Fire control, credit files, factory floors, agents.
The jobs look unrelated until you notice what they share: systems where many moving parts must agree, decisions that are expensive to reverse, and the discipline of being checkable. Every chapter added a language — and the languages compound.
Coordinating fire
Sergeant, Swedish Amphibious Forces — Battalion Artillery Group Commander, part of the battalion command structure coordinating indirect fire across army, amphibious, naval and air assets. Green Beret. The first education in high-stakes decisions under uncertainty, and in the difference between a plan and an execution — you get both wrong once, early, and never think about them casually again.
Finance, the hard years
Investment banking at Lehman Brothers and then Nomura — industrials and financial sponsors across the Nordics and the Middle East, structured products through the global financial crisis, part of a core team building derivative-based stabilisation deals with sovereign wealth funds. Top-5% ranked, in the years when the market was teaching everyone humility. Then development finance at Swedfund: equity, debt and project finance in emerging markets, where capital meets the real economy with no cushion.
A decade at Citi
Director, Corporate Banking. P&L and balance-sheet responsibility for roughly half of Citi's Nordic corporate franchise across ~80 markets — multi-billion-dollar credit allocations, nine-figure revenue exposure, personal credit signing authority, banking coverage of Sweden's largest private equity houses. On the side of the desk that never gets to round up: the credit file either holds or it doesn't. Also EMEA IoT Lead and Nordic Digital Innovation Lead — the early seats at the intersection of industry, infrastructure and technology, working with the startups that became unicorns.
Building one, boarding others
Co-founded MTEK Industry — manufacturing-operations software — and led it commercially and financially from zero to international scale, recognised by industry analysts as a global leader in its category: aerospace & defence, automotive and infrastructure-equipment customers across three continents, $30M+ raised across equity, convertibles and debt, C-level partnerships with hyperscalers and tier-one industrials. CFO first, then CCO — the full translation loop between a product, a factory floor and a term sheet. Board member and early investor at an AI data company; led its Seed round. A private advisory practice alongside, at executive and board level.
The AI turn
I had circled AI for a decade — the Norna seat was no coincidence — but the day Claude's collaborative coding tools shipped, 10 February 2026, I subscribed within hours, with one specific thought: now I can build myself. I had never written a line of code. Five months later, as an extracurricular project, the practice exists: my own governed build platform, my own written operating method — not products, but the way a workshop builds its own jigs — and a series of agentic systems in production use, some mine, some others': committee-grade diligence platforms, physics-grounded feasibility engines, compliance-first clinical architectures, market-intelligence pipelines, delivered to demanding counterparties and reviewed by serious domain experts. The banking discipline turned out to be the differentiator: systems whose every number can be checked, that refuse rather than flatter, and that ship with their gaps stated.
Where this points
Toward the build-out — energy, basic materials, industrial capacity, compute: the inputs a flourishing society runs on, and the ones Europe has decided it must rebuild. The Nordics hold an unusual hand here — the low-carbon grid, the raw materials, the stability, the ice-free ports, the export instinct born of a small home market — and I find I keep gravitating to where those advantages meet real projects. What I want from the coming decades is to work where these threads knot together: capital that thinks in decades, execution that moves in months, and the languages of credit, factory and code needed in the same room. The subject matter matters less than the shape of the problem — the build-out is simply where that shape is clearest right now.
Raised in Sweden, schooled partly in the UK; early career in the US twice — a technology holding company as a young analyst, later New York with Citi — a formative business-analyst year with Electrolux in Argentina, and the Gulf years from Dubai through the crisis. The Nordics are home and base. The habit that survives all of it: assume the room thinks differently than you do, and find out how before deciding.