The Thesis

Before we begin, I want to be upfront about something.

The voice in this episode is mine, but it’s AI-generated.

I cloned my voice using ElevenLabs, and the entire episode was produced that way. I think it’s important to be transparent about that. The words are mine. The ideas are mine. The delivery is artificial.

That feels like a fitting place to start, because a big part of what I want to talk about is exactly that tension: how technology should be used as a tool, not as a replacement for what is real.

This post is the written version of something deeper than a company update. It is not the pitch version. Not the investor version. This is the real version — what I actually believe, why I believe it, and what I’m asking of the people building with me.

But first, something important.

I did not start this company alone. I started it with my co-founders. This has always been about the team. I take my role as CEO extremely seriously, and I do everything I can to earn that position every day. But I would never pretend this is a one-man show. It isn’t. The reason we have something worth talking about is because a group of people decided to build it together.

Some of you reading this are part of that team. Some of you are following from the outside. Either way, I want to be straight with you, because I think that is the only way any of this works.

And to understand where we are going, you need to understand where this started.

A kid in Småland

I grew up in Åseda, a small town in Småland.

If you know anything about Småland, you know it tends to produce stubborn people. People who do not quit easily. That matters more than it might seem.

Even as a kid, I had a certain way of disappearing into things. My first-grade teacher told my parents that I was often somewhere else in my mind. Back then they called it daydreaming. It did not feel like daydreaming to me. It felt like locking in. When I got interested in something, everything else disappeared.

That trait has followed me my whole life. On some days it is a superpower. On other days it is a curse.

Very early on, I wanted to understand how things worked. I tinkered with hardware, took computers apart, put them back together, built machines from parts. I was not of the C64 generation. I started with a 286 PC running MS-DOS. From that point on, I was hooked.

I read everything I could get my hands on — Tolkien, Asimov, anything that expanded the world. I was deep into RPGs, tabletop games, worldbuilding, systems. I wrote text-based games in QBasic and spent absurd amounts of time optimizing memory just to make them run. Back then, 640 kilobytes was supposed to be enough for everyone. It rarely felt like enough.

What all of that taught me, early, was simple: systems have rules. If you understand the rules, you can make systems do what you want.

That is still basically what I do for a living.

By the age of eleven, I had set up a bulletin board system in my room called The Heart of Gold, named after the ship in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This was 1991. I was connecting with people over phone lines, learning how networks worked before I fully understood what a network even was. FidoNet. The proto-internet before the internet. I still remember the sound of a 2400 baud modem connecting.

I was also part of the wares scene. The pirating movement. Cracking and distributing software. It was not legal, and I am not trying to romanticize it. But it taught me things school never did: how communities self-organize, how information flows, how systems that try too hard to close themselves eventually get routed around.

By my mid-teens I was running Linux Slackware and compiling my own kernels. Not casually. Obsessively. Learning what each module did, what belonged, what did not, how the full system fit together. That bottom-up systems thinking never left me.

And that is where Sourceful really comes from. Not from a business plan. Not from a market map. It comes from a kid in Småland who built PCs, ran a BBS, compiled kernels, and never stopped wanting to understand how systems work.

Systems under pressure

The Navy was where systems thinking stopped being theoretical.

I started on fast attack craft with gas turbine propulsion. Raw speed. Raw power. In that environment, you are responsible for the whole system, not just one part of it. If something fails, you cannot call support. You cannot Google it. You fix it, or you have a serious problem.

Later I moved to submarines with electric battery propulsion. A completely different environment — quieter, more confined, slower in some ways, but under even greater pressure. Weeks underwater. No help coming. The same principle applied: if you do not understand the full system, you are a liability.

That shaped me profoundly.

As a marine engineer, you learn that nothing exists in isolation. The electrical system affects propulsion. Propulsion affects cooling. Cooling affects air systems. Everything touches everything else. If you only understand a component but not the system, you are dangerous.

And then there is the human side. Rough conditions. Broken sleep. Tight spaces. Stress. You learn to lead tired people in environments where mistakes have immediate physical consequences. In the Navy, the commanding officer stands in what we call the windshield — the position where the impact hits first.

That idea stayed with me.

That is how I think about leadership. When you are in the windshield, you do not get to have an off day. You do not get to be unprepared. The people around you depend on you being sharp, present, and honest about what you see and what you do not see.

