Just About Life #7: Arguing with five version of your past self. The 16-year-old, 21-year-old, the 26-year-old, the 32-year-old, and the 37-year-old me having a discussion about life.

One of my best storytelling pieces

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Just Thoughts #66: Narratives we’ve never seen before are making us anxious Listen now |, and find the best way to kill the feeling of angst they bring.

Unfamiliar narratives create stress. Not because they’re loud, but because they’re unrehearsed.

Greenland. Leaders signaling stability through posture as much as policy. Europe moving quietly while attention drifts. Startups overanalyzing instead of building.

open.substack.com/pub/nicolasd...

open.substack.com/pub/nicolasdolenc/p/just...

One Battle After Another. The Rip. Stranger Things.

The common thread isn't genre. It's believability.

Not about who wins. But how people behave when systems, power, and pressure collide.

That's where modern storytelling does its honest work.

Check out Just Culture #28 on my Substack

Just Thoughts #65: A father's pride and joy Purpose only works when the organization is mature enough to carry it. This article discusses how to design it when you're ready.

"You derive purpose from pride and joy."

That was the thesis when we defined @Smartly's purpose.

Not a mandate from @Kristo Ovaska or @Tuomo Riekki, but discovered in our team's stories.

Revisiting the process:
nicolasdolenc.substack.com/p/just-thoughts-65-a-fat...

I write about tunnels. And the Bridge of Light in Helsinki that reminds me what the opposite feels like.

Even in the darkest moments, there is a bridge.

A letter to my son: nicolasdolenc.substack.com/p/a-letter-to-my-son-i

open.substack.com/pub/nicolasdolenc/p/just...

This is not a ranking. It is a collection of signals.

I wrote about the moral tension in @Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen, @Dave Chappelle’s uncomfortable mastery, and the Knives Out trilogy.

Attention, more than ratings, is the real currency of culture.

nicolasdolenc.substack.com

Just Culture #26: How I think about reviews, care, and cultural responsibility What does entertainment teach us about culture, and how we interpret society? Also, Avatar: Fire and Ash in review.

How I treat reviews, what Tom Coancys Jack Ryan show teaches us about recent global political actions, and Avatar in review

open.substack.com/pub/nicolasd...

#moviereviews #film #entertainment

Just Thoughts #64: What Survives After the Role Ends A leadership letter written before AI, deleted on purpose, and recovered as part of an archive that still has something to teach

Leadership letters age in public, even when you delete them. This one was written in 2017, rediscovered years later, and reread with hindsight. If you care about leadership, memory, and what survives after roles end, this one’s for you.

#leadership #culture

Just Thoughts Podcast #9 - Ecosystems Don’t Fail on Talent. They Fail on Belief. Thinking out loud with Aape Pohjavirta about systems, people, and the future we still control

Big things don’t start optimized.
They start believed in.

A conversation with Aape Pohjavirta on ecosystems, memory, and ambition.
🎧📖 Link in bio

open.substack.com/pub/nicolasd...

Just Thoughts #63: Practicing Empathy Is Like Playing a Second-Person Game Perfect outcomes can hollow people out, and most leaders and AI products are making this mistake.

Perfect output isn’t always empowering.

In leadership and AI, the real question isn’t how good the result is, but how it feels to receive it.

Some feel hollow. Some feel liberated. Both are valid.

Just Thoughts #63 is out 👇🏼

#Leadership #AI #Empathy #ProductDesign #JustThoughts

Just Culture #25: F1 isn't the point, it describes the point. A Just Culture essay on media, money, and the end of static stories

Movies are no longer finished things.
They’re becoming systems.

Netflix bought the pipes.
Disney is building the simulator.
Amazon turned content into checkout.
Apple’s defining move is still pending.

I wrote a about this
👉 nicolasdolenc.substack.com
#MediaStrategy #FutureOfMedia #Entertainment

Just Thoughts #62: Intimacy Of Violence Some stories don’t begin with answers, but with the courage to finally speak.

Listening is easy until the story removes your reference points.

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Just Thoughts #59: On Cooking, Culture, Tribal Leadership, and the Long Road of Learning A story about cooking, culture, leadership levels, and why most lessons fail until you learn to use them.

How do you apply leadership learning? Having trouble teaching company values?

This post is for you.

#leadershiplessons #leadership #management

Agree. On that note, what experts subjects should I ask you about?

Just Culture #24: Frankenstein, Sisu & Elon Musk’s Sci-Fi Future Logic A late-evening sparring match between movies, sci-fi futures, and an Elon Musk interview that reveals more than it intends.

Elon said X is for thinkers and writers. I think there might be more of those here on bluesky than on X, don’t you think?

