It begins

"I'm leaving Nordnet."

David smiled. "Then let's do it."

Two of us, dark water below the brygga, and a decision that felt way bigger than the planks we were standing on.

How did we get here? It all began four days prior.

The Climbing Session

Tuesday. David the genius and I went climbing together. To give a short background about David, when he was in high school, he won the Young Entrepreneur Prize. Because as you do, he created an industry-leading eye tracking software. In high school! Here's the news article about it (opens in new tab).

Anyways, in between the trials of completing a route, David had something he wanted to show me.

"The stuff you can do with AI right now is insane. I've been playing with it for a while, and honestly, most people have no idea what's already possible," David said.

I had to pause for a moment to take it all in. "Wait, what do you mean?"

I mean, I had been feeling this pull for a while. I loved Nordnet, but there was this itch, you know? So hearing David talk like this just lit something up in me.

"You gotta show me this!" I basically yelled at him.

"Sure!" was David's response.

The Asian Restaurant

Fast forward a bit, after the climbing session we sat at an Asian restaurant. The kind of place with sticky menus and way too bright lighting. David pulled out his laptop and showed me the most incredible things I had seen in a while. He showed me what these models could actually do. Understand a pile of messy files, search through them, connect the dots. Take a half-formed idea you describe in plain words and help you shape it into something real.

All I could say was, "Wait... it can do that?"

My head was spinning. Every example David pulled up cracked something open in me. This wasn't a toy. This was the kind of thing that changes how everything works.

And it hit me — things were changing way faster than anyone around me realized. Way faster than I'd been moving.

The Decision

Saturday. No restaurant this time. We were out on a brygga, the water dark and cold below us, breath fogging in the February air. We'd been talking non-stop since Tuesday and the more we talked, the more obvious it got. Sitting still wasn't an option anymore. Not for me, not for him.

"I'm thinking about leaving Nordnet," I said. Out loud, for the first time.

David was quiet for a second. Then a small nod. "Yeah. I think you should."

"Let's do something. You and me."

A grin slowly spread across his face. "Let's do it."

And that is the story of how me and David decided to bet on each other. Two weeks later I handed in my notice at Nordnet. Neither of us knew exactly what we were building yet. But I knew one thing — the world was moving too fast to wait around and figure it out from the sidelines.

It begins.