EP03: The Mental Game Behind 20 Years at the Top of Women's Golf | Suzann "Tutta" Pettersen
Starting ColdShow Notes
Suzann Pettersen is one of the most decorated golfers in history, and now the founder behind VOXA, a talent management agency built to give female athletes the tools she had to build for herself.
Tutta's mindset was forged over more than two decades competing at the top of women's golf, where she turned professional at nineteen, won fifteen LPGA Tour titles and two majors, and stayed ranked among the top two players in the world for six straight years.
In this episode, Tutta traces the full arc: from being twelve years old and laughed at for saying she'd be the best in the world, to holing the winning putt at the 2019 Solheim Cup twenty months after giving birth, to building her own company for the first time as a founder.
We dive into:— How do you train yourself to never let one bad round define you?
— What's the difference between confidence and validation, and why did chasing the wrong one nearly cost her the game?
— How do you climb back into elite competition from outside the world's top 600, with a newborn at home?
— What does it take to walk away from your sport at the very top, without a second thought?
— After twenty years of competing entirely alone, what does it take to learn how to build and lead a team?
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John Markus Lervik is the co-founder of Cognite, the industrial AI company Schneider Electric agreed to acquire for $3.1 billion in 2026, the largest tech exit in Norway's history. It is his second billion-dollar exit. In 2008, Microsoft bought Fast Search & Transfer, the search company he built out of his PhD research in Trondheim, for $1.3 billion. Along the way, Cognite became Norway's startup factory, with around 25 former employees going on to found companies of their own. We sat down with him at Cognite's headquarters in Oslo. In this episode, John Markus explains why he considers both exits failures, and what it takes to build global companies out of Norway: — Can ambition be learned, or are you born with it? — What does it really cost to build at this level? — How do you make founder-level ambition spread across an entire team? — Why did asking Aker for 300 million kroner and a first customer change everything? — Should Norwegian founders hire in the US, or send their own people first? 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:00 Why both exits feel like failures 00:05:07 "Forget about Norway" 00:09:05 The cost of extreme ambition 00:11:06 Spreading ambition to a team 00:17:07 The framework: vision and four balls in the air 00:21:48 Aker and the capital strategy 00:28:01 Storytelling in a technical company 00:31:59 Inside the Schneider deal 00:35:05 What's next for John Markus and Norway 00:41:33 Advice for founders going global
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We are on a journey to tell the stories of the greatest outliers from the New Nordics like you've never seen them before. Starting Cold is not like other podcasts. Our studio travels to our interviews with the most successful founders, executives, athletes, and high performers and captures their journey's while physically sitting in their element. Whether its a NYC high rise, or a boat in the Lofoten Islands, or a loft in Stockholm, Starting Cold is there to capture the playbooks of the best of the best from one of the highest performing regions in the world.