I feel calling X a haven for freethinkers is like drawing parallels between a moshpit and a seminar.

open.substack.com/pub/nicolasd...

Norte — Your wallet’s benefits brain: See every benefit your wallet already gives you. | Product Hunt Most people miss out on card perks, pay for coverage they already have, or lose receipts when they need them most. Norte stores your cards, insurance and documents in one smart wallet — so you can unc...

Launched Norte today on Product Hunt. If you are also #buidinginpublic you know how special a day like this is.

So if you would like to show up with some support, here is the link:

www.producthunt.com/products/nor...

Just Thoughts #58: What Actually Matters Demand, success, failure, and a framework for living a life that feels aligned.

New Just Thoughts is out: Rob Snyder takes the #1 spot at Slush, Ilkka Paananen reframes success, and a life framework finally clicks.

Read here 👇

open.substack.com/pub/nicolasd...

#Startups #Slush #FounderLife #Leadership #DemandDecoded #JustThoughts

Just Products #11: Using Lovable & Claude to build an app as a non-technical founder Watch now | Jose Sánchez on Building Norte — a tool to simplify credit card coverage. From creative director to founder, Jose uses Lovable & Claude to unlock new possibilities.

@efesor.bsky.social launched Norte app on Product Hunt!

Support with a vote if you think it’s cool that someone saves you money by helping you makes sense of your insurences!

www.producthunt.com/products/nor...

Who the Hell Has Demand? – Rob Snyder on Startups, Sales Calls, and Case Study Factories Recorded in an old hospital-turned-startup-campus during Slush week in Helsinki. Yes, there are tunnels. No, we’re not sure we made it out.

Just dropped a new conversation featuring rob-snyder and richardmakara — and it completely reframes how founders should think about demand, sales calls, and early-stage GTM.

#startups #gtm #demandgeneration

open.substack.com/pub/nicolasd...

Just Thoughts #57: What makes a stage talk worth a founder’s time? A comprehensive scoring framework for evaluating speaker personas, content density, and program relevance.

Startup stage talks. What makes them good?

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Just Thoughts #41: Two decades of life experience summarised in less than 10-minutes That's how much time people have to for a life story anyway right?

My evergreen content: Life as balance, the spinner analogy and how I find purpose.

#life #purpose #selfreflection

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Just Thoughts #54: The GTM master framework. Five doers interviewed, two thought leaders sourced for content, one prompt to tie everything to a framework ready to be re-written.

GTM is not the same in every domain. Interviewed 5 doers to cover the differences and used some of your content @martenmickos.bsky.social as you a world expert on Open Source GTM ;)

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Just Thought #53: Byte-Coded Vibes at Antler (Femcode Kickoff Edition) At the Femcode kickoff, Mari Luukkainen showed what happens when code becomes conversation.

From one interview to Femcode’s kickoff at Antler, where Mari Luukkainen vibe-coded a dog meatball tracker while talking about scaling Freska to €30M ARR and building multiple SaaS in months. Now she’s switching gears on Herizon: the global employment engine for immigrants.

#startups #vibecoding

Thank you. Pavel was not interviewed by me :D

Just Thoughts #52: VC Supercycles, and platform creating founders. Converging worlds of defense technology, digital freedom, and cryptographic integrity, drawing insights from personal networks, social media, AI research & leading podcasts

Quantum hacker Lars Lydersen on the Defense Tech Supercycle
Telegram’s Pavel Durov, the untouchable communicator
Both ask: What are we really building for?
👉 Read the full edition

#DefenseTech #Startups #AI #ContentCreation #Innovation #EthicalTech #Storycrafter #QuantumComputing #Telegram

Just Thoughts #51: The Book's, The Hype, and What We Missed Along the Way Two bestselling Finnish startup books, one evolving ecosystem. What they reveal—and forget—about leadership, ambition, and belonging.

Two bestselling Finnish startup books are shaping how the next generation thinks about leadership and ambition.
But what if they’re teaching us to build for a world that no longer exists?
👉 Read the full reflection on Just Thoughts.

open.substack.com/pub/nicolasd...

Just Thoughts Swedish edition: Att Skriva på Svenska An essay about the Swedish-Speaking finns at the book fair in Helsinki 2025 turned into an audio podcast in English. This is Just Thoughts in Swedish.

Writing in swedish covering three other swedish speaking finns and their thoughts

open.substack.com/pub/nicolasd...

Just Culture #23: When the Game Ends, the Story Begins Where sports, film, and AI music collide: finding the same human heartbeat in systems built for performance.

Finnish basketball, Denzel Washington, and AI music might seem worlds apart.

However, they all wrestle with the same question: can we believe under pressure?

New Just Culture essay: When the Game Ends, the Story Begins.

#basketball #aimusic #moviereviews

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