Momentum

Thirty-nine minutes on the two years before a term sheet arrived on my birthday, and what it took to turn it into money. An interview with Lily. I answered her questions in Swedish on a fifteen-kilometre run; the English voice you hear is my cloned voice saying what I said, and the Swedish is me, out of breath. The script was written with Claude Opus 5.5, from my tape.

Lily wrote me a list of questions. I put them in the notes on my phone, put in my headphones and went for a run north of Kalmar on a Saturday at the end of October. Past the golf course, along an old stone wall with the Baltic on my right, and onto a trail into the woods. I read one question at a time and answered it out loud. The sauna was on at home.

This first part is about one day, my birthday two years ago, and how we got there.

Two years ago

In the autumn of 2024 I was in TINC, a program for Nordic startups that want to learn from Silicon Valley. Most of it was online. In November there was one week on site, and I rented a big house in Menlo Park for seven of us from the cohort. I also rented a Ford Mustang convertible with a V8, which had been on a list I never said out loud.

We had closed our first funding that summer, and I had talked to more than a hundred investors that autumn, late in the evenings to fit their time zone. A term sheet came in, I think on the evening of the fourth. On the fifth it was settled. It was my birthday, and it was election day in the US.

At a pitch event that day the other founders sang to me. One of them, from an Icelandic company, did not believe it was my birthday. I showed him the term sheet and my ID, and he still said no way.

I felt on top that day. Unstoppable. On the run I said it like this: here in San Francisco is where I want to live, here I can become myself. That’s how I felt then. And in the next breath: it’s easy to get carried away.

Both are true, and the episode lives between them. Two years on, I’m writing this in Kalmar, still building the company with my co-founders.

A word I kept using

On the run I kept saying momentum. In physics it is how heavy a thing is times how fast it moves: the more of it something has, the harder it is to stop. A young company lives on it. When it moves, investors call each other, emails come back faster, and every yes makes the next one easier. It carries you, too. That evening it was carrying me.

The election showed the other side of it. The mood was gloomy, and we had a draw on every state. I thought Trump would win, and I won the draw. There was no prize. What I took from 2016 is that what I think is not what others think, and that the world as a system will do things for reasons that are not mine. Lily put it like this: on the same day I read a country better than the room I was in, and let another room tell me where I wanted to live.

A box on a map

How did a company from Kalmar get there? We started in 2022, four of us and then six, with day jobs at the university and at Kalmar Energi. We copied Helium’s model straight off: people own the hardware, the network pays them in tokens. We put Raspberry Pis in 3D-printed boxes, sold about fifty of them to people in other countries, and watched their solar panels on a dashboard. We had a token on Solana for a little while, and turned it into a test token once we understood the legal side.

Crypto cost us a great deal of time. It also gave us a community around the world from day one, and I count that as luck.

In the autumn of 2023 I drove to Amsterdam with the family for Breakpoint, Solana’s conference, and talked to investors for the first time. It was a breakpoint for me and for the team. The Swedish Energy Agency granted us half a million kronor. The next spring Viktor and I drove to Stockholm with a hockey-stick deck, shared a hotel room and went running on Djurgården in the evening.

The same Friday

In May we launched what we called the Energy Warden at Kalmar Science Park: a map of the world in hexagons, where you could buy a tile and earn from the work done inside it. Countdown, button, launch. That same Friday, an accelerator in London that had turned us down called to say they were ready to come in. We drank champagne at my place that evening, the whole team.

The week after, at a dinner in New York, I told the Helium people about the offer, and the phones started ringing. In the end the network we had copied came in and took the lead in our pre-seed, with a group of angels. We said no to London. It was the first time I learned that it is perfectly fine to say no.

The test

The big lesson from all my fundraising is that it never gets easier. There is a new problem round every bend, and you cannot understand it until you have lived it.

The term sheet on my birthday was half a round. The rest we had to raise ourselves, in about two months, or we would get nothing. I spent November and December in meetings and was completely exhausted. At Christmas, on the Canary Islands with the family, nothing moved, and more than half was still missing. We were still on leave from our old jobs, and for a few more weeks we could have gone back.

That Christmas I read Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I needed an anchor, and I was looking for one. An anchor is the other side of momentum: what holds you in place while everything around you moves.

In January a video I had posted on Twitter led to a cold message from a fund in the States. I emailed everyone and said: this week we close. When there is a clear deadline, things happen, and fast. The fund met me on the Tuesday and decided on the Friday. The round ended oversubscribed, and I had to ask people who wanted to give us money to give less.

Then: now we’re done, then. Oh s**t, good God. The next thing I did was tell the local paper, which used up the news before anyone national could have it.

What it carried us into

The money was in. The problem was the thesis. We had built the whole company around DePIN, and the only thing we really knew how to make was pitch decks. Part two is the two years after: what happened to the tokens, the hexagons and the boxes, and how a company built for a crowd came to own batteries. Part three is about home.

Early on that run, just after I reached the trees, I said what my pace was: five minutes a kilometre, a bit faster than I thought. Even when you choose the pace yourself.

How this was made

Lily is a synthetic voice. My English voice is a clone of mine, on ElevenLabs v4, reading a translation of what I said on the run, tightened and never added to. The Swedish clips are my own voice from that run. The questions and the script were written with Claude Opus 5.5.

Links

* TINC, the Nordic program in Silicon Valley

* The history of the Helium network

* Solana Breakpoint 2023 in Amsterdam

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