First principles or nothing

After the Navy and a short period as a project leader, I did something that surprised a lot of people: I went into teaching.

I became an adjunkt, teaching marine engineers subjects like pumping technology and hydromechanics. And that is where I really fell in love with first principles.

I would stand at the whiteboard and derive SI units from scratch. No shortcuts. No hand-waving. I wanted students to understand where formulas came from, not just memorize them. I would spend so much time writing that I would lose my voice and wear out my arm.

That period shaped how I think about everything.

If you cannot derive it, you do not understand it. If you do not understand it, you cannot build on it.

For a lot of people, “first principles” is a buzzword. For me, it is literal. It is years of standing at a whiteboard, reducing ideas to fundamentals until there is nowhere left to hide.

That mindset later led me into a PhD, where I spent years studying how to optimize ship energy systems using machine learning. A PhD requires a specific kind of lock-in. But more than that, it taught me something about teamwork. Academic work is collaborative, but the thesis is still yours to defend. You build with others, but you also carry something alone.

During that work, I encountered an idea that changed my worldview: Jevons paradox.

William Stanley Jevons observed in 1865 that when coal became more efficient to use, people did not use less coal. They used more. Efficiency lowered cost. Lower cost increased accessibility. Increased accessibility increased demand.

That realization broke my brain in the best possible way.

Before that, I held a more traditional environmentalist mindset: conserve, reduce, use less. Jevons forced me to see that this framing was not morally wrong, but mechanically wrong. The path forward is not austerity. It is abundance. The way to outcompete fossil fuels is to make clean energy so cheap, so scalable, and so abundant that it wins on economics.

That was a major shift for me. I stopped being a conservationist in the traditional sense and became something closer to an accelerationist — not the reckless kind, but the kind that believes we solve the climate problem by building overwhelming clean energy capacity.

That insight became the seed of Sourceful.

The real problem: coordination

But abundance alone is not enough.

You can put solar on every roof, batteries in garages, EVs in every driveway. If none of those assets can coordinate, you have not solved the problem. You have simply created millions of independent actors in a system that fundamentally requires orchestration.

That is the transition we are living through now.

For more than a century, the power system was one-directional: big plant, long transmission lines, passive consumer. That model is ending, not because of ideology, but because the economics changed.

The grid is becoming distributed. And distributed systems only work when coordination is real.

By 2030, tens of millions of electric vehicles will be connected to European grids. Every one of them represents flexible load, storage, or both. Every rooftop solar system, every battery, every heat pump adds another actor. The problem is that these actors are largely blind to each other. Your battery does not know what my inverter is doing. Your EV charger does not know what grid frequency is doing. And the grid must balance supply and demand every second.

Not every hour. Not every minute. Every second.

That is where most of the industry made a mistake.

A lot of companies looked at this challenge and said: no problem, we will coordinate it through the cloud. Aggregate everything centrally. Send commands down through APIs. Done.

Except physics does not care about your cloud architecture.

A cloud roundtrip takes seconds. Grid events happen in milliseconds. You cannot coordinate physical infrastructure at grid speed through cloud APIs. It is a fundamental architectural mismatch.

That is what we saw.

The same systems thinking I learned in the Navy, the same first-principles approach I developed in academia, all pointed to the same answer: control has to be local. Intelligence has to be at the edge. Computation has to happen where physics actually happens.

That is the thesis.

What we are building

At Sourceful, we are building the platform that enables AI software to operate at grid speed.

Local execution. At the edge. On commodity hardware. In the real physical environment where the system actually lives.

We are not a hardware company. We do not manufacture hardware. We are not an app company either. We are infrastructure.

The simplest analogy is AWS. AWS does not run your application for you. It provides the infrastructure that makes running applications possible. We are building the equivalent infrastructure layer for energy at the edge.

And we are doing it in a way that compounds.

Every new device integration. Every driver. Every deployment. Every partner. Each one makes the next one easier. The platform gets stronger as it grows. That is by design.

This is not a product you ship once. It is a platform that compounds.

Technology, values, and the people who build it

Building something this hard is not just about having the right architecture. It is about the people.

And I do not think you can separate who you are from what you build.

I am a stoic, and I mean that in the actual philosophical sense. Marcus Aurelius. Seneca. Epictetus. Focus on what you can control. Accept what you cannot. Act with virtue. Judge yourself by your actions, not your intentions.

