The Importance of Expression

On January 13, 2009, I published my first YouTube video, talking about entrepreneurship and how to find a great startup idea. I was 19 years old at the time, living in a humble studio apartment in the southern part of Aarhus, Denmark, and, quite frankly, had no clue how to build a successful business.

Nevertheless, I kept vlogging throughout the first six months of that year, and while the advice I offered was questionable at best, making those videos turned out to be valuable to me. I gradually became better at structuring a message and explaining an idea, while the commitment to publishing regularly encouraged me to think more carefully about entrepreneurship. Putting my thoughts into words helped me develop ideas that might otherwise have remained vague or unfinished.

Although my audience was small, the videos reached other young entrepreneurs, mostly around Jutland, whose comments led to conversations about our shared interest in startups. Through those videos, I was invited to join eYoung, a small network of young business owners, where I got to know people from all over Denmark who were much further along than I was and from whom I learned a great deal.

Those connections encouraged me to take my own ambitions more seriously and eventually led me to GeekHouse, a free coworking space for aspiring entrepreneurs in central Aarhus. It was there that I met several people who became lifelong friends, including Anders Skovsgaard, who would become my co-founder in Heyhack 11 years later.

Looking back, I appreciate those videos as much for the people they brought into my life as for what I learned by making them. Sharing my ideas gave me a way to develop my own thinking while allowing others with similar interests to find me, even when I had little experience and only a small audience.

Yet in the years since, I’ve only shared my thoughts online sporadically, despite how much those early experiences meant to me. I regret not making more time for it, and starting this blog feels like a way to return to something that I found both rewarding and worthwhile.

While most of my experience sharing ideas has been through videos, conference talks, and podcasts, writing appeals to me because it leaves room to slow down and spend time with a thought before deciding how to express it. I hope that making a habit of it will help me understand my own ideas more clearly, much as those early videos did.

My intention is to write about aviation, technology, startups, and whatever else occupies my mind, whether that’s finance, travel, parenting, running, cycling, gaming, or life in general. These are varied interests, but they all belong to the same life, and I’d like to have a place to share the experiences and observations that come with them.

With AI agents increasingly present on my laptop and my phone, I want this blog to be a space where I take my time to work through my own ideas and find the words for them. I hope the process will be valuable to me and that, along the way, some of what I write will be useful to others or lead to conversations I wouldn’t otherwise have had. Remembering the friendships and opportunities that grew out of those first videos makes me curious to see what might come of sharing my thoughts again.