Buying technology is easy. Building the capability to shape it is much harder. That idea ran through the session I moderated at the Autumn Economic Forum 2026 in Ho Chi Minh City, held in collaboration with @WEF. Ho Chi Minh City has around 14 million people, more than my home country, Sweden. At that scale, a tech partnership is about who controls the data, where IP is developed, how local talent benefits, and how dependent the city becomes. What I took away: • Importing technology doesn’t mean importing innovation. Make local capability part of the deal. • Procurement matters more than it looks. Servicing fees on black-box contracts can double within two to four years. • Sovereignty isn’t owning everything. It’s choosing your dependencies. • Start small, show results, then scale. • Cities can shape these partnerships, not just receive them. Thank you to our panelists, Ho Chi Minh City People’s Committee, Viet Nam C4IR, the Tech Diplomacy Global Institute and everyone who made it possible.

Too much of what we call business is show business. At the Fund What Matters roundtable with @StefanKrook, author of The Laghum Economy, we challenged how we measure success. We celebrate funding rounds, valuations and unicorns. But raising money isn't the same as creating value. Stefan argues that we tax labor while failing to adequately price our consumption of natural resources. It raises a bigger question: are we rewarding the things we actually want more of? We also need to rethink capital itself. Time, experience, energy and networks matter too. Sometimes the most valuable investment isn't a check. It's an introduction, a shared experience or helping someone avoid a mistake you've already made.

Back in Europe after three weeks in the US, and still thinking about the last weekend in SF. Reconnecting with friends I've spent far more time with online than in person. Long dinners, a book exchange that took an entire evening, hiking at Muir Beach, and a bonfire on the sand. What made it special was how natural it all felt. Good conversations, genuine openness, and people who made everyone feel at home. I flew out to catch up with old friends. I came home with more of them than I left with.

Wrapping up my Texas tour in San Antonio, where I presented research on startup survival at the Academy of Business Research conference alongside Prof. Annette Craven. Our paper explores how tech startups survive the Valley of Death, moving from early traction to commercial sustainability through experimentation, adaptation and better use of resources. Earlier in San Marcos, I reunited with Prof. Angela VandenBroek, who interviewed me in Stockholm back in 2018 for her research on the startup ecosystem. She's now writing a book about Stockholm, and we had plenty to catch up on. After 20+ years of building and investing in startups, it's rewarding to explore these questions from an academic perspective. Texas has been great. Off to San Francisco!

Congratulations @WomenInTechOrg and @AyumiMooreAoki on reaching one million women and girls. A milestone worth celebrating. 👏 This week, I gave a masterclass for Women in Tech's Global Entrepreneurship Programme on fundraising vs. bootstrapping. The simplest version: raise when the window will close without capital. Bootstrap when time is on your side. Raising isn't validation. Investors validate the story. Customers validate the business. Sharing a nice memory from our visit to @philippivillage during the Cape Town summit earlier this year.

After a week of diplomacy in NYC, I swapped politics for culture and headed south for my first time in Texas. Starting to understand why Texans are so proud of it. 🤠 Dallas, then Fort Worth @fwsystation, @SixthFlrMuseum at Dealey Plaza, old friends, new ones and a probably unreasonable amount of BBQ. Plus a slightly unusual bucket-list item: two @KillTony shows in three days. First in Grand Prairie, then a live taping at the @MothershipATX in Austin. Houston and San Antonio next. Who should I meet, and what shouldn't I miss?

Wrapping up UNGA with one more question: what does sovereign AI actually mean? I moderated a closed-door Digital@UNGA session together with @MFAestonia and @H_Popp, Estonia’s Ambassador-at-Large for Cyber Diplomacy. One example made the point clear: having a data centre on your soil doesn’t necessarily mean you control it. Very few economies can own the entire AI stack. Sovereignty isn’t necessarily independence. It’s choosing your dependencies and having the ability to switch.

Busy few days on the sidelines of UNGA, moving between public stages and private rooms. 🇲🇿 President Daniel Chapo on using energy investment to diversify Mozambique's economy. 🇦🇴 Minister of State for Economic Coordination José de Lima Massano on Angola beyond oil and investment in digital infrastructure. 🇸🇾 Minister of Emergencies and Disaster Management Raed Al-Saleh on rebuilding Syria, with schools and hospitals returning to service. 🇧🇩 First Spouse Dr. Zubaida Rahman on turning commitments for women and children into meaningful action. Very different starting points, but a similar optimism about what comes next. I think technology will be part of each.

