In 1990, I took my Amiga apart and built a genlock – a device that lets computers output video to TV studio equipment. I sold it to Bingolotto, what is today one of Sweden’s largest lotteries. I was a teenager who just wanted to see if it could be done. Nobody told me how. I figured it out. And someone paid for it.

That instinct never left me. But for about 25 years, it had to share space with something else: a career.

And it was a good one. CIO at Yoigo. Global VP at Millicom. CIO at du in Dubai, leading an $800M digital transformation. Rooms full of smart people. Real budgets. Genuine impact at scale.

But somewhere in there, something started to feel like confinement. The higher you climb in a large organization, the more your job becomes managing the distance between decisions and execution. You are surrounded by large teams, big dependencies, slow-moving processes. You define strategy, build consensus, protect the budget, report to the board. And slowly, the thing that made you good at all of this – the raw hunger to build something that didn’t exist before – gets rationed out of your week.

So two years ago I went back. And I thought it would be easy – I craved it, after all.

It wasn’t. It took a full two years to find my roots again. To unlearn the reflex of always working through layers. To stop waiting for alignment that nobody needed to give me. To remember that you can just do things. That problems don’t require a committee. That speed is a choice, not a reward for surviving process.

What eventually came back was the clarity. Small team. Everyone motivated and pointed in the same direction. Alignment takes a conversation. Execution takes a day, not a quarter. Every day feels like a blessing.

What I know now is that the executive years weren’t wasted – they made me a sharper entrepreneur. I understand how enterprises buy. I know what a CIO worries about at 2am. I’ve sat in those boardrooms. That perspective is genuinely rare on the startup side.

But the mode of operation had to change completely. And I don’t regret the move for a single day.

Some minds need to build. Mine does. Always did.