2025 Recap and review

Better late than never. I’m now writing a recap in August 2026, because 2025 was so busy I never got around to it. And what a year it was. If previous years were “pretty much on repeat”, 2025 was the year everything changed: I left my safe job of almost 6 years in ScanReach, went all-in on entrepreneurship, bought first rental building with Heimfond AS, founded multiple companies, and traded my stock portfolio for equity in my own ventures.

Life

The first months of the year looked like normal life: work at ScanReach, friends, Kvarteret, and a proper ski trip to Livigno, Italy in March, flying via Zürich and taking the train through the Alps, great snow and even better company.

But under the surface things were already moving. From February I started as Technical Director at Heimby part-time, exploring AI agents in Short term rental management, scraping the short-term rental market for data, and hunting for off-market property deals. In May I had my last day at ScanReach after five and a half years, it felt weird leaving my first real developer job, where I went from junior full-stack to Head of Product. Leaving was scary but in hindsight completely right.

I also stepped down from friByte in May after almost 5 years of volunteering. Teaching students Linux and Docker has given me so much, but something had to give with all my new ventures.

The rest of the year was a blur of company building (see Career below), with some great breaks:

• A trip through Southern Norway during the summer
• Paris and Luxembourg visiting my friend Adrian who works in DnB in Luxembourg at the end of August
• Mexico City in September for GuestyVal 2025 — my first hospitality-tech conference, where I also got to speak about AI together with Njål. Plus tacos delicious street taco 🌮!
• Bought a red Kia Soul EV in September — very happy with the car! This was not an impulse buy: I made a spreadsheet analyzing 80 cars on price per km of range, 3-year depreciation, interest, insurance and sunk cost per month. I even test-drove a brand new Hyundai KONA, but it came out badly in the sheet — so a used Kia Soul from Finn it was. The spreadsheet always wins.

And then, just as the year was wrapping up: in late December I met my girlfriend. Previous recaps have ended the personal section with “still single, but working on it”, consider that project finally delivered, and with the best possible outcome.

Somehow I published exactly zero blog posts in 2025. This late recap is my penance.

How did I spend my days?

The classic day-tracking table (Friends, Work, Beer, …) is missing this year — my Daylio export is still stuck on my phone. If I dig it out I’ll update this post.

What I can measure from my bank transactions and GitHub (“visits” = days with at least one card transaction there, so rounds don’t inflate the count):

The tables tell the story of the career switch on their own: commits dropped to 151 in 2024 (Head of Product year, meetings all day) and exploded to 747 as a founder. Student-bar life collapsed — Kvarteret went from 65 visits in 2023 to 16 — replaced by Old Irish Pub near everything downtown, at 25 visits and 67 card transactions. That’s 2.7 rounds per visit, a statistic I’m choosing not to reflect further on.

The commit graph is basically my employment status plotted over time: product manager at ScanReach until April, ramping up at Heimby, then full-time founder from June.

Also worth noting: 9 of the 19 kebabs were bought at Malinka, the kebab kiosk on the ground floor of the building we bought. Supporting your own tenant, that’s synergy.

Finances 💰

2025 flipped my finances completely upside down. The short version: I stopped being a well-paid employee with a big index-fund portfolio, and became a founder who owns illiquid shares in his own companies. Cash poor, asset rich.

• Rental income: 152 kNOK (up from 133k)
• Sold my stock portfolio: ~3.5 MNOK in liquid stocks/funds at the start of the year, ~0.5 MNOK left by summer. This was hard — years of disciplined saving, liquidated in months.
• Invested ~2.5 MNOK into my own companies — the bulk into Caps Lock Invest (my holding company) which funded the Jonsvollsgaten 3 acquisition via Heimfond AS.
• Net worth (including apartment): ~3.2 MNOK → ~4.1 MNOK, roughly +25%. Less than 2024’s +56%, but the composition changed from index funds to property and startup equity — the risk profile is completely different now.
• Personal cash flow for the year: almost exactly zero (-21 kNOK). Everything went back into the companies.

Spending categories

Transport looks insane until you know it includes the car (185k). Without it: ~45k, still triple last year — turns out running around between properties, the office at Kokstad and viewings costs money. Vacations look cheap, but that’s because Mexico was a work trip and flights hid in Transport.

