About
Every founder has a story worth sharing.
A Founder's Friend exists to collect those stories — the real, messy, human versions — and put them in front of the people who need to hear them.
Why this exists
Founders keep the most useful stories to themselves.
Not on purpose. There's just no good place to put them. The blog feels too polished, the post feels too thin, and the version that would actually help another founder is the one that gets edited out somewhere between the voice memo and the publish button.
A Founder's Friend is a quiet, well-lit room for that version. Bring the recording, the conversation, the half-written thought — and share it here, where the people on the other side of the wall are building too.
We believe the highlight reel was never the point. The point was always connection. So that's what the platform is built around: stories told once, honestly, then carried to whoever needed them.
Who's behind it
Hi, I'm Nicolas.
My path started on international basketball courts with the Wolfpack of my age group, wound through Helsinki's nightlife, and led to the first Slush Presidency. The constant through all of it has been people and connection.
I spent years as a Human Catalyst at Smartly.io. Somehow I also earned a Master's in Computer Science from Aalto University despite the fact that I can't actually code. What I can do is help teams find their rhythm, organize themselves, and tell their stories with heart.
I write about tech, culture, and mental health. For me, it all comes back to what it means to lead and live authentically. The best stories aren't just told — they're shared.
A Founder's Friend is the product I kept wishing existed: a home for the real story, and a way to put it in front of the founders who'll recognize themselves in it.
The journey that led here
What is writing, when a machine can mimic it?
Before A Founder's Friend, there was a question that wouldn't leave me alone. If a model can produce a clean paragraph in seconds, what is the actual thing a writer is doing? What survives the moment the tool gets better than us at the surface of it?
I spent a year sitting with that question in public. It became a poetry collection — Love, Life & Leadership in an AI-driven World — and then an event called AI Within Art, made with friends and founders willing to think out loud in a room together.
The answer that kept showing up wasn't about prose. It was about provenance. The thing a model can't fake is that you were there — that the pivot happened to you, that the hire was your call, that the late call reshaped how you think about leadership.
Writing, in this new world, is less about producing words and more about protecting the part of the story only you could have told. That's the belief A Founder's Friend is built on — and the reason the platform leans on your voice, your context, and your people before it leans on any model.
"The hardest part isn't the work. It's the moments when you realize the work is reshaping you — and you have to decide whether you like who you're becoming."
If any of this resonates —
you probably already have a story worth sharing. This is the place to tell it, and the bridge to the founders who need to hear it.