Useful Art

I’ve spent most of my life living at intersections: designing since I was 16, coding since I was 18, building products since I was 20. Same in personal life: the sprinter who runs 10 miles, the techno guy who collects jazz vinyls, the painter as a child who was also in math competitions. I felt like a walking contradiction … until I saw the word “nyttokonst” at the National Museum in Stockholm. It means useful art, infusing form & function to everyday things to make them useful and beautiful. It clicked with me. I recognized myself in it.

Stepping away from Neuma

We wanted to build something that had the potential to change the way we work & live — you don't make asymmetric returns by playing it safe.

That's when we pivoted to Neuma 2 years ago, a neural interface that lets people co-create with machines in creative tools (Cursor, Figma). Neuma lived at the intersection of electrical / mechanical engineering, firmware, neuroscience, machine learning, and industrial design. Kind of a dream for a generalist like me. And for a while, it was. But 18 months leading up to October required expertise outside my core skills: signal processing, building generalized models, shrinking hardware footprint, maximizing BLE throughput, data collection at scale.

Working on the edge of science & hardware meant long iteration cycles and I just wanted to build and ship things. The work was interesting. But it never felt like I was the person for it. My co-founder and I had many difficult convos, and after our latest round last October, I decided to step away. It was amicable. We’re still good friends. He’s the right person to take it forward. I wasn’t.

That’s the painful thing to admit after 5 years. The fear of looking like I had given up. That I can’t commit. That I can’t do the hard work. But no one outside that room knows what we built together. Running any startup is hard. Running one at the intersection of hardware, neuroscience, AI, especially where the core work doesn’t match your core skills is a different beast. If you’re going to work this hard, you should feel like it’s your calling and ... I stopped feeling this way.

12 countries. 2 months. 1 question.

So what does one do after they walk away from the work of their life? Travel. So I packed my suitcase, cancelled my NYC lease, and decided to do a loop around the world: East / Southeast Asia, Middle East, Scandinavia, and Europe. 12 countries. 2 months. 1 question … “what do I do next?” I thought traveling would give me an answer. It gave me a better question:"what matters to me?"

I was expecting to be blown away by the cleanliness of Tokyo, the architectural formidability of Prague, the audacity of Dubai. It was cool. But that’s not what stayed with me. This is what did:

• Running in 25°F weather with a founder in Edinburgh in a tank top
• Talking to a barista named Adam in Seville about Spanish culture for 40 minutes
• A walk around Galata Tower in Istanbul that turned into one of the best dates
• Spending 2 days with Mo in Chiang Mai who showed me around on his Grab bike
• Talking to a girl on my flight to London about slowing down & being lost
• Chatting with a Korean restaurant owner in Seoul on a translation app for 1 hour
• Meeting strangers in hostels and talking to them until 6am in the common room
• Doing an escape room with one of my closest friends in Prague
• Joining a dinner my friend hosted in London with his friends & co-workers

These are the moments I remember. Not a skyscraper or a 5-star hotel or a 3-course meal at a 2-Michelin star restaurant. It’s human connection. Experiencing this after 5 years with heads down building showed me how isolating I had grown to feel. How much I missed hosting dinners. Going on group runs.

“Traveling the world” is a fantasy a lot of us have. I certainly did. But traveling the world collapses that fantasy into existential questioning:

Now what?
What do I actually want?
Why am I so afraid of being mediocre?
What does a 'meaningful' life mean to me?
Why do I care so much what others think of me?

This was paralyzing at times, but clarity came at St. Paul Cathedral. During stillness & silence. Not movement.

The Ideal Role

Here’s what I've learned about myself: I’m a capable designer, but I don’t want to be world-class at design. Design for me is a feeling, a vibe. I build full-stack apps across web, mobile, desktop, but I’m a prototyper, not a production engineer.

Product is a better fit but not in the traditional sense, especially in the world of AI. What I think makes someone good at product is discernment. Knowing when to make a bet. When to cut. Making a strong business & user case for the opportunity. Focusing well. Integrating across disciplines. Narrating up & clarifying down. Shipping things that are genuinely useful and beautiful. Practicing nyttokonst.

That's what I enjoyed most at Neuma: pushing for creative tool use cases, building POCs, saying no to bets with linear returns, integrating mechanical <> electrical, shaping the early industrial designs. Same at Webflow when I led breakpoints and layouts used by millions of designers. This felt like play. And it's hard to outwork someone who is playing.

I’ll be bouncing between New York & SF for the next few months. I’m drawn to applications of AI/LLMs across hardware, health, finance, and creative tools, but open to interesting problem spaces with a team that:

1. Cares about function and form
2. Ships fast and often
3. Has fun doing it

If your team is building a killer product and want someone to drive 0→1 across product, design, strategy, execution — who cares about how something feels as much as it works — shoot me a DM on Twitter, LinkedIn or email me.