The photo taken for my military ID. I can totally see this guy holding up a 7-Eleven.

I was born in 1973 and grew up in the small Swedish town Karlskoga. I left there 3 days after graduating high school where I studied electronics for 3 years at Bergslagsskolan.

Before that though a monumental moment in my childhood was when I at the age of 10 got my first computer. A Commodore 64 which I completely fell in love with and which started an obsession in trying to learn as much as posible on how it worked... An obsession that have only in part abated now even though the computers have changed during the years the facination with their inner workings have not dissapeared.

My first stop after leaving the town I grew up were in the military service where I served 12 months as an electrician and I can honestly say in retrospect that that is a year of my life that I want back. As some of my friends in Sweden know I hold nothing except the highest distain for anything military.

Me and the gang at Chalmers. Counting from left to right: Jorgen, me, Peter, Stefan and Jerker.

After my military service I managed to get my first job at AB Tore J Hedback where I worked for the summer helping to administrate their UNIX workstations and develop CAD solutions. A job I continued doing off and on for the next couple of years. After that I was off to Gothenburg where I started attending Electro engineering at Chalmers University of Technology. It was also around this time that I started to suspect that there might be more to life than just computers (Not to say computers aren't important).

During this time I also started my first company Underscore AB which was originally just a way for me to be able to earn a little bit of money and still keep my student funding.

At school I met a great bunch of guys which I spent a lot of time eating pizza and pretending to study with for quite some time.

Around this time I also picked up another hobby which is inline skating. Something I am still passionate about and do on a regular basis. A few years later I was even involved in organizing the Stockholm Sunday Skates where we got a whole bunch of people together and skated around Stockholm. At timmes we were over 100 people doing the skate and we had a lot of fun.

While at Chalmers I also met up with another group of people who seemed to agree on the fact that you should probably be able to make some money on this "new" internet thing (Which was just starting to reach the mainstream at the time in Sweden) and after some carefull consideration we started a company working with it which was GlobeCom (In 2005 GlobeCom was bought by Bahnhof Internet and has ceased to be a separate corporate entity).

I started working full time with GlobeCom somewhere around 1995 which was my second year at Chalmers. This unfortunately did affect my studies eventually and I never managed to graduate from Chalmers. In the end I finished around 3 out of 4 and a half years of full studies... But I did it in 6 years and then they stopped sending me mail. In my defence though, before I started with the GlobeCom project I was on target with my studies. It was while starting with GlobeCom I got my nickname Mauritz to distinguish me from one of the other founders called Henrik Johansson.

Our first boardmeeting in new offices with GlobeCom. From left to right: Janne, me, Tobias, Henrik

Initially, as with all startups, it was rough in the beginning. And it took a long time before we could get by on our incomes reliable. All the time everyone I knew was adament about that I really needed to finish my studies no matter what. And there was a lot of strife and hardship getting GlobeCom off the ground. But in retrospect I don't regret a second of it, because I made some of the best friends I've known during the process and I came out the other end with a lot of experience in real life. Something you just do not get from a regular College education.

As we started getting off the ground with GlobeCom I moved away from pure ISP and website building into being a regular computer consultant. This is also what I've been spending most of my professional life doing since this time. I have been working in a lot of different industries and locations. From finance and telecom to tourism. From Singapore and Greece to Los Angeles.

In 1998 I spent a year in Athens, Greece working for a local mobile phone operator. By the time I was going back to Sweden, everyone I knew had pretty much moved from Gothenburg to Stockholm... And so did I, because that was where all the work was. And this is also where I ended up staying until 2002 when I finally left GlobeCom, mainly because I felt like I needed to try something else having worked with the same company for 7-8 years (Depending on when you count I started for GlobeCom).

After I stopped working for GlobeCom I got my first "real" job. At the age of 29 I for the first time wasn't at least partially my own boss. I went to work for the small cell phone operator Spinbox AB and it was quite a large change for me at least. Before this I had started on a small project that would change my life considerably in a year or two though. During a previous project I worked on at PPM. I needed a tool for querying Oracle databases and started on a program called TOra. By the time I started at Spinbox I had started selling this application over the internet and it brought me pretty much as much money as my regular day job salary.

During this time I also really fell in love with the city Stockholm and even bought my own appartment. That was not to last though. In the spring of 2003 I was contacted by the company Quest Software which basically wondered if I wouldn't mind selling a competing product to their product Toad and come working for them. Basically they made me an offer I couldn't refuse and I was off again. This time the destination was southern California.

View of Laguna Beach, you can almost make out my house in the middle here (My house is just behind those trees by the arrow).

In february 2004 I made the leap of moving from the comforts of home to join Quest Software in the city of Irvine just south of Los Angeles. After moving around a bit I finally found my new home in the city of Laguna Beach where I now lived 5 minutes walking distance from the beach and am loving every minute of it for exactly 10 years to the day before I moved again and this time around I did not go that far, just a few miles north to Long Beach.

During this time the company I work for has also been acquired and I now work for DELL. So if working for a large company was unusual for me when I worked for Quest Software which had around 3000 people, it is even stranger now when DELL has around one hundred thousand employees. During this time I have worked on many projects but most of the time I have been involved with the design and development of the products Toad Data Point, Toad for MySQL (Discontinued), Toad for SQL Server, Toad for SAP and Toad for DB2 among others.

While living in the United States I've also pick up a lot of new hobbies like paddle boarding, motorcycle riding, frisbee golf, regular golf, lawn bowling and others. I've also really come to look at Laguna Beach in particular, but Southern California as my home. I have also finally after "only" a little bit over 10 years living here finally received my green card at which point I started a US company to succeed my Swedish company called Underscore Research LLC.

And lastly I have met my wife here. The lovely and beautiful Lisa DuMouchel (Now Lisa Johnson). We met through a common friend while she was living in San Francisco in early 2012. A little bit over a year later we were married on the 4^th of October 2013 at the Saint Regis Monarch Beach (Now a Waldorf Astoria) in Dana Point. She is also the reason that I moved to Long Beach for 5 years as she got a PHD degree in Santa Monica at the RAND institute so we are splitting the commute.

In 2015 I joined Amazon Web Services after submitting myself to my first and so far only job interview. In 2016 Lisa and me had a daughter Sarah. Like clockwork in 2018 I also received my US citizenship just in time to vote in the California mid term primaries.

Finally right before the COVID pandemic we bought a house in Newport Beach and finally made it back to Orange County after being in exile in LA county for 5 years...