I almost felt bad for Siri when I said “Hey Siri, open Alexa”. Siri dutifully opened my Alexa app. When I tried “Hey Siri, OK Google” there wasn’t an app to open – but a joke[…]
Rational Agents and Emotional Humans: Why you should include variable rewards
It’s one week until John’s birthday, and you just got the an invitation from Lisa for his birthday party. In the good ol’ days, you’d add it to your day planner, make a mental note to get[…]
Rational Agents and Emotional Humans: Why you should ask “Why?”
An intelligent agent is by definition a rational agent, who will “acts so as to achieve the best outcome or, when there is uncertainty, the best expected outcome.” With the agent being rational and humans[…]
Resources for using Habit and ‘Hooked’ Theory in Product Development and Sprints
People check their phones 150 times every day. How can you use the theories behind this behavior in your product development? Hopefully for good, not evil purposes. Habits are defined as “behaviors done with little or[…]
Corporate Innovation – Using Design Sprint to go from Idea to Prototype in 5 Days
It was my first day on my new job as business developer at Telenor, and I was having lunch with my new colleagues. They all seemed great, – and enthusiastic about our innovation mission. At the[…]
Pitching, or How to Not be Boring
When I arrived in Silicon Valley in 2014, I knew a little bit about pitching – but it was still challenging to make a stock photo agency sound interesting. On my first day I had[…]
Bye Bye Screens and Keyboard – Welcome Voice Control and AI Assistants
I often hear people say that talking to your devices is unnatural. “No way people will start talking to their machines, especially at work”. It’s interesting, and mostly shows how bad we are at imaging[…]
Intelligent Agents – the death of traditional branding and marketing?
The other day, while I was reading an article about Intelligent Agents and Artificial Intelligence, I realized that this might be the end of marketing and branding as we know it. Why? It’s all about[…]
Why We Need Physical as Well as Digital
This article in NYtimes is spot on – we need physical books, records, papers! It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about. I have a Kindle, I use Spotify, I read news online. I play Xbox,[…]
No dawn, no day, I’m always in this twilight [photos]
Sognsvann at 2 pm, winter 2016. I had a hiking trip, and also tried out my GoPro. The cold (-10C) made it difficult to keep the iPhone alive, so I had to shoot most of[…]
List of Resources for Events in Silicon Valley
The Bay area is a jungle of events and networking opportunities. If you’re new, or visiting, to Silicon Valley and the Bay area, I’ve made a list of my top resources for finding events and[…]
Bullseye – How to find the right traction channel
Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work, according to Peter Thiel. And this lack of distribution, not problems with the product, is the number one cause of failure. Unfortunately for ‘builders’, the saying “if[…]
How to Get Traction – Book Review and Experience
For a startup, traction is crucial. It’s what separates a successful startup from a failed one. Why? Because “everybody” can build a great product, but not everybody can get enough customers or users. Lately I’ve[…]
Practical advice for short-term stay in Silicon Valley
There’s some practical stuff you’ll need to figure out when planning to stay for 1-3 months in the Bay area. Most importantly: Where will you live? How will you get around? (And why are you here?, but[…]
Visa Options for Entrepreneurs in the U.S.
One of the first questions international entrepreneurs ask each other is, more often than not, “what visa are you on?”. The impression many people have is that it’s easy to get into the U.S., at[…]
3 Tips for Networking as an Introvert in Silicon Valley
I’m an introvert, and I’ve blogged about how to network as an introvert. Introvert does not mean you don’t like people or that you’re shy. For me, it’s that it takes energy from me to[…]
Female Entrepreneur of the Year – Region East
So happy to have won Norwegian Female Entrepreneur of the Year – Region East! Press release in Norwegian here. It feels really good to get validation on what you do, and what you’re trying to accomplish.[…]
The classic ‘I’m still here, I’ll blog more soon’-post
Life is still great here in California. The weather is amazing – we’ve had several weekends with 30+ degrees. It’s sunny almost every day. The food is great, the people are great and business is[…]
Work, work, work, work, work, fun, fun, repeat
Life in California is good! It’s work all week, closing in on 50-60 hours/week on YAY. The little time left is spent on authenpic, the project I’m doing with my fantastic sister Mari. I do get[…]
When I’m not working..
I’m mostly working 10-12 hours days here, but I try to have some time off in the weekend. Last Thursday, after the mingling event I was lucky enough to be invited to dinner with Maria[…]