Michael “Monty” Widenius

Every founder faces the same question: how fast should you go? In conversation with our Venture Partner, Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana, we explored why so many startups struggle to balance speed, quality and scale, and how to get it right (at least most of the time). As Dups puts it, for every rule there is an exception, and for every exception there is something to learn.

When we met Jan Goetz, Professor Mikko Möttönen and the rest of the IQM founding team in late 2018, we knew we were seeing something rare. The science was hard to grasp, even for my colleague Patrik Backman, who had studied physics and some quantum theory, but the ambition was unmistakable.

At the start of the year, “2025: The Year of Agents” sounded like headline bait. Eight months in, it feels like an understatement. Sam Altman said agents would “join the workforce” in 2025. Satya Nadella expects them to replace segments of knowledge work. Marc Benioff wants Salesforce to be the “#1 provider of digital labour.” That’s not future tense anymore - today, agents are moving tickets, shipping code, and digesting documents.