America’s a great place to get educated, but I wouldn’t live there.”
Arts Alliance seeks out projects that will “conquer big markets.. change people’s lives”. That summer, Höegh moved to the UK, for two reasons.
“Long term, it made sense to be the springboard between Europe and America,” he says. “We had a good grasp on America, and we wanted to be early here and immediately differentiate ourselves by being European investors in America.” In addition, he says, “London’s a much nicer place. Höegh had steadily been investing small amounts, totalling $20m; in June 1997, he and his two partners incorporated these into Arts Alliance.

“It was a bit of a juggling act, but I was used to working seven days a week,” he says. I pooled money with my cousins and we invested in the company, and I also worked there, became the site’s content editor.” The site was sold to Microsoft in 1998.
During Höegh’s two years at business school, he also raised his first venture capital fund, though his Harvard professors knew nothing of these extracurricular activities. I began working on what was later to become Firefly [an online music community]. “Mosaic was still in beta then; no one was talking about the Net. I didn’t really fit in – I had hair down to my elbows.” Instead, Höegh hid away in the Media Lab, where he made friends who were playing around with the Internet. At these institutions, the art or managing director is effectively the CEO.”
Höegh did his MBA at Harvard.

“When I arrived, there was a wall of consultants and bankers. “Mossad was checking the lyrics for the Palestinian songs,” he says.
After working briefly in Prague, he applied to business school. “I wanted to be artistic director of one of the larger cultural institutions in Norway or elsewhere, the national theatre or the national film theatre. Höegh organised the Oslo Treaty celebrations, where both Israeli and Palestinian leaders, poets and bands would be present.

“I spent a lot of time up there in a field, where we rigged up loudspeakers and all kinds of flashers and things – we were simulating audience noise to train these reindeer not to be afraid in a stadium of 40,000 people.”
Work on the Olympic ceremonies meant he could “do some pet projects of my own, because I had the clout: weird experimental stuff in lighthouses, sealing off whole towns”. I came home to Norway: no job, no nothing.”
Working in radio and TV drama, Höegh met the man who had just been appointed artistic director for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1994 Olympics in Lillehammer, and became principle director for the ceremonies.
“I have fond memories of what it’s like to educate reindeer in the middle of winter,” says Höegh He worked in Kautokeino, in the northernmost part of Norway. “I was actually going to Amsterdam, to work in the national theatre there, but they didn’t want to give me a work permit. They claimed there were too many unemployed directors in Holland.

You can’t really navigate big boats in there, so we have these small, very fast, very powerful boats with heavy firepower.”
After his naval stint, he did a bachelor’s degree in theatre direction at Northwestern University in Chicago, returning to Oslo in 1991. It hasn’t exactly been the shortest distance between two points: from creating multimedia experiences for reindeer to founding one of the UK’s few Internet venture capital funds. In fact, Norwegian-born Thomas Höegh, managing director of Arts Alliance, has changed jobs more often than you’ve had hot dinners.

Höegh, born in Oslo, served for two years on a “fast patrol boat, more explicitly called a missile attack craft”, where he did his national service “It’s a small coastal vessel designed to defend the fjords. In fact, Norwegian-born Thomas Höegh, managing director of Arts Alliance, has changed jobs more often than you’ve had hot dinners. It hasn’t exactly been the shortest distance between two points: from creating multimedia experiences for reindeer to founding one of the UK’s few Internet venture capital funds. Also featured were sites for those with something specific in mind like Lastminute for last-minute travel deals.
With all this encouragement to get “switched on”, online banking wasn’t about to be left out. Nationwide Building Society demonstrated their site, which now includes Internet access complete with Net-Nanny software to block sites you don’t want your children to see.