Interacting with the world at maximum capacity
Reflections on a year of mistakes, growth, and immersion.
2025 may have been my favorite year yet. Certainly not because it wasn’t gut-wrenchingly challenging at times, because it was. But at the risk of sounding like a cliché, I learned so much. About myself, creativity, and what it means to actually be immersed.
I started the year with winding down Sane. Sane was my world for several years, and it felt incomprehensible to be leaving that. If I’m being very honest with myself, and with the ability to think in retrospect, I wasn’t totally in my element with that company. Several factors of course contributed to this, but I think most importantly it was due to the fact that I simply am not an engineer, and do not wish to be.
The tech industry has historically loved to categorize technical vs. non technical founders, and has held an infatuation with this conversation that I’ve largely thought was bullshit. Thinking about this today, I may have been wrong. Not entirely, in the sense that I still think that someone’s background and training is not as relevant in comparison to other attributes. But what I do think is important is how people think, what they are motivated by, and what skills will they never stop wanting to acquire. For me, having little interest in getting my hands dirty with code should have been a personal red flag. I always justified this to myself, and to others, by saying that I must build Sane because I can deeply connect with our end-user, and I am able to understand what experience needs to exist that goes beyond the building blocks to reality, to culture. I no longer think this is enough. You need to obsess.
With the decision to discontinue Sane, I felt a lot of financial pressure. Bruno and I had been in the US for just over a year, and it was not an easy one. We came here on my O1 visa, which meant B couldn’t work. It was tough on us, balancing life in New York and San Francisco on one founder salary, while going through a green card process and trying to make sense of what we wanted our life in the US to look like (we got our green cards at the end of 2024). I was exhausted. And thought that the next best move would just be to get a job, and not have to exist at the edge of existential dread for a while.
So I did exactly that, and was content for about two seconds. For context: the last time I was employed by someone other than myself was 2019. I was 24 years old at the time, and kind of an asshole. It is not hard for me to admit that I entirely underestimated what it means to have a job after six years in the seat of a founder. Turns out, it’s not easy to be an operator, where you have to understand someone else’s vision, and then execute that according to someone else’s standards and ways of working. As a founder, you’re in an entirely different position. I find that being an entrepreneur is much easier because it puts all the responsibility on you at the end of the day. You either sink or swim, and bring everyone along for either experience. This brings clarity and drive, in a way that I find challenging to tap into inside an org chart.
So after my few week stint as an employed person, I decided that life is simply too short to fuck around in situations that don’t make sense, for me or for the others involved. I turned 30 at that exact time, and maybe the idea of a new decade kicked in too. I took a few weeks to breathe, this time knowing that I needed to understand what the hell is going on in this body and mind of mine so that I don’t repeat my mistake(s). If I were to build again, I knew it would have to be very different. And of course it would be. Because I am not the same person I was when I started this journey many moons ago. I am years wiser, stronger from countless failures and rejections, and with so many wins under my belt, too.
Going back to Sane, I am immensely proud of what we built. We grew to almost 200k teens making and sharing artifacts of love on our platform. Sane became a movement for radical self-expression, intimacy, and human connection in a time where it felt like the internet was growing with bots, AI slop, and disdain. I came to the conclusion that my new venture needed be built without compromise. Why, how, what, for and with whom this would be created would not be predicated on fear or conformism. I wanted to create the grounds for me to do my life’s work, and realized that can only be possible if I have the guts to color outside of the lines of the tech industry.
Josephine & Company started out with texts to my founder friends, asking if anyone would hire me to help them with their story. A few did, and those initial projects helped me achieve a few important goals: a) pay my bills b) validate my method and c) see if what I brought to the table created actual, lasting value for companies. Again, I learned a lot, particularly when it came to how to run a process with client work. What was most interesting about phase 0 for me was the role that I found I had to play in order to do this work. I had to act as both a mirror as well as an artist, and to know when to switch from one role to the other. Being a mirror allows the truth emerge, and acting as an artist allows me to capture and bottle that truth: the essence, as I call it. I wholeheartedly believe that a story is not created (or it can be, but it will probably not be very good). A truth is something you uncover. It’s already there, within your lived experience, and my job is simply to bring it to light and then find the right form factor to share it with the world.
Human life is really quite extraordinary. The experiences people go through, what moves them, and how they make sense of reality is really such a privilege to get to understand. I’ve always loved stories, and have related with them deeply. I started writing fictional short stories when I first learned how to write, and have never stopped. My medium has mostly been essays. I feel called to mix life, ideas, and story together in a way that transmits essence in addition to information. My first professional experience in narrative was when I got into politics in Finland as a teenager (first in student politics with myself as a candidate and later party politics for others). I loved running campaigns, because it quickly dawned on me that it was all about the story you told, and even more importantly, how that story made people feel.
Getting to work full-time in narrative this year made me realize that I am one thousand percent in my element. I think recognizing that, and seeing the value I was able to produce for the companies I partnered with, gave me the courage to go even deeper. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to take a stab at taking this into a new medium. I’ve always been in awe of film, and have dreamed about becoming a filmmaker for as long as I can remember.
I poured a few hundred hours into my first short, and in the process built a production team and the infrastructure for us to do many more. Last week, we screened our first ever official Josephine & Company production, The First Act, in San Francisco. The process of making this film was surreal in many ways, but what I loved most about it was how I could not stop obsessing over it. I was in it, involved in every single minuscule detail from ideation to script to pre-production, production, and post, of course with an incredibly talented cast and crew. I do not have formal training for making films, but it’s a funny thing how that doesn’t stop me from wanting to learn and acquire every possible skill needed to make outstanding work.
My New Year’s resolution for 2025 was to interact with the world at maximum capacity. What I meant by that was that, regardless of what I was doing, I wanted to be there. Fully immersed. Present. Engaged. I can say with a lot of joy that I certainly met that resolution, and thanks to this I’ve been able to plant seeds that I am extremely fucking excited to see grow next year.
Over dinner tonight, B and I were talking about our New Year’s resolutions for 2026. Without putting much thought into it, I said I want to get hot and rich. I laughed, but then on second thought realized I wasn’t really kidding. My ambition for Josephine & Company is to build a media house that defines what culturally significant storytelling looks like. And to do it in a way that proves real stories that come from a source of truth are also the most commercially viable option. As for the ‘get hot’ part, well life is more fun when you look and feel great so why the hell not.
Don’t take me too seriously. Happy Holidays, friends x
Inspiring thoughts :D
beast