Henrik Torstensson

🚨 Generative AI just went from being a “tool” to being a teammate. ChatGPT → Veo3 → Nano Banana → now Sora 2. ChatGPT showed us the spark. Veo3 pushed video quality to cinematic levels. Nano Banana made image gen ridiculously good. Now Sora 2 is here and it’s not just a “tool.” It’s a creative partner. We’re moving past the stage where AI is just automating tasks. The new wave is about co-creation: ideation, iteration, and scaling at speeds humans alone can’t match. At Atria, we see this every day. - Campaigns that used to take weeks → done in hours. - Ad concepts that used to need 5 designers → now flow from one marketer with the right prompts. - Testing that used to drain budgets → now fueled by AI-driven creative sprints. The exciting part? This isn’t replacing creativity. It’s amplifying it. The best founders, marketers, and creators aren’t asking “Will AI replace us?” They’re asking: “How do I collaborate with AI to do what wasn’t possible before?”

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Norway’s $1.8T sovereign wealth fund is saving 213,000 hours every year with AI. How? They tapped into their enterprise data on Snowflake, integrated Anthropic’s Claude, and made AI proficiency non-negotiable—backed by real training, enablement, and leadership conviction. This is what enterprise AI looks like in action. 👉 https://lnkd.in/gtFrcScv

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Spotify is shuffling its leadership playlist. Founder Daniel Ek is stepping down as CEO of the music streaming giant after 19 years. Instead, he will become executive chair of the company. Alex Norstrom and Gustav Söderström will step up to fill his position, as co-CEOs – a leadership duo replacing the solo artist. Ek has said the change “simply matches titles to how we already operate”. It’s never easy for the founder to relinquish the CEO title, even if Ek says he will remain “deeply involved”, working on long-term strategy. On the one hand, Ek must be tired. Over the course of nearly two decades he has fought to build his global, billion-dollar business. He had to do it in the face of stiff competition from Apple. It was believed it had a near-monopoly on music streaming through iTunes. He waged a long campaign to challenge that assumption. It paid huge dividends. The final test of a great founder and leader, in many ways, is to choose his or her successor. Ben Francis MBE hired his replacement as CEO at Gymshark in 2015 after 3 years. I waited at Homeserve for 8 years before replacing myself as UK CEO. My success at Homeserve came from hiring great CEOs for each of our 10 countries and a great CEO for them to work for, when I ended up with too many direct reports. Founders are great at creating businesses, copying and pivoting until they get the right model and start growing. (Exactly what Ek did. Music streaming platforms were not a completely original idea. But he managed to make a standout product and executed it brilliantly.) My advice in these succession situations, when the founder steps away, is to hire a proven CEO with the right cultural fit to work with the founder to achieve exponential growth with fewer mistakes. It looks like Ek has built the right leadership playlist to do this. And he’s been CEO at the company he created for nearly two decades – few pop stars can sustain a career that long!

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Talking to Lovable founder Anton Osika on stage at Nordic Tech Week earlier today, we spoke about how Stockholm tech founders are well-known for giving back to the startup ecosystem, with capital and time. Osika told me that he was quite busy building Lovable and couldn't set aside too much time to invest in other founders. However, he and his cofounder Fabian Hedin have pledged 50% of future earnings to philanthropy. More here: https://lnkd.in/dwe7XdMZ

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Public-private partnership from idea 💡 to research 📚to scalable impact 🌎 Sara Leander-Pehrson (Heka VR CEO) together with Louise Birkedal Glenthøj (head of VIRTU Research Group talks about our collaboration to get a avatar-based Virtual Reality to the thousands of danish schizophrenia patients. Big thanks for the support to Danish Life Science Cluster Erhvervsfyrtårn Life Science initiative (co-funded by the European Union). HekaVR is in so many ways the child of the Danish\European Life science ecosystem with initial support from Innovation Fund Denmark, then BioInnovation Institute (BII) and European Commission. And also supported by Health Tech Hub Copenhagen, Nordic Mentor Network For Entrepreneurship - NOME and in partnership with Region Hovedstadens Psykiatri, Psykiatrien i Region Syddanmark, Psykiatrien, Region Nordjylland. And of course special thanks to Merete Nordentoft who initially saw the potential in using VR for severe mental health. All these partner are vital for avatar therapy to make an impact in Denmark 🇩🇰 and beyond 🌎. #vrhealth #psychiatry #schizophrenia #mentalhealth #womanintech #PublicPrivatePartnerships

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🇪🇺 Everyone’s talking about Lovable—the European/Swedish $100m ARR success story. 🇺🇸 However, Lovable is incorporated in the US as a Delaware C-Corp (Lovable Inc.), so technically it’s a US company, not Swedish. It adds to the count of US unicorns, not European ones. The founders’ choice to incorporate in the US rather than the EU is obvious: 🗂️ Bureaucratic red tape makes setting up companies and doing financing rounds in Europe slow and painful. There are 27 different corporate regimes across the EU and some regulations date back to 1892(!). Take the German GmbH-Gesetz, for example. In a previous post, I told the story of German startup which had to pay €58k (this is not a typo) in notary fees for a Series A financing round. Gathering all(!) shareholders in one room for five hours to listen to a notary in an expensive suit read a 100-page contract, with a wall of books behind him, feels like an ancient ritual. But it’s still standard in some EU countries, including Germany. International investors might endure this once, but they won’t do it again (in the US/UK the whole process would have been a DocuSign PDF). That’s why many top European founders choose to incorporate outside the EU. 👉 The EU Inc initiative is trying to change this. 🙏 Let’s support Andreas Klinger, Philipp Herkelmann and their team to help to stop this bureaucratic insanity and reclaim Europe's competitiveness! #startups h/t to Alessandro Palombo

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