That philosophy has outlived empires for a reason. It works.

There is also the Lindy Effect — the idea that the longer something has survived, the longer it is likely to continue surviving. A book that has lasted two thousand years is more likely to last another two thousand than some management fad from last quarter. I think about that a lot. I would rather build my life and my company on ideas that have been stress-tested across centuries than on whatever happens to be fashionable in the moment.

There is another word I think about often: pannben.

It is Swedish. Literally “forehead bone.” In practice it means grit. Stubbornness. Refusal to quit.

I found running in my thirties. I was not a natural runner. But I locked in. Eventually I ran a 10k in 36 minutes. Then an ultra marathon of 90 kilometers. Not because it came easily, but because once I decide to do something, I keep going.

That matters in startups more than people admit.

Talent matters. Intelligence matters. But in hard things, pannben matters more. The willingness to keep going when it hurts. To do the repetitions. To come back the next day.

For over a year now, I have been waking up at five in the morning. Exercise. Journaling. Reading. Not because it is enjoyable in a Swedish winter, but because it compounds.

Compounding is one of the most powerful forces I know.

Small improvements are almost invisible day to day. But over time they separate people, teams, and companies. Individual discipline compounds into personal capability. Personal capability compounds into team performance. Team performance compounds into competitive advantage.

That is how small teams become disproportionately effective.

And health is part of that. You cannot compound if your body is failing. You cannot make sharp decisions if you are exhausted, under-recovered, and living on caffeine. Sleep, exercise, real food — this is not soft advice. It is infrastructure. Your body is the hardware everything else runs on.

The team is the moat

I do not want people on this journey who are here only for a paycheck.

That is not a moral statement. It is a practical one. Life is too short to spend your working hours on something you do not care about. The best work comes from genuine engagement — the kind where you cannot stop thinking about the problem because it bothers you that it is not solved yet.

I still think tinkering is one of the most enjoyable things in the world. That has never gone away. Whether it was optimizing heating systems in my first house, building backup power, buying an early EV, mining Ethereum, importing the first iPad, building a 3D printer, or automating a home — it is all the same impulse. Go deep. Understand the system. Make it work.

That joy matters.

Because you cannot grind people into excellence. I have seen attempts. It does not work. Sustainable excellence comes from people who genuinely care.

A few years ago I read The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, and it resonated because I was already living it. Leadership is not about applying a neat framework. It is about making hard calls, often between bad options, and then carrying those decisions with integrity. Leadership is earned every day. It is not contained in a title.

And this is why I believe something that sounds counterintuitive but feels increasingly obvious: in the age of AI, the human team matters more, not less.

AI makes execution more available. Code generation, analysis, pattern recognition — increasingly these are commodity capabilities. If everyone has access to similar tools, what matters more?

Judgment. Taste. Conviction. Trust. Culture. The ability to disagree productively and still commit together.

That is why I say the team is the moat.

Not the technology. Not the tooling. The people, and how they work together.

What I’m asking

So here is what I am asking.

Bring your full self to this. Not the polished version that performs well in meetings. The real version. The one that actually cares.

Get a little better every day. Not dramatically. Just enough to let it compound.

Speak up when something is wrong. Problems do not get cheaper with silence. In a startup, silence is one of the most expensive things there is.

Hold each other accountable. Hold me accountable too. I do not want to be surrounded by people who tell me what I want to hear. I want people who tell me what I need to hear.

And enjoy the building. Seriously. If there is no joy in solving hard problems with smart people, something is off.

Focus on what we can control. The market will behave however it behaves. Competitors will do what they do. We do not control that. We control how sharp we are. How quickly we move. How honestly we work together.

That is the philosophy.

Everything else is execution.

Why this matters

We started Sourceful because we believe the energy system should work for people, not the other way around.

We believe abundance, not austerity, is how we solve the climate problem.

We believe open, distributed, locally intelligent infrastructure is the path there.

I do not know exactly how this ends. Nobody does.

But I do know this: the people building this, the team around it, and the builders who will join this platform have a real chance to create something that matters. Something durable. Infrastructure. The kind of thing that, once it exists, is very hard to replace.

That is worth getting up at five in the morning for.

That is worth the hard days.

That is worth building.

Let’s build it.

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