Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner

Jon von Tetzchner: The Man Who Built Two Browsers

On 21 April 2005 the chief executive of a Norwegian software company promised that if his new browser was downloaded a million times in four days, he would swim the Atlantic Ocean. The downloads arrived. He got into the water off Norway, symbolically, and got out again. It was a joke, but it was also the only marketing budget Opera had, and it says most of what needs saying about Jon von Tetzchner: a man who has spent thirty years building web browsers nobody asked him to build, twice from nothing, and both times against companies vastly larger than his own.

Seltjarnarnes and a Grandmother's Piano

He was born on 29 August 1967 in Seltjarnarnes, Iceland, into a family that was half Icelandic and half Norwegian and thoroughly musical. His mother was Elsa Jónsdóttir; his father, Stephen von Tetzchner, is a Norwegian professor of psychology. His great-grandfather was Iceland's best-known classical composer and his grandmother was a composer too, and he grew up listening to classical music and sitting at her piano — the reason his second company would be named after an eighteenth-century Venetian.

He went to school at Menntaskólinn í Reykjavík before moving to Norway, where he took a master's degree in computer science at the University of Oslo.

His father's work has mattered more to his product thinking than any engineering influence. The elder von Tetzchner specialised in children with disabilities, and his son took from it a conviction he still repeats: adapting to people, to their requirements, is a very natural thing.

A Browser Inside a Telephone Monopoly

From 1991 to 1995 von Tetzchner worked at the Norwegian state telephone company, now Telenor. There, with a colleague named Geir Ivarsøy, he built a piece of research software called MultiTorg Opera — a web browser, at a moment when the web itself was three years old and the idea of a state telecoms monopoly writing browser software was faintly absurd.

Telenor concluded the same thing and abandoned the project. Rather than let it die, the two men acquired the rights, and in 1995 founded Opera Software around it. The browser was released publicly in 1996.

Opera

What followed was two decades of building a serious product from a country of five million people. Under von Tetzchner, Opera grew into a global company with more than 750 employees in thirteen countries and passed 350 million users. Its most consequential bet was mobile: Opera pioneered browsing on phones years before that was an obvious market, at a time when handsets had almost no memory, tiny screens and metered, expensive data. Making the web usable under those constraints was genuinely hard engineering, and it gave Opera a foothold across the developing world that its desktop share never matched.

He stepped down as chief executive in January 2010 and stayed on as a strategic adviser.

The Painful Exit

The advisory role did not work. He has described the period bluntly — he was a passenger of a kind, watching decisions he disagreed with. He left the company entirely in June 2011.

His account of it remains among the rawest things any founder has said in public: you are sitting in a company that you built all your life, and you are seeing it destroyed in front of your eyes. He has said he regrets not leaving sooner, and that the failure was one of judgement about people rather than about technology — he knew them, he thought they would do the right thing, and they did not.

Vivaldi

Most founders stop there. In December 2013 von Tetzchner founded Vivaldi Technologies and launched vivaldi.net, initially not a browser at all but a community: forums, blogs, chat, photo sharing and webmail, aimed at the users Opera had left behind. The Vivaldi browser followed on 27 January 2015, reaching version 1.0 in April 2016. The company is self-funded — a deliberate structural choice, since outside investors are the mechanism by which the first company was taken somewhere he did not want it to go.

The product philosophy is a direct inversion of the industry's. Where the large browser makers strip away options in pursuit of a single clean default, Vivaldi multiplies them. Where they infer what a user wants from behavioural data, von Tetzchner's team asks. His formulation is that everyone deserves to get it their way, and so the software provides multiple ways to do the same thing — a position that follows straight from his father's clinical work and from his own summary of it: we are all different, and we are all equal. Vivaldi began on the desktop with an Android version planned for late 2017, and has been constrained on iOS by Apple's restrictions on alternative browser engines.

Why Jon Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that no major institution has called him one, and the claim should be built carefully or not at all. What he demonstrably possesses is a rarer trait than technical brilliance: product conviction that survives being wrong about the market for thirty years. Opera's central bets — that mobile browsing would matter long before phones looked capable of it, and that users should control their software rather than the reverse — were correct, unfashionable, and held to for two decades before the industry agreed with either. Building a globally used browser out of an abandoned research project inside a Norwegian telephone monopoly, and then, after being pushed out of it, building a second one from scratch and refusing outside capital so it could not happen again, is a form of stubbornness that shades into something more interesting.

The counter-case is straightforward. Von Tetzchner invented no protocol, no rendering technique, no standard; his contribution is entrepreneurial and editorial, the judgement of what to build and what to refuse. Opera never achieved significant desktop market share against Microsoft and then Google, and the company he built was ultimately steered in a direction he publicly disowned — a commercial outcome, not a triumph. Vivaldi remains a small product with a devoted following rather than a mass one. If the word genius is used of him at all, it should be for persistence and taste rather than invention, and it is worth noting that he has never used it of himself.

Legacy

Opera reached more people than most software ever does — 350 million users, a company of 750 across thirteen countries, and a mobile browser that arrived early enough to shape how much of the world first met the web. That it is now owned and run by others, in a form its founder rejects, is the ordinary fate of successful companies and the exact thing von Tetzchner built Vivaldi to avoid. He is the rare technologist whose second act is not a memoir or a venture fund but the same work done again, more stubbornly, on his own money — still shipping a browser for people who want to decide for themselves how their software behaves.

Achievements

• Educated at University of Oslo
• Worked as computer scientist