V · Person

I build small companies and write what I learn.

Story

Desk · Villa AlexMMXXVI

I grew up in a small town in southern Sweden, the kind of place where you build because there is nothing to consume. I taught myself to code on a borrowed Thinkpad and never quite stopped.

I've spent the last decade between Stockholm and Lisbon — building things that try to take a small amount of friction out of how people work. First as a designer, then as an engineer, now as an operator running three companies and the small team around each.

The current chapter is about AI. Not as a product category, but as a kind of leverage that lets two or three serious people build what used to need fifty. I think that shift is the most interesting thing happening in software, and I am trying to be honest in public about what I am learning while it happens.

Outside of work: I run slowly, cook deliberately, and read a lot of architecture and a little philosophy. I am married and we have a small daughter who already knows the word "ship."

Principles

Six things I keep coming back to.

01

Operate, don't launch

A bet is a five-year posture, not a moment.

02

Simpler than yesterday

Cleverness is a tax future-me has to pay.

03

Write to think

If I cannot write the argument, I do not have one.

04

Small teams, long horizons

Two good people and time beat ten and urgency.

05

Customers, then strangers

Make ten people love it before a thousand know it.

06

Quiet leverage

The best AI work will not look like AI work.

Beliefs about work

A breath · Ubud08°30′S

I believe the best work in the next decade will be done in small teams with long horizons, using AI as a quiet kind of leverage — not a feature to ship.

I believe in customers over funding, durability over momentum, honesty over polish, and writing as the cheapest tool we have for thinking clearly.

I believe a company is a piece of design, and that the people inside it deserve the same care as the product they ship.

Get in touch

The best way to reach me is a short, honest email.

pelle@pelleforsman.com →