Biography | Göran Marby — The Business School on Vasagatan That Put a Finance Degree in His Pocket

People meet Göran Marby as the Swede who ran ICANN.

The first public building that put a qualification in his pocket sits on Vasagatan in central Gothenburg, next to Haga.

Bo Göran Edward Marby was born on 22 March 1963 in Annedals församling, a parish a short walk south of here.

He studied economics at the University of Gothenburg's School of Business, Economics and Law — Handelshögskolan — and later biographies prepared for his regulator and ICANN posts give him a Bachelor of Science in finance from this school, completed in 1987.

The campus is not one building.

Vasagatan 1 holds the lecture halls, the economics library and the inner courtyard; Viktoriagatan 13 holds other departments.

When Marby was a student the school still occupied the older mid-century blocks, including Carl Nyrén's 1952 house at the Vasagatan corner.

That corner block was demolished in 2020 to make room for a new wing planned for the late 2020s.

The pale stone drum with the curved window that faces the tram stop today is later work, from 1995, and should not be read as the façade he walked through.

What the degree did was ordinary and decisive.

It sent a Gothenburg economist into Swedish network companies rather than into a ministry first: Cisco's Swedish country office, Cygate, Unisource Business Networks, then the security firm Appgate that he co-founded in 2002.

The regulator's job and the ICANN job came after that commercial stretch, not instead of it.

Stand at the tram stop named Handelshögskolan and the school is the building with the large windows on Vasagatan 1.

The 1983 photograph attached here shows the older tower as it looked while he was still a student.

Photo: Björn Reilund, 1983, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons