Co-Founder at Dragon Guild. Positive change, digital, & education activist. Dad. Entrepreneur. Changemaker. Speaker. Coach. Friend. Curious. LiG!
Finland
Joined March 2009
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Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
“The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles.”
A new concept: vintage friend.
Someone you haven’t seen for ages, but when you meet again, everything just clicks. The conversation flows, the connection is still there, and suddenly everything goes WOW.
Some friendships don’t age, they get vintage. ❤️
Thank you 🙏
Finland always stands on the side of peace, and we are working together to achieve it. Today in Oslo, we met with Norwegian Prime Minister @jonasgahrstore, Ukrainian President @ZelenskyyUa, and U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff.
Peace requires patience, but war doesn’t wait. It is our duty to do what we can to bring Russia's war of aggression to an end. We stand with Ukraine.
Today was a step towards a just and lasting peace.
Photo: Pavlo Yurkin
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
200 AUAR micro factories. That’s all the UK needs to clear its entire yearly housing backlog. 🏗️
I just visited AUAR in London. They are building fully autonomous micro factories for houses. A robotic arm, a robotic saw, a robotic assembly table. All of it fits in a shipping container.
The bet: Ship the factory to the construction site. Build walls there.
For 100 years people tried to industrialize housing. Every attempt failed.
Transport costs kill the economics. The factory is too expensive, the product too heavy.
AUAR inverts it. Ship the factory, not the product.
Two containers build a village. Ten build a small town. 200 build everything the UK needs in a year. And now they are starting to scale production.
Mollie and Gilles are architects who spent a decade researching construction robotics before it was cool, they even wrote the book on it.
We visited them as they are finishing their latest micro factory for a home builder on the US East Coast. One micro factory. 40 homes. Next they will help to build new UK cities for a million people.
Disclaimer: we’re small investors, big fans..
Disclaimer 2: Yes, the housing crisis can be fixed by robots. 🦾🇪🇺
Full video on Youtube: youtu.be/FhUQ4YVQL3g
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Linux. Git. SSH. MySQL. IRC.
Almost all started by individual Finns. 🇫🇮
The key here is individuals. The more organizations or broader environment get involved, the worse it gets.
It’s nice to be proud of where these things came from. But what matters more is what you do with them.
European individuals can invent. But America is, ironically, a much better collective environment for trying new things and turning them into something impactful.
That’s why so many these ambitious people move there.
Building something great is and needs to be a shared ambition. This has been missing from Europe maybe the last 70-100 years. Ambition is very little at all. Shared ambition even less.
Especially now with AI, you can raise your ambition a lot. Build the best products in the world. Make rockets, satellites, drones, robots, software, drugs, whatever.
Remove councils. Fire the grey hair boards. Refuse to raise from the EU financier VCs. Incorporate in Delaware if you have to. Put talented individuals in charge.
Averaging everyone’s ideas doesn’t produce great work and working with people stuck in the past is not worth it.
Reset your thinking.
What would it take for you to be the best of your generation?
What’s the greatest thing you could possibly build?
How could you build fast?
Make it matter.
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
After we have determined all the proofs, discovered all the drugs, found all the new materials, we will have to face the reality that our deepest problems are political, philosophical and psychological.
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Happy to announce the launch of the new 100 Year website we built for the person who coined the term "personal computer' and co-created the first online community: @stewartbrand. It includes his entire ~50,000 photo archive that is now in the Public Domain stewartbrand.org/
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Energy capacity = economic capacity, in one chart
There are no low electricity, rich countries
"Energy Capacity = Economic Capacity"
Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on why America's power grid is the ceiling on growth:
"We went through 10 to 15 years where essentially I was taking coal offline at the rate I was adding renewables, and essentially the nation was flatlined in terms of overall energy capacity."
"So essentially our economic capacity as a nation, flat for fifteen years."
"Even with that, we've gone to maybe increasing our national energy capacity 4% per year. Going from essentially zero to one."
"Nuclear as base load is a fabulous thing that we want to go build more of. Unfortunately all of our renewables have deep dependencies in China."
"Energy capacity somewhat dampens how euphoric we can get on AI. Why build a new data center and buy the million GPUs if I can't power them?"
