My first week in Stockholm is finishing up. I take a 35 minute train into the city every morning, work at my internship during the day, and spend most evenings exploring the city with my new friends. We’ve mostly been walking around different neighborhoods, finding places to eat, and taking advantage of the long evenings. The biggest adjustment so far has been the daylight. The sun barely sets this time of year and its been messing with my sleep. I try to get to bed around 11 but sometimes it is still a little bright, so it makes it challenging to believe its time for bed. Another thing that surprised me is that I haven’t touched cash since I landed. Everything here is card or phone. I like the cashless environment, but I still keep some on me in case of emergency.
Im interning at Divly, a startup in Stockholm that makes software for calculating crypto taxes. You connect your crypto accounts, and it turns all your transactions into a tax report for your specific country. So it is a mix of fintech, crypto, and taxes. Coming in, I figured the most important skills here would be technical or financial. Those do help, but the skills I’ve used everyday have been research, analysis, and being able to explain what I found. My projects so far have been researching how AI tools like ChatGPT rank crypto tax companies in different countries. The hard part wasn’t about finding the information, but turning it all into a report my boss could actually use. The other big one is being okay with not having instructions. I wasn’t given a full project guide for my report. In school you always get a rubric, but here I got a general direction and was trusted to figure out the rest. At first it stressed me out, but it ended up being a part of the internship I enjoy the most. I get to come up with creative ideas that they hadn’t thought of and decide myself what should and shouldn’t go into the report. I would say I learned more from not having instruction than from having them.
The biggest thing I’ve noticed thats unique to working in Europe is how local everything has to be. In the US, a company builds one product for one giant market. Here, every country has its own tax rules, forms, and languages. Divly competes with bigger international companies by being more local than they are. They support the specific forms and rules of each country instead of offering a generic product. Watching a small Swedish company win that way changed how I think about business. The office culture has been an adjustment in a good way. Meetings are really inclusive. Everyone gets asked for their angle before anything is decided. There are really no layers either, I present my work to the whole company in our growth meetings. There is no dress code, people wear whatever they want. The hours are really flexible as well, I leave at 5, but my coworkers come and go as they please. People are trusted more to manage their own time and nothing is tracked.
An interesting about my office is that they skip the one Swedish work tradition everyone talks about. Before I got here, I kept reading about fika, the daily coffee break that Swedish companies are supposedly built around. I was expecting to be involved in it, but it doesn’t exist in my office. It made me think about how countries aren’t all their stereotypes, and every office is its own little culture. You can read all you want about a place before going there, but the version you read about and the version you actually experience are never quite the same. Looking back at week one, I thin the biggest lesson has been that working internationally is different in each company. Its about listening to everyones angle and coming together as a team to solve the problem. I am looking forward to continuing my projects and learning more as the program progresses.