into the heart of the storm
Oslo, Norge
Joined August 2014
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Today, @Stendr_tech announces a $5.4M pre-seed round. One of the largest in Nordic Defence Tech history.
When I stepped away from Sky Mavis, I had nearly eight years of hard lessons in my pocket. What it takes to survive near-bankruptcy. What it takes to find product-market fit. What it takes to scale something real under pressure.
Speed and focus. The startups that win move faster than anyone thinks is reasonable, and cut everything that does not serve the mission. Those lessons apply everywhere. Especially in defence, where the cost of moving slowly is measured in lives.
Stendr is building the foundational technology stack for a new Nordic defence prime: an AI-native platform for the rapid development and deployment of defence software and hardware. Built to perform today and adapt to the warfare of tomorrow.
The immediate problem we are pursuing is among the most urgent in modern warfare. Drones have changed what the battlefield looks like, and Europe's detection and response capability has not kept pace. We are building the sovereign technology to close that gap.
Norway is where we are building it. The engineering talent is world-class, the strategic context is clear, and the window to build something foundational is open.
I am building it alongside Robin Alexander Holm Pedersen, one of the most versatile engineers I have met, and Markus Leonhard Hansen, who built Gungnir of Norway from nothing into a globally recognized hardware brand. Together, we have the software, AI, and hardware depth to build something that lasts.
A big thank you to Rainfall Ventures, ACME, Skyfall Ventures, Sisyphus Ventures, Antler, Startuplab, Max Samuel, Magne Uppman, Thomas Falck, Tord Moe Laeskogen, BORGET Sebastien, Arthur Madrid, Joachim Haraldsen, Alex Svanevik, Kenneth King, Jeffrey Zirlin, Sandeep Nailwal, Stephen McKeon, Marcus Krylborn, Yat Siu, Michael Arnold, Einar H. Braathen, Sebastian Almnes, Thuc Hoang and Andreas Helbig for backing me to build again, and from Norway no less. It truly means everything.
We are hiring a software architect, senior electronics and cybernetics engineer, and growth operations lead. The people who join now will help define what European defence looks like for the next generation.
Apply at stendr.com/
Sharing a glimpse from a recent field test where we are pushing the boundaries of our passive/multistatic radar network.
Passive means the nodes don't transmit. A radar that transmits tells the enemy exactly where it is. Ours stay quiet until we decide otherwise. And because it's a network of many small, cost-efficient nodes rather than one vulnerable radar, losing a node doesn't leave you blind.
But none of that counts for anything until it works outside a lab. So we collect data in real conditions – real clutter, real signals, real weather. Every test feeds the models, and every round of data makes the next test sharper.
Detection is the first step. The data we collect now is what will let us predict how the enemy flies and, ultimately, take it out before it reaches its target.
Psycheout retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Radars aren’t the most sexy thing but in the words of Brad Pitt in Moneyball - it gets us on base
Stendr Founder & CEO Aleksander Leonard Larsen (@Psycheout86) shares why advancing the radar market is important in an age of drone warfare:
"I think there are many reasons for radars, but most importantly, it's actually quite an underserved market."
"It's not that sexy to make a radar. Everyone actually wants to make the thing that blows things up."
"There's like 5,000 or more drone companies that try to shoot down other drones. That makes a lot of sense."
"We found a really elegant way of making a radar, countering the drones in the same way that they counter our large radar systems today."
"Right now, if a big radar gets destroyed, it's incredibly expensive. It leaves our battlefields incredibly vulnerable."
"So, we're decentralizing those radars and creating a passive radar system that is hard to take down."
Psycheout retweeted
Stendr Founder & CEO Aleksander Leonard Larsen (@Psycheout86) shares why advancing the radar market is important in an age of drone warfare:
"I think there are many reasons for radars, but most importantly, it's actually quite an underserved market."
"It's not that sexy to make a radar. Everyone actually wants to make the thing that blows things up."
"There's like 5,000 or more drone companies that try to shoot down other drones. That makes a lot of sense."
"We found a really elegant way of making a radar, countering the drones in the same way that they counter our large radar systems today."
"Right now, if a big radar gets destroyed, it's incredibly expensive. It leaves our battlefields incredibly vulnerable."
"So, we're decentralizing those radars and creating a passive radar system that is hard to take down."
Big day for us at @Stendr_tech
Adding Michael Kattouf, 13 years at Palantir to the team as a founding engineer 🚀
Strength before weakness
Finland stands in full solidarity with its ally Germany after the Russian hybrid attack in Leipzig.
We know the Russian playbook. It attempts to intimidate us, to undermine our resolve and our willingness to support Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion. It will not succeed.
We will stand united and deter anyone from attacking our freedom and security.