Party spending +59% and eating out +48%: the founder lifestyle apparently involves a lot of celebrating, commiserating and “let’s discuss this over a beer”. But 2026 is already looking like a more sober year, with a lot of focus on building and scaling Proptonomy.

Career

Buckle up, this section is longer than usual.

Leaving ScanReach (Jan-May) — and the 5-day job

I spent my last months at ScanReach as Head of Product, handing over what I’d built over five and a half years. 703 logged hours, 1 sick day, and a proper goodbye in May. ScanReach taught me everything from maritime IoT and Azure architecture to hiring, mentoring and product strategy. Forever grateful.

Then came the shortest chapter of my career: InsertLogic. I interviewed in January (they had me implement a pub/sub system over TCP), signed the contract in February, and even invested in the company through my holding company — the plan was to start there after my ScanReach notice period. I started in early June and quit after five days. Nothing wrong with them — I’m still a happy shareholder — but once I was actually sitting there, it became painfully obvious that what I wanted was to go all-in on building my own companies. Five days to learn what six years of employment couldn’t teach me: I’m done being an employee, at least for now.

Heimby and hunting for deals (Feb→)

From February I joined Heimby as Technical Director alongside my job. Heimby manages short-term rentals, and I started building the internal logistics and operations tooling — the first commit to logistic-manager was February 4th. By the end of 2025 Heimby handled ~60 units in Bergen. This ops-heavy, spreadsheet-and-chaos world turned out to be the perfect problem space for AI automation, which shaped everything that came after.

In parallel I started systematically looking for off-market property deals: scraping listing and rental data, digging through municipal building-case archives, running the numbers on dozens of buildings around Bergen — and in February, cold-emailing building owners directly as “a small group of investors looking for a bygård in central Bergen”. Most analyses ended in “no”, which is exactly how it should work. But in early March one email brought us Jonsvollsgaten 3, off-market.

Buying a building: Jonsvollsgaten 3 (May-Aug)

In May we founded Heimfond AS, and in June, together with Njål and Mats, we took over Jonsvollsgaten 3 in central Bergen — a residential building with 3 apartments and the Malinka kebab kiosk on the ground floor. Summer was renovation, IKEA runs, furnishing and photography. We did AirBnB over the summer and students from the autumn. Going through legal due diligence, building-case archives and a full acquisition process taught me more about real estate than years of reading ever could.

DigiSale, DigiCar, DigiHome (Jun-Dec)

In June I went full-time founder. Together with the team at Kokstad we built:

• DigiCar — digital sales platform for digicar.no, one of Norway’s leading used-car commission dealers. I was CTO and lead developer; we launched the platform and website during the autumn.
• DigiHome — property management through technology: combined short/long-term rental, dynamic pricing, automated operations. Incorporated in August. Autumn was full of partner meetings — Eiendomsspar, Ohana, Ability, Breezeway, Minut — plus an exploration of expanding to Marbella, Spain.
• DigiSale — the umbrella with the ambition of building small market leaders in niche verticals with tech and AI.

I also got to speak about AI several times this year: at GuestyVal in Mexico City, on stage at Make Data Smart 2025 in October with an AI logistics demo (repo on my GitHub), presenting DigiHome at Aksello in Florø, and an AI presentation for iVest Consult in November. Saying yes to speaking is still one of the best career hacks I know.

The seed of Proptonomy (Nov-Dec)

By November it was clear that the most valuable thing we’d built wasn’t any single product — it was the understanding of how short-term rental operations actually work, and how much of it AI can automate. The Proptonomy-landing-page repo was created November 26th. In December we ended the DigiHome collaboration, and the last weeks of the year went into planning what came next: finding investors, planning sessions between Christmas and New Year, and analysis of a property portfolio in Odda (spoiler for the 2026 recap: we bought it).

On January 1st 2026, Njål and I started Proptonomy full time. But that’s next year’s story.

2024-me wrote “life is good, I’m happy and looking forward to 2025”. He had no idea. 2025 was the most intense, expensive, educational and fun year of my life so far — and I’d do it all again. 🚀

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Tags: general