On the sidelines of United Nations General Assembly, I moderated a closed-door Digital@UNGA 2026 affiliate roundtable under the Chatham House Rule, co-organized with @uzbekmfa, bringing together government, academia, industry and civil society. One issue kept coming back: continuity. Governments train diplomats, then they rotate. Companies build teams, then reorganize. Knowledge leaves. Technology doesn't reset when organizations do. Almost a year after the Samarkand Declaration on Tech Diplomacy, the harder work now is delivery.

Back in New York for UNGA High-Level Week, starting with UN #DigitalCooperation Day hosted by @ODET_UN. We talk about AI as if it is something almost abstract, living somewhere in the cloud. In reality, every national AI strategy eventually runs into the resources an economy actually has: compute, energy and infrastructure. What works in one part of the world can't simply be copied somewhere else.

Two interesting conversations at @NordicTechWeek. One about building companies in Europe. The other about what happens when companies fail. They sounded like very different topics. Turns out, they were not. Sweden has become a very good place to start a technology company. The ecosystem is deeper, the early money is here, and Stockholm is now attracting people who a few years ago would have gone to the Bay Area. The late-stage money is a different conversation. Then a company starts growing, and some surprisingly basic things get difficult. Employee ownership is probably the clearest example. We have a qualified option scheme, QESO, but the valuation cap has not kept pace with how companies here are valued. One Swedish company is now running five separate option programmes to give its people a meaningful stake in what they are building. Social fees on a single senior hire can reach a million dollars before anyone has made any money. Then there is Europe itself. A company can be successful across the Nordics and still find itself starting again when it enters the next country. Different tax systems, regulations and local exceptions slowly turn one company into several versions of itself. The following morning we talked about failure. It rarely came down to one spectacularly bad decision. The product is good and the market is not there. Too much capital creates pressure to scale before the company is ready. A decision that looks tactical turns out to be structural. Or the mistake is carrying on too long. I know that territory. I have had companies fail and gone through periods of sleeping ~3.5h a night for months. I’ve seen up close what that kind of pressure can do to people. We compress entrepreneurship into two moments, starting and succeeding. Nearly everything that decides the outcome happens in between.

Just voted in Sweden’s election today. For the first time, my voting card came digitally through Kivra instead of the mailbox. Found my polling station there and headed over. Such a small change, but it worked really well. 🗳️🇸🇪

Back at @NordicTechWeek, this time on the other side of the microphone. Two panels at Tech Open, outdoors in Kungsträdgården, free and open to anyone. ▶ Thu 10th, 15:00. Build in Europe: Europe has the talent, capital and ambition. Building across its borders is still harder than it should be. ▶ Fri 11th, 10:30. Founder F*ckups. Every other stage gets the good story. This one does not. Bring coffee. Nobody is going to be gentle. I have had companies of my own go under. I know which of the two I am looking forward to. See you in the park.

Wrapping up my visit to São Paulo, where I gave the opening keynote for the final panel of the 5th Brazil & Arab Countries Economic Forum, hosted by @abcc_mea. Around a thousand people joined us in the room and online. 🇧🇷 The Chamber has spent 74 years building a bridge between these two regions. I spoke about the generation that will carry that relationship forward: two young populations encountering the same technological shift at almost exactly the same time. In Brazil, 65% of internet users aged 9 to 17 already use generative AI. Brazil is now the third-largest source of ChatGPT traffic globally, behind only the United States and India. This is not a generation waiting to be persuaded. The numbers are significant. Across Brazil and the 22 Arab countries, around 320 million people are under 25. That is the scale behind the phrase “next generation of consumers,” although increasingly they will be builders as much as consumers. The Arab world is already showing what that can look like, with homegrown AI efforts from Falcon and Jais in the UAE to ALLaM and HUMAIN’s ALLAM 34B in Saudi Arabia and Fanar in Qatar. There is real research, real capital, and serious ambition. The part I find most interesting is what comes next: two young populations on opposite sides of the world building with the same technology, but in their own languages, markets, and cultures. That feels like a very good place to start.

Shenzhen turns ideas into hardware faster than most cities schedule a meeting. A few days after TDGI's global forum at UNESCO HQ in Paris, I was invited by @APEC to deliver an opening keynote on Tech for Good and tech diplomacy. The contrast was clear: in Paris, the question was how technology should be governed. In Shenzhen, it was whether those principles can survive contact with reality. That is the test Tech for Good has to pass. From Paris to Shenzhen, from principles to practice. This may have been my first visit here. It will definitely not be my last.

Last Thursday, @UNESCO headquarters accidentally became the largest birthday party I have ever had. But the birthday was the smallest thing that happened. More than 1,000 people joined us in the room, thousands more online, with speakers from over 30 countries discussing tech diplomacy as statecraft. In just over a year, what began as a single forum has grown into TDGI; an institute convening leaders, building capacity, producing research, advising institutions, and helping make tech diplomacy a real discipline. Probably best birthday in years.