Twenty years around the inputs a flourishing society runs on —
capital, energy, manufacturing, artificial intelligence and compute.

The machine that builds the machine. Manufacturing for atoms, AI for bits.

I find myself at the most interesting moment of my working life, and the reason is a blender: capital, risk, manufacturing, hardware and software — five things I spent twenty years learning separately — have suddenly become the same problem. To see why, start with the oldest frame there is.

The short version: the world still runs on the fundamental factors of production — Land, Labour, Capital — but the mode of the inputs has changed. Agency now also belongs to the machines, which makes them both inputs to the machine that builds the machine, and output from it. The machine that builds the hardware the intelligence runs on — and everything else made of atoms — is manufacturing: harder than it looks, and vastly under-rated as a source of both wealth creation and value destruction.

And risk is being re-priced. A bank prices the downside and says no in committee; a startup treats risk as oxygen and lets portfolio mathematics carry the failures. When the cost of building collapses, decisions that used to be startup-grade bets become banker-grade experiments — for the first time you can underwrite like a credit officer and move like a founder at the same time. The risk doesn't disappear; it migrates, from "can we build it?" to "can we trust what we built?" — and beneath that sits the sharper question: what deserves to be built at all? When building is cheap, focus becomes expensive.

This page is about that journey — from investment banking, analysing and creating systems for capital allocation and business strategy (via the Great Financial Crisis); through helping blue-chip global enterprises allocate billions of dollars on a daily basis; to the inside of a factory, and how things made of atoms actually get built efficiently; to AI — first pre-agentic, from a board seat, and now agentic, as a builder.

The full argument, at essay length →

The inputs of a flourishing society — and the Nordic hand of cards

Societies flourish on a short list of inputs: affordable energy, basic materials, industrial capacity — and now, increasingly, compute. Europe has concluded it must rebuild its position in all four. What interests me is that the Nordics hold an unusual hand for exactly this: a low-cost, low-carbon grid; genuine abundance in raw materials; relative political stability; ice-free ports; a corporate history built on engineering and innovation — and a domestic market so small that thinking in global market access has always been second nature rather than strategy.

Most of what I've worked on these past months turns out to be expressions of that one pattern: a large-scale industrial investment made computable to bank-grade standards, data-center economics modelled as physics, commercial strategy for infrastructure financed at scale, manufacturing software before that. Energy-and-compute is one expression; manufacturing is another; the thread is the inputs themselves, and the joints between them. The work page shows the expressions; the essay makes the argument; the December 2025 op-ed is the same argument in public form.

The through-line is curiosity

I have been a lifelong learner by default — it is the habit underneath everything on this site. It filled the toolbox: fire-control mathematics, credit committees, factory floors, term sheets, board rooms, five countries' ways of doing business. And it is what defines the way I view the current changing landscape and capabilities. I had circled the field for years — the Norna board seat was no coincidence — but for me, as a non-coder, the day Claude's collaborative coding tools were released, 10 February 2026, I bought a subscription within hours. The thought was immediate and specific: this changes everything — now I can build myself.

I had carried ideas for twenty years and always needed someone else's "labour and capital" to build them. Five months later — almost to the day, and as an extracurricular project — I have gone from never having produced a line of code in my life to deployed agentic systems: some I use myself, some are used by others. To be clear about the why: my aim was never to become the one doing the prompting. I learned this because understanding first-hand what these systems can and cannot do — the possibilities and the constraints — is becoming table stakes for allocating capital and attention inside organisations. The building was the tuition. But the speed is not the point; the point is what a broad toolbox does when the tools finally connect. Most of what I now build well comes from thinking laterally — carrying a discipline from one world into another: credit-file provenance into software, fire-mission sequencing into agent orchestration, factory quality gates into AI governance. Orthogonal thinking is the dividend curiosity pays.

— Oscar

Information, thoughts, experiences and opinions — likely unstructured. A place to share what I have learned and what I have gathered from others, and to think out loud about the professional territory I find interesting. If something here is useful to your own thinking, take it. If you believe we can collaborate effectively, get in touch. If you believe I'm wrong somewhere, write to me — that's the conversation I enjoy most.