I built a startup that succeeded, then failed.

I was born and raised in Delhi, with a frugal innovation mindset and the belief that nothing should be wasted. I moved to Norway on a scholarship to do a PhD in physics at the University of Oslo, and stayed. Physics trains you to make your assumptions explicit, test them before building on top of them, and take a system apart to find where it is under strain before the strain shows. After the PhD I spent more than twenty years across technology, product, design, R&D and leadership, ten of them at Telenor, in large organisations and small teams, before founding my own company.

Tørn was a marketplace for surplus building materials. We went from idea to revenue in four months, launched in two countries within two years, grew to more than 500 vendors and 120 million kroner in transaction value, and raised 65 million kroner from corporate venture investors, family offices and angels. We had a capable team and a solid product.

Then it failed, after a period that looked like success.

The failure was not a mystery once I looked properly. Customers liked the product but did not need it the way the economics required. The unit economics were not improving as we grew, and the go-to-market ran on the founders' effort rather than on repeatable pull. We had deployed capital before any of that was confirmed, and it scaled the problem instead of the solution. The pattern was visible long before the money ran out, and nobody asked the questions that would have caught it. I did not ask, and neither did the investors or the board.

After Tørn, other founders started reaching out, and in their companies I kept seeing the same structural mistake I had lived through. I spent half a year going back through Tørn and the companies I had worked with and advised, and the pattern was too consistent to be luck.

Today I help founders, investors and new ventures understand what is proven and what is still assumed, and test those assumptions before they make hard commitments on capital, product or new markets. The work starts with a diagnostic that puts the method from the book to work on one company, and I am testing it this autumn with a cohort of Oslo startups. What the diagnostic finds decides what we work on next. I also give talks and take a small number of board roles. I write on Substack and LinkedIn, and in Dagens Næringsliv and Aftenposten.

The book, The Avoidable Startup Failure, came out in September 2026.

I paint. Mostly abstract pieces, a way of working through ideas that do not fit into frameworks.

See my paintings →