Welcome

I'm Martin. I was born in Switzerland, grew up on the Mutschellen and started a commercial apprenticeship at Hewlett-Packard in Widen when I was sixteen. That was the beginning of a 26-year corporate career through HP, Fujitsu and Cisco. I left Cisco on 31 December 2016 and moved into entrepreneurship.

Today I am the sole founder of pre-incorporation humAIne. The 2026 work is research, finishing the book, sharpening the position and building a one-human, AI-native organisation around agents. Advisory comes first; investment and active ownership may follow later.

I have also worked alongside my wife Sigrun's business and co-founded Sea Growth, a chapter I have now stepped away from. Sigrun is Icelandic. We live between Switzerland and Iceland, which explains both the travel writing and my long-running argument with Icelandic weather.

The question driving this site is direct: what does rapidly improving AI mean for us?

The past decade of technology rewarded cost and speed. Move fast, break things, optimise the algorithm, watch the engagement metric rise. We outsourced judgement to machines and treated people as data points. AI makes the consequences harder to ignore.

Displacement is real. We have built a civilisation without a clear plan for what people do when machines perform more of the work.

My conviction is simple: as AI becomes widely available, humanity becomes the differentiator. Models and systems will spread. Judgement, taste, genuine connection and the courage to make a difficult decision remain scarce.

I write about four connected subjects.

Human flourishing as AI advances

I am interested in the practical work of building systems, cultures and incentives that give people more agency. That means distribution, power and the plain economics of how resources move. I have little use for utopian promises or rehearsed doom.

Leadership and decision-making at scale

How do you make a good call when the work matters and the evidence is incomplete? I have invested in more than 50 companies, started from nothing and failed more often than I have succeeded. Leadership needs a framework and enough humility to update it.

Markets, macro trends and capital

AI will disrupt industries, but disruption sticks when incentives support it. I follow the money, test the consensus and look for the mechanism behind the headline.

Travel and culture

You cannot understand people from a spreadsheet alone. Some of the best questions begin in a café in Reykjavik or Buenos Aires.

I do not write corporate prose or manufacture balance when the evidence points one way. If you want comfortable conventional wisdom, this may be the wrong place. If you want to examine what is changing, why it matters and what you can do with that knowledge, start with the piece that catches your eye.