@PGelsinger @RaghuRaghuram @appenz
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
All my work online for a guaranteed 100 years.
It's a new service being offered by WordPress. They tried it out on me. I think it's great.
Explained here: wordpress.com/blog/2025/02/1…
This is such a gift to the world. All of @stewartbrand’s work: writing, festival shenanigans, & 50,000(!) photos, dating back to the 50s: stewartbrand.org/
(Where else could you find Marshall McLuhan, Brian Eno, and Marlon Brando in one place!?)
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Context:
300k tonnes of diesel = 93 million gallons.
US uses 160 to 170 million gallons per day - so 300k tonnes would last 13-14 hours.
Total order of 1.8 million tonnes = ~82 hours of US use = ~3 days 10 hours.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm1d…
I just said yesterday to someone that it seems that @Apple is the only big player with a business model & capex that can survive the small revenue streams of on-device AI.
Tony Fadell on on-device AI in @TechCrunch
“Trust and safety are going to be paramount with anything that we turn over to some kind of intelligence,” Fadell said. “The only company I could see right now — maybe one other — is Apple who could do this. Apple has all the hardware, they have all the chips, they have all the pieces, but they don’t have all the AI stuff.”
“When you’re hearing all of these things about, ‘Oh, data centers are going to conquer the world,’ … I don’t believe it,” he said. “I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen this play out in the internet days and what have you. We have so much power on the device now, and even more compute, and they’re still battery operated.”
I'm not convinced Apple is set up to execute well on agentic AI, but I'm optimistic that Ternus is going to fix software engineering.
The whole article is worth a read, @tfadell is a legend, of course.
techcrunch.com/2026/10/07/to…
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Europe is the only region stupid enough to invest all it's money into other region's economies and then complain that their own economy doesn't improve.
🇺🇸🇪🇺 Europe once had factories and no money. Now it has the money, but it sends much of it away.
Where do European savings go? Across the Atlantic, into America, where they flow into US equities, Treasuries, and other financial assets—and, increasingly, into the valuations of a handful of tech giants.
Those returns are difficult for American factories to match, which helps push capital toward finance and technology rather than manufacturing.
Meanwhile, European plants face high energy costs, weak investment, and growing Chinese competition—all problems that more capital could help address, yet European savings continue to finance American assets.
I call this “the West’s carry trade against itself”: Europe saves; America turns those savings into financial assets and inflated tech valuations; meanwhile, China builds the factories.
The chart below shows twenty years of this dynamic.
More on this soon: open.substack.com/pub/europe…
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Je ne sais pas si vous mesurez ce qui est en train de se passer.
Alex Karp, le patron de Palantir, ne va plus chercher ses talents à Harvard. Il les forme lui-même. Des jeunes de 18 ans, sans diplôme, choisis sur leur seul talent, qui codent sur de vrais projets et lisent de la philosophie politique entre deux sprints. Il appelle ça « le diplôme Palantir ». Et aujourd'hui le New York Post titre que les boîtes tech lancent leurs propres programmes parce qu'elles ne peuvent plus compter sur l'Ivy League.
Ce n'est pas une anecdote RH. C'est un basculement de civilisation.
Pendant des décennies, les entrepreneurs ont confié à l'université la mission la plus sacrée qui soit : former les esprits. Ils comprennent aujourd'hui que cette mission a été trahie. Les institutions censées produire des penseurs libres produisent des conformistes. Le mérite a été remplacé par des critères opaques. L'enseignement est devenu catéchisme. Paul Graham l'avait vu avant tout le monde.
Alors ils font ce que font les bâtisseurs quand un système les trahit. Ils ne le réforment pas. Ils en construisent un autre, à côté.
Elon n'a pas attendu que la NASA se réveille, il a fait SpaceX. Il n'a pas réformé les médias, il a racheté la place publique. Les entrepreneurs ne cherchent plus à convaincre l'État. Ils font l'État, partout où l'État a abdiqué.
