TL;DR: I’m a former tech entrepreneur working on efforts to maximize the benefits of AI while minimizing its risks. I am based in San Francisco where I joined the OpenAI Foundation as one of its first people in July, 2026.
Let me share a story. It starts in 2010, when a friend from an AI startup introduced me to the concept of the singularity.
A couple of years later, in 2013, I wrote about scenarios in which computers and robots replace us in the labour market. In 2014, I wrote about AI alignment, recursive self-improvement and what if AI becomes uncontrollably smart (in Kuukausiliite, a respected long-form journalism outlet in Finland).
OpenAI did not yet exist. Sam Altman was a person I thought highly of because of his startup blog.
Then Wolt happened. My friends and I saw the physical world turn digital and founded a local commerce platform. It took off and became my next step in life.
In 2016, I was in charge of launching Wolt in Stockholm. In a tech seminar I publicly asked Eric Schmidt, then-executive chairman of Alphabet, what he thought of the premise of AI becoming a threat to humanity, the idea that Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking were popularising. Schmidt brushed me off as he felt Musk and Hawking did not know what they were talking about. He argued we could always switch off the computers.
I found the take surprising but also had my hands full. Wolt had just raised €10M, which soon became hundreds of millions. I was too busy scaling our business to follow the breakthroughs in 2017–2021.
Then, in 2022, two things happened.
First, Wolt was acquired by DoorDash for $8B — one of the largest acquisitions ever of a privately held, venture-backed technology startup.
A few months after that, OpenAI started the mainstream LLM revolution.
Everything we had learned in 100,000 years – on math and medicine, memes and political science – could now be put into use by anyone. This was thanks to a bunch of neural network layers and smart matrix calculations.
How far could we get if we kept feeding the machine and gave it access to tools?
Cut to spring 2026.
On the verge of recursive self-improvement finally taking off, we seemed to be approaching an even more profound intelligence explosion. (Eric Schmidt had also long taken this seriously and become an excellent communicator on the topic.)
As if that weren’t enough, we were also preparing for a new wave of AI-enabled biosecurity and cybersecurity threats.
Nothing energized me more than the idea of working on these problems. I had left Wolt in 2024 and was free to chase a dream. I decided to dedicate the next phase of my life to helping us navigate what’s ahead.
In 2026, started coaching Silicon Valley deep tech startups and splitting my time between Helsinki and the Bay Area.
At first, I aimed to become a useful bridge between SF and Europe. However, as often happens, spending time with people who are interested in the same problems can help one figure out their own next chapter.
That happened to me.
Long story short, a trip to SF in May, 2026 led me to meeting OpenAI co-founder Wojciech Zaremba. We talked at an OpenAI Foundation cocktail party and noticed we shared similar thoughts about AI and what’s to come. Soon thereafter, Woj messaged me – and I noticed I might be taking part in a job interview process.
After a few weeks, I ended up joining the OpenAI Foundation as (I think) employee #8.
I now work on AI resilience, based in SF. My role is in Special Projects, i.e. I get to use my entrepreneurial background in helping tackle resilience challenges.
I could not be more excited. And I hope to see you here.