We started out the day like anyone would want to start out their Friday. By walking into a law firm… Thankfully Valea works closely with inventors and other companies that produce products as patent attorneys. Anything from a flap on a diaper to a process followed during manufacturing to the logo a company uses can be protected by a patent, trademark, or copyrights. When we met Andrew and Viktor for the meeting we grabbed some coffee and signed their non-disclosure agreement to protect them and their clients information that may have been overheard or seen while we were inside the office. The work that they do is extremely important to their clients for the fact that intellectual property can be the vast majority of a companies value. The same statement goes for trademarks (Logos). Think about how valuable the Coca-Cola logo is to their brand and business. If another individual or entity takes their logo and puts it on a different product. It can have endless consequences on the Coca-Cola brand.

After the presentation about what Valea is and what it does, we all headed over to an iconic Gothenburg building called “The Lipstick Building” for a wonderful lunch, I was deep in conversation with Viktor so I forgot to take a photo, but it was a cheeseburger on a fresh sourdough bun, with a grilled tomato and sweet pickles and a side of fries. It, as most of the food here, was exceptional!

From Valea we had about an hour and a half break. So we explored Nordstan a but then headed over to Xylem. Xylem is a world class producer of water pumps. Their current market is for waste water, but they have been moving into the pumps for clean water as well. Some notable clean water pumps they have in use is the 9/11 reflecting ponds, water removal in New Orleans that we’re installed after hurricane Katrina, and the Burj Khalifa.

For dinner we returned to Di Vinci’s for pizza and a drink. I told myself I wouldn’t repeat meals on this trip, but it was just so darn good I had to get another pizza that had Onions, Bacon, and Salami!

The rest of our Friday night was hanging out to catch up on blogging and just grabbing a nightcap at our favorite spot, Karlson’s!

Takeaways

• Intellectual property is valuable to protect even if the company isn’t doing well.
• The amount of water it takes to make a 1 liter bottle of water is 8 liters. 7 liters for the bottle and another 1 liter of water to fill it.
• It is Swedish tradition to sing a song before taking any shot. Doesn’t matter which type of shot it is.