Relisez La Grève d'Ayn Rand. Nous y sommes. Les bureaucrates gardent les titres, les budgets, les bâtiments. Mais ils perdent la seule chose qui compte : la confiance. Aux États-Unis, à peine 28 % des gens font encore confiance aux médias. Un plus bas historique. Plus personne ne croit ceux qui prétendent nous dire quoi penser.
On entend partout que l'école est finie. Je pense exactement l'inverse.
Ce n'est pas l'école qui est morte. Ce sont les institutions qui l'ont confisquée. L'école, la vraie, celle de l'Académie d'Athènes, des ateliers de la Renaissance, du maître et de l'apprenti, va renaître. Plus exigeante. Plus juste. Sans dette, sans dogme, sans diplôme comme rente à vie.
Une école qui ne fabriquera plus des diplômés, mais des polymathes. Des esprits libres, capables de coder, de penser, de construire et de douter. Ce sont eux qui créeront la valeur des cinquante prochaines années.
J'ai appris à coder seul à 12 ans. Aucun amphi ne m'a appris ce que j'ai appris en construisant. Je sais ce que devient un talent quand on le laisse respirer.
L'université a eu des siècles pour former les meilleurs esprits. Les entrepreneurs vont le faire en une décennie.
La grande reconstruction a commencé.
Tech companies launching their own programs to train grads because they 'can't rely' on Ivy Leagues trib.al/Fi2miAG
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Excited to introduce @Cosign: the curated professional network for the startup community: cosign.co
Our goal is to create the following:
- A comprehensive startup directory of investors, companies, and operators, including what they worked on and who they worked on it with.
- Cosign graph: Who shaped your career? Who were you actually in the trenches with? Who would work with you again? Who thinks you’re someone to watch?
- Durable reputation: Great endorsements happen every day on X and disappear into the feed. Cosign attaches those signals permanently to people and companies.
- Discovery: Who are the best fintech angels? Which AI companies should I watch? Who are the best designers?
- Intent network: Privately signal “I’d invest in them,” “I’d hire them,” “I’d work with them,” or eventually even “I’d acquire this company.” Match people when interest exists on both sides.
Imagine if Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and OG AngelList had a baby. Though Cosign is a community, not a business.
In order to join, you need to be cosigned. Or you can apply directly.
David Booth and I started this idea 7 years ago but didn’t have the firepower to make it work. Now we do.
No one has really touched LinkedIn in 20 years. Excited to take a swing.
cosign.co
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Mike Markkula, a former manager at Intel, cosigned Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1977.
Jobs and Wozniak sold a VW bus and a calculator to fund their first computer. Markkula wrote them their first check.
Jobs: "I thought it was unlikely that Mike would ever see that $250,000 again, and I was impressed that he was willing to risk it."
Aape Pohjavirta retweeted
Peter Thiel just said Europe fears success.
His argument: German founders treat a working company as something to sell, not something to scale into a Musk- or Zuckerberg-sized giant. The result is almost no large new firms built in decades.
Think missing follow-on jobs. No employee millionaires at scale. Rich lists full of heirs instead of builders.
When he compared the 50 wealthiest people in each country, Thiel laid out the numbers:
- Of the 50 richest Americans, 12 are Gen X or younger.
- 9 of those 12 made their own money.
> Of the 50 richest Germans, 20 are Gen X or younger. All 20 inherited it.
> “Not a single person did something new, made some new money, built a large, new scalable company.”
Then he added the cultural twist people usually miss:
“One of the things in Germany that people always talk about in this entrepreneurship context is there’s a fear of failure. A ‘no risk’ culture… Perhaps there’s also a fear of success.”
If something works, “you’re not going to scale it to this extreme degree like an Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. At some point you’ll sell the company or exit.”
It seems that Germany’s (& Europe's) real entrepreneurship problem may not be starting companies.
It’s refusing to let the winners get too big.
These posts by @stewartbrand contain links to an era when man and the machines had real relationships.
Later, man and software had similar relationships. 'Will this compile?'.
Do we have that in the age of AI? Where do we have that?
LiG?
Far the best and most complete online version of my 1972 article titled "Spacewar: Fanatic Life Among the Computer Bums" in Rolling Stone starts on Page 39 of my 1974 book, Two Cybernetic Frontiers:
wholeearth.info/p/ii-cyberne…
