focus 100% on a professional business career. The only interest was within IT even though I didn’t know anything at all about it. I just knew that it was a very dynamic business moving fast and that there was lots of money to be made, someone told me. I always told my selves that I could do whatever I wanted to do as long as my desire was strong enough…so IT it became and of course something with sales.

MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE

My first job after my diploma as an International Business Economist was as a Shop Manager Trainee in the Danish success retail chain; Jysk, which are famous for selling bed and linen, furniture’s and more at very attractive prices. I started out in an outlet in the Swedish city Gothenburg. I was pretty green, but thought, what the hell, let me try, I can always go back if it doesn’t work out.

It was a great, great time for me, not salary wise and I also had a lot of sacrifices to make, being away from my family and friends in Denmark.

I very quickly learned everything about running a shop, selling, managing a business and everything it takes. It was a fantastic time and a fantastic education which I again and again later have given lots of credit for my later successes.

Also their founder, Lars Larsen, is among one of the persons in this world I really admire. He is a true Danish business celebrity and very well respected for his accomplishments. Today he is having more than 2000 shops around the world and is among the world’s absolute richest people. He is a fantastic person with a fantastic story and I admire him deeply. He had great vision, great tenacity and have worked his ass off for the idea and business he believed within…..and he started out with no money in his pocket! I have had the pleasure to meet him several times and every time I get more amazed, Lars Larsen is one we in Denmark could be very proud of and should and could learn a lot from.

I worked at Jysk for approx. 4 years and was heading 3-4 different shops in Sweden before I decided to move back to Denmark.

But IT it had to be and something within sales as I obviously couldn’t get any other job within IT…as I didn’t have a clue, but I was indeed a pretty good salesman.

First I had to get a job, but with no IT knowledge at all I actually needed all my sales skills just to sell my selves as a good IT salesman. Amazingly enough I manage to convince Corel Corporation that I was their man to head up their Danish retail sales of CorelDraw, WordPerfect, Gallery 65.000 and PrintHouse Magic.

I got the responsibility for the Nordic region and as a Regional Sales Manager I took the Nordic market from nothing to the best performing region in the world in less than 4 years. I was also awarded "Sales Exec of the year, 1995" among more than 1500 sales Exec´s worldwide. I was flying and IT was everything I hoped it would be.

In 1997 I went to Computer Associates (CA) to head up the Nordic Security Software Channel Division as a Regional Vice President. I later also took over the Pan European OEM Security Software team where we with a very immature product range and team within OEM sales amazingly enough managed to achieve massive success and huge revenue streams.

Inspired by our great OEM success in CA I in 2003 decided to start my own company together with a long-time childhood friend. I had a feeling that there were huge possibilities in consumer security software if sold the right way. It was the days of the "I love you" and "Kurnikova" viruses and new virus outbreaks were almost everyday news. Also lots of surveys said that more than 80% of computers in private homes lacked security…that became the reasons and start of MYSecurityCenter.

We wanted to deliver cheap, easy to use top quality security software to private consumers. With just a few men and some very simple coding we managed to get a website live. With the antivirus technology from my former employer CA, eTrust, we manage to cut some amazing deals. Among our top partners was, Medion, Targa and Gericom. All German based PC manufactures where we manage to get our product pre-installed. Also traditional retail chains like Fona, Expert and Aldi carried our products. Among lots of online promotion partners, Jubii, Lycos, Just-Eat and Nordea can be mentioned as some of the most successful ones. We only had one product, a very basic antivirus product from CA which we amazingly enough manage to get more than 15 million people to use and more than 500.000 people to subscribe to, paying 29 EUR or more for a yearly subscription. The software wasn’t the best in the world, it was pretty ok, but not the best. But we managed to get and keep customers as we were focussing a lot on customer service and support. We simply wanted to deliver the best service and support in our industry, something we know our customers really appreciate.

Among other achievements I am particular proud about is the fact that MYSecurityCenter in 2006 was awarded "EMEA partner of the year" by CA, an American fortune 500 company. Still today MYSecurityCenter is the only partner in the Nordics which have achieved this award!