As the strong measures announced by the German government show, any action against any one of us will be met with a clear response.
Our commitment to supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s aggression is unwavering.
I continue to be in close touch with Chancellor Merz and other Allies.
Norway is one of the biggest donors to Ukraine.
Just confirmed another $7Bn going into the war effort.
Proud to be the citizen of a country who is putting our money where our mouth is
nrk.no/artikkel/store-i-kyiv…
Played magic for the first time ~20 years ago
Still enjoy an occasional pre-release
3-1 this time at The Hobbit with black/red dragons
Lived my life digitally
Now I spend my time building a hardware company drawing on the digital experience.
Goal: Make physical systems operate at digital speed.
Of course it’s damn North Korea supplying the missiles
It gives me immense motivation that we are building something which will negatively impact these fucks
Psycheout retweeted
That was a brutal shakeout.
We lost a bunch of teams and soldiers as the excesses of 2021 took a lot of time to work off.
Gaming was the hottest subsector of crypto in '21. But aside from a great 2023/2024, it's underperformed dramatically. And a lot of it is OUR fault. My fault.
Here's the history of crypto gaming from my perspective.
2017: CryptoKitties moment. Gaming exposes scability issues with Ethereum
2018: CryptoKitty decline. Formation of Axie community.
2019: Bear market. Some interesting experiments with tokenization of game items. Axie Land sale.
2020: Axie Classic launched. SLP pumped by 4chan /biz creating pumpanomics flywheel. AXS launched on Binance. Binance lists SLP. Axie hits 10,000 DAU.
2021: Axie goes crazy. Billions pumped into crypto gaming. Lots of bad teams funded. Launch of Ronin.
2022: Pain and torture.
2023: Pixels goes crazy at the end of the year.
2024: Pixels/Ronin go crazy. Opportunistic teams start showing up again. RON makes ATH but underperforms since then.
2025: Pain and torture.
2026: More pain but signs of renewal and final capitulation from bad teams. Interesting experiments start showing up again.
It's been a mental rollercoaster to go through this. But I'm always able to find some perspective and reasons to be grateful. Axie, if it weren't for a few meetings and even taking on a third party dev contract would have died in 2018 and none of these "problems" would even exist.
And that would be a much sadder timeline.
So in some ways, it's a blessing to still be here, alive when others are giving up or being forced to fold.
And i'm grateful to everyone who's shared moments with us on this journey, and of course, to those that are still here.
Maybe crypto is over and the haters will be finally right. But that's never been the case. And it's always been during these moments of pain that sunlight begins to break through.
Cycle theory says we bottom in October/November. Perhaps we bottom now.
TBH i don't care, because the market isn't something I can control. What we can do is make sure that we do the hard work and lay the foundation so that when the time comes we're positioned correctly, with strong products, strong community, and innovation.
Anyways. Now we're here. And teams are starting to pick up the pace again.
Here's what I saw over the weekend!
nitter.cf/PlayCalamity/status/20…
nitter.cf/Ronin_Network/status/2…
nitter.cf/Ronin_Network/status/2…
nitter.cf/AxieInfinity/status/20…
Axie is taking over Pin Drop next week!
The FREE match-3 game from @goodvibesclub.
Play in your browser and climb 4 leaderboards for exclusive rewards.
Psycheout retweeted
A few principles I’ve come to believe about competition:
1) You’re more likely to win or lose because of your own company’s actions than those of your competition. This is particularly true of startups but I’ve found surprisingly true at scale as well.
2) Being copied isn’t always inspiring. But it usually means you’re leading. Don’t waste energy looking over your shoulder. Lead, don’t follow.
3) There’s more to learn from customers than competitors. Consumer markets are hard, but they’re honest. Sales, engagement, and retention are the only scoreboard that matters.
4) There’s a difference between obsessing over competitors and harnessing a deeply competitive spirit. The former distracts you from your true intuition. The latter gives you the extra motivation to do your best work.
5) Creating a market is valuable. Continuing to lead after others copy you is even more valuable. You’re innovative and durable.
6) Remember big, growing markets attract competition. Competition validates the opportunity.
Now go win.
This demand must be met by European companies
Legacy primes will take a slice sure, but the stage is set for several new European unicorns
🚀
Not surprising
Europe needs to shed its dependencies asap
Good for European defence companies 🇳🇴
Good for US in the long term - a strong Europe can hold the wolves at bay.
France and Germany already cut Palantir from intelligence. Now the military. Macron and Merz just pledged to build a European rival to Palantir's battlefield AI, after both countries' spy agencies already swapped it for a homegrown tool. Karp called Germany's refusal to use his software "conversations about witchcraft." thenextweb.com/news/france-g…
