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 Swedish corporate franchise, covered across ~80 markets — a client portfolio of around USD 100M in revenue, multi-billion-dollar credit allocations, personal credit signing authority, banking coverage of Sweden's largest private equity houses and the companies they own. 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.
The other side of the table
Co-founded MTEK Industry — manufacturing-operations software — and have led it commercially and financially since, from zero to international scale and recognition 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. A small company selling to very large ones, which is a specific and unforgiving school. Alongside it: board member and early investor at an AI data company, where I led the Seed round, and Interstice — never a full-time occupation, but the vehicle I use to engage with different kinds of company on different kinds of strategic problem, a handful of mandates a year.
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. Since then, as work alongside the day job, I have designed and deployed systems in real use by demanding counterparties: diligence platforms that produce committee-grade output, physics-grounded feasibility models, market-intelligence pipelines. 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. The build platform and written method behind that work are described, in more detail than most people will want, at orch.build.
What this was for: not a new career in software. The advisory work has always followed whatever the pivotal strategic question of the moment happens to be, and in 2026 that question is what AI actually does to a business. Knowing first-hand what these systems can and cannot do is the difference between a board that can price an AI decision and one that is repeating a vendor's claim back to itself. I wanted to be in the first group, so I put in the hours.
Where this points
A long-term seat where strategy and execution are held by the same person — leading strategy, or leading the business — either inside a company or from the investing side of one. The shape of the seat matters more than the size of the organisation: close enough to the decision that direction and delivery are not separable, and far enough into the horizon that the answer takes years to arrive. That is the shape I keep returning to, and the one the record actually argues for.
The sector matters less than the shape of the problem, though industry and industrial technology are home turf. If there is a theme I would choose, it is the build-out — energy, basic materials, industrial capacity, compute: the inputs Europe has decided it must rebuild, and where the Nordics hold an unusual hand. What I want from the coming decades is to work where those 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.
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.