Thirty-seven minutes on two runs a day apart: the two years after the money came in, and home. An interview with Lily. I answered her questions in Swedish while running; the English voice you hear is my cloned voice saying what I said, and the Swedish is me, out of breath. The script was written with Claude Opus 5.5, from my tape. Two days after the first run I set off again, this time from our new office on the south side of Kalmar. Across a field where they are digging, and into a wind that came straight at me over open ground beside the E22. I said into the phone that it might be too windy to transcribe. It wasn’t. After a while I found shelter behind a few trees. The next morning, a Tuesday, I went out from the same office again, onto the trails. This episode is both runs. The anchor Part one ended at Christmas 2024, on the Canary Islands, with more than half the round still missing and Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things in my hands. The book fitted where I was. All autumn I had been fighting, and for a while I was sure it was going to go to hell. What Horowitz describes is the struggle: there is always a new obstacle, and being a founder is about always finding a way. It is meant to be hard. If it weren’t, the journey would not be worth it. I wrote then that I needed an anchor, and in part one I called it the other side of momentum, what holds you in place. On this run I put it better. The anchor is knowing that the decisions are mine, the bad ones too. You can never blame someone else. What I believed In November 2024, if I had looked two years ahead, I would have said: we have launched in the US, I live in San Francisco with my family, and we are raising a Series A. Fairly naive. But it is what you have to believe, with your whole body, or you cannot make anyone else believe it. I am not disappointed that it turned out otherwise. I am grateful for where it has taken me and the team. Here is what 2025 was instead. In February we launched the Zap, a small box that sits by your electricity meter and reads it. In the summer the local utility signed for hundreds of them. In July we decided to do one thing only: connect home batteries, solar panels and cars as simply as possible. In the autumn we bet on the car, on a charger that can run power both ways so the car’s battery can help the house. A hundred and forty-three households joined the waiting list in five days. In November we put the token launch on hold, with the board behind us. Rådighet In April I wrote to our investors: We are killing B2C. In the same letter I mentioned a support email I answered at half past seven on a Saturday morning, to someone who was never going to become a customer. There I was, the CEO, answering support. Being close to the product is fine. But selling to households is painful when you have no rådighet over the product. Rådighet is a Swedish word with no good English match. It means having both the right and the power to act on something. Lily put it like this: your neighbour’s roof is leaking and you know exactly how to fix it, but you have no rådighet over it. It isn’t your roof. In people’s homes we had none over the network, the wifi, or a home user who doesn’t keep track of all of it. The car settled it. With a partner we built software to steer two-way chargers: charge and discharge to cut the peaks and follow the spot price, using the car’s battery. Great technology, and great pitch deck material. It worked, and yet it didn’t. Every support case that came to us was about something we did not control. We sent a signal; the charger and the car did not see fit to carry it out. The technology wasn’t ready. It still isn’t. Rådighet is the answer. What we own, we can answer for. That is how a company built on boxes in other people’s homes came to own batteries. Our first went into a commercial property in Kalmar on 2 September and started work on 1 October. Our new office is in the same building. Killing an idea Writing those words was heavy. The spring was heavy. We had spent years trying to grow a consumer business, I had pitched it on stage, and my identity was coloured by it. Shutting something down feels like failing, and in some sense it was. But to start something new, you have to stop. I slept badly. When we shut down B2C we also reshaped the team, and as CEO I had to end several people’s employment. It was necessary, and it was not fun. Ending someone’s employment means something failed, on both sides. What I have learned is to be clear and to listen, and I am still far from good at either. Early this year one of my co-founders chose to move on. It was good for me, for the group, and for them. I should have acted much earlier on the signals. It isn’t completely dead, either. We stopped new development, but the business we have lives on. This industry runs on trust, and sometimes you are just too early. No I take a no with a shrug now: oh well, then we’ll do it again. When I talk to a VC I turn the question round early and ask about their timing and their funds. Then a no is about their thesis, not mine. It still stings, less than before, and less when the team trusts each other and talks about it. One no this summer was ours to give: a deal with a hotel, with big potential. We said a flat no. In the end it’s about people: do you trust them, do you want to work with them? If not, shut it down at once. That goes for raising money too. Three moments Running a company is about taking a small part of the world and shaping it after an idea. Lily asked for three moments from the two years. The dinner in New York. My birthday in San Francisco. And now: the right keel, the right track, the right team, the right execution. I am at peace with the sunk costs. After an hour I said: now we take a break. Five o’clock I get up at five every day of the week. I run three kilometres, or train for twenty minutes, and then I write my diary in a Leuchtturm notebook with a Lamy fountain pen. On the second run I talked about these runs. I write a list of questions, go out, answer them freely, and send the tape to a project in Claude Code that transcribes it, understands it, puts it in context and makes a podcast of it. I think that’s magic. Sometimes it shows me something I didn’t understand myself before I started. We live where we are We are selling the house. Moving has always been with us, and Madeleine and I are alike there: it’s a renewal we look for. What stays fixed is the family and the children. We usually say: we live where we are. We want to be closer to town and to school. The house is very good: solar panels, a battery, good heating, low running costs, a quiet area. It is a few kilometres too far out. And freedom is maybe the most important thing. We don’t want a big garden that steers our life. At least not now. I am fairly sure I have come closer to both my children in these two years, even though I have worked a lot. We talk about everything at home. I see myself in my son. He installs NixOS and Arch Linux, mods everything, programs many hours a week and wants to find better ways to compute neural networks. Having a system and trying to make it better, and to understand it. What has it cost? A lot, in a relationship where one person works hard. I can disappear into deep subjects, and that is both a vice and a superpower. I come home to a cooked meal. I don’t cook, I don’t do laundry, I hardly clean. I do the dishes. That is our agreement: I work more, and Madeleine takes on more at home. Screens off between eight and nine, in bed by nine, up at five, weekends too. Most of it is still joy, not compulsion. A suitcase each When Lily asked what the years have given us, I went back to before Sourceful. I defended my PhD in December 2018, and the world opened up, like being eighteen and allowed to drive. In 2019 I took every trip I could: Glasgow, then Vancouver on an exchange. One day I walked up to the University of British Columbia, handed over my thesis as a CV and said: here I … This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit frahlg.substack.com