After 5-6 years of running MYSecurityCenter very unprofessional, but very successfully, making huge profits but not knowing a lot about running an internet software company, my partner and I decided to split ways and I took over 100% of the shares. We simply had different priorities, he wanted to start producing a super car, the first ever in Denmark, a pretty bold and completely crazy idea for a guy living in little Denmark. But believe it or not, they got quite a good success with it and lots of attention…..I can only tip my hat and say well done!

I wanted to reinvest the profit into MYSecurityCenter, something we had been arguing about for years. I felt he only wanted to suck out as much profit as possible, something that was easy to accept as it gave us the liberty to live like kings, but it didn’t do much good for the further development of MSC. For a decade I had a life only few would dare dream about. We made the money fair and square and we was also pretty good at spending them I have to admit.

But with my partner leaving I decided that I wanted to develop MYSecurityCenter from a small unprofessional company with a few employees and only one product to an international company with broad recognition, a wide product portfolio only using the best technologies within our products and on top with the best end-user support the industry. But a slight problem was that this decision came 3-4 years too late. The complete lack of focus, product development and reinvesting of revenue and profit had led MYSecurityCenter onto a declining revenue slide.

I am very proud of the work a very dedicated team of people in our Marbella office have made to turn MSC around and into what I wanted and described above. We have had a whole string of hard working and dedicated people making it happen. Especially our Project Manager Charlotte Way, our Support Manager Marion Williams and my brother Anders for strategy, messaging and design have been instrumental. Also our Chief Designer Vasco Peixoto has had an enormous role in the turnaround.

Today MYSecurityCenter is a fine-tuned company, with a perfect product mix and some great services and a very low cost structure ready and easy to get growing again. We have turned the trend and we are facing a very promising future. We are now growing and forecasts and predictions are again nice reading.

Based on the success and all the hard work and experiences earned via MYSecurityCenter I in 2009 decided to start MYMobileSecurity together with a long time CA colleague, Kevin Freij and Mobile app veteran Jonas Borgh, both Swedish and fantastic guys!

In a very short period of time we have managed to position MYMobileSecurity as one of the top mobile security companies in the world and we are seeing great growth. We have managed to sign contracts with lots of mobile carriers and are getting more than 100.000 new users weekly and hundreds of new paying subscribers daily. We are very proud of MMS and are seeing a huge growth potential in the company.

MY INTERESTS

I must say that I am quite a busy man with not that much spare time. But when I find some time to something else than work, William and Tina I really like to play golf. I have played golf since I stopped playing Handball and I play to a 5,3 handicap. I love going to the range and practice and clear my mind as well as a round in the weekends I fancy too.

I also love to have my closest friends and family visiting me and us in our home in Marbella, Spain.

I also enjoy watching sports in the TV. Especially Handball, Golf, Football and Boxing are among the favourites. But also UFC catch my attention. I find it extremely fascinating that these fighters willingly and by themselves are going into the octagon and fight, literally for life. On one hand fascinating on the other completely stupid and grotesque, but maybe exactly that’s why it fascinates me and so many others. Believe it or not I even went to see some of the biggest stars fighting live in Las Vegas, it was a pretty wild experience and not the last time I will go.

I also very much enjoy reading books, especially books about business personalities and biographies. Lately I read Richard Branson’s – Virgin, Mærsk – Manden og magten, Janus Friis – Millionær på Skype and even my friend Jesper Buch´s book – Fra kælder til Million, about his venture with Just-Eat was pretty fascinating. Another great book is the book about Steve Jobs.

When it comes to novels I must say that John Grisham is phenomenal.

Music like most people have my interest, but especially one particular band, U2, has a special place in my heart. It is a passion I share with my brother and best friend Anders and we have so many unforgettable memories connected to U2 concerts around the world. Believe it or not, but I saw them in concert 15 time so far, great, great fun and it won’t be the last time.