Swedish inspiration
Though members of Yubico’s core team today are based in California and in London, we continue to foster our Swedish heritage.
Sweden is a small country that has built an international reputation for technology innovation, safety and quality that customers all over the world have come to rely on. Three prominent companies, founded in Sweden on these principles, continue to be a source of inspiration for the Yubico team.
IKEA - Simple, flat, affordable, do-it-yourself products for the mass market
One of the world’s most successful home furnishing companies, IKEA, was founded in a part of southern Sweden where the soil is thin and poor. The people in this area are known for working hard, living frugally, and working smart to make the best possible use of the limited resources they have. This way of doing things is at the heart of the IKEA approach to keeping prices low.
IKEA was founded when Sweden was fast becoming an example of the caring society, where rich and poor alike were well looked after. This is also a theme that fitted well with the IKEA vision. In order to serve all people with affordable prices, IKEA asks the customer to assemble the furniture themselves.
The YubiKey is manufactured a few miles from where IKEA was founded. In many ways, Yubico follow the IKEA model, as our firm was created with limited financial resources, requiring us to develop cost efficient and automated processes for every part of our operations. We also chose to use the Web and a self-service business model to make our products available and affordable for everyone.
MySQL - Open source solutions for world leading software and cloud services
The world leading open source database management system, MySQL was founded and initially owned and sponsored by the single for-profit Swedish company MySQL AB.
The MySQL software has been adopted by leading open source software projects, including WordPress and Drupal, as well as many of the large-scale Internet services, including Wikipedia, Google, Facebook and Twitter.
Yubico followed the MySQL model, combining the scalability of free open source server software and paid and proprietary products. With this model, Yubico has built a profitable company with global adoption, endorsed by the major open source initiatives and cloud services.
Volvo - Simplified safety solutions that have saved millions of lives
In the 1950s, only fighter pilots used seat belts. Happy drivers, who loved their new won freedom, hit the highways and died like flies.
Nils Bohlin, Chief Safety Engineer at Volvo and former aircraft designer, realized that for a seat belt to be accepted by the everyday user, it could not be clunky and complicated like the harnesses that the fighter pilots used. Knowing that safety procedures need to be easy to scale, he designed the three-point seat belt in 1958 and then led the initiative making his invention into a standard feature in every car.
Today’s Internet highway delivers on its promises of freedom, bandwidth and speed. And most of us love it - until the day we get our digital lives hacked. At Yubico, we think that it would be a big shame if the Internet, and one the best inventions ever created, would fail due to the lack of user friendly identity protection; security solutions as intuitive as Mr Bohlin’s seat belt.
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