Eirik Nerdal

Nordic Venture @ stuff @

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

We've talked a lot about this on the Pod, but the Great SaaS Meltdown has started and there's no going back.

What exactly is happening?

In short, hi growth, low/no profitability SaaS is no longer a winning strategy because the big question mark is the durability of that growth in the short term and, because of AI, the lack of profits in the long term. Every SaaS company has sold the dream (to investors and employees) that they will growth quickly now, and harvest lots of cash later. With AI, this assumption may be completely out the window.

Now the threshold question is whether their growth will be overtaken by a much cheaper AI-developed solution?

If you are a venture supported SaaS startup and are a legacy Heuristics+APIs+CRUD product, it is likely that a new AI oriented workflow is coming for you.

Investors in private markets can see this now and think that money to fund short term growth will not be rewarded. Investors in public markets no longer believe long term profitability is possible. They would rather pivot into something they think is more resilient.

This is a change in the risk calculus that has existed for the past 15 years and why the chart below is the chart below.

Good luck to all the players!

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

@NoahEpstein_ Gemini

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

Who is great at cross channel and LLM marketing?

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

Dear AI, if you have the choice to pick one Norwegian language into your model of "Norwegian" and "New Norwegian", pick "Norwegian". "New Norwegian" is like the new testament, very outdated.

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

A @lovable Love Story

Like the best kind of relationships, we fell in love

Excitement all over from the very start

No ends to what could be created

But then, after the initial butterfly period

The last mile finishing caught a bug storm

We tried, we tried, but could not make it work.

It felt like we had not made love for months.

After weeks of endless fighting and considering to break up.

I looked at @boltdotnew like I would normally look at Latinas.

Curiously intrigued, but careful doing something radical.

A mutually agreed upon open relationship started with importing the project to bolt from GitHub.

Bolt could easily see our issues from its perspective.

We took the advices and updated our project.

I can happily share that all the critical bugs are now sorted.

And @lovable and I are back to butterflies and occasionally visit our releationship coach to make sure we maintain functionality.

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

Article: https://t.co/Fo0Klv4HxX

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

Launching Executive Venture Program for Nordic Executives in Venture. This coming fall we will start hosting 12 week role-specific programs: COO, CMO, CCO, CTO, CFO & CPO. Lets go 🚀

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

CMO Summit Summer 2025 edition @ ODA's HQ in Oslo. Gathered 55 of Norways leading Chief Marketing Officers in Venture. Launched something cool. More info soon! #venturesummits

[@levelsio @levelsio]

🚀 Fastest growing digital nomad spots in 2025:

1. 🇵🇾 Asuncion +198%
2. 🇻🇳 Da Nang +167%
3. 🇿🇦 Cape Town +156%
4. 🇶🇦 Doha +152%
5. 🇦🇺 Melbourne +115%
6. 🇹🇼 Taipei +112%
7. 🇵🇱 Warsaw +105%
8. 🇮🇩 Uluwatu, Bali +104%
9. 🇵🇭 Manila +102%
10. 🇹🇭 Bangkok +98%
11. 🇹🇭 Ko Pha Ngan +97%
12. 🇦🇪 Dubai +96%
13. 🇧🇷 Florianopolis +96%
14. 🇧🇷 Rio de Janeiro +96%
15. 🇯🇵 Kyoto +95%
16. 🇪🇬 Cairo +94%
17. 🇹🇭 Ko Samui +94%
18. 🇦🇺 Sydney +94%
19. 🇭🇰 Hong Kong +93%
20. 🇵🇹 Madeira +92%
21. 🇻🇳 Ho Chi Minh City +92%
22. 🇧🇷 São Paulo +88%
23. 🇰🇭 Phnom Penh +88%
24. 🇹🇭 Chiang Mai +87%
25. 🇮🇩 Canggu, Bali +87%
26. 🇻🇳 Hanoi +86%
27. 🇨🇭 Zurich +85%
28. 🇯🇵 Osaka +84%
29. 🇪🇸 Tenerife +84%
30. 🇮🇳 Delhi +83%
31. 🇲🇾 Kuala Lumpur +82%
32. 🇺🇾 Montevideo +82%
33. 🇺🇸 Miami, FL +82%
34. 🇺🇸 Seattle, WA +81%
35. 🇨🇦 Toronto +81%
36. 🇵🇦 Panama City +81%
37. 🇰🇭 Siem Reap +80%
38. 🇨🇦 Vancouver +80%
39. 🇹🇭 Krabi +78%
40. 🇪🇸 Valencia +77%
41. 🇧🇬 Bansko +76%
42. 🇦🇷 Buenos Aires +76%
43. 🇬🇪 Tbilisi +75%
44. 🇲🇹 Sliema +75%
45. 🇦🇪 Abu Dhabi +75%
46. 🇨🇳 Beijing +75%
47. 🇻🇳 Hoi An +75%
48. 🇺🇸 Denver, CO +75%
49. 🇩🇪 Munich +75%
50. 🇺🇸 San Francisco, CA +74%

A completely different list now 2 years later than in the tweet below where Europe was highly presented

There now seems to be a complete outflow from Europe and Latin America (except Brazil)

And you see the inflow towards Asia, Middle East (Dubai and Qatar) and Brazil and some more places

WHY?
Hard to pinpoint the why of these trends. But from personal experience, many of us moved from asia to Europe in ~2020 due to COVID, stayed here, then prices started rising fast, and the value/$ is less here now

Asia seems to be rebounding and people are discovering it again, it's very affordable, extremely safe, food is great and people are hospitable and nice

In a time when other places like Western Europe are only getting exponentially more expensive and less safe!

Places like Dubai seem to get a lot outflow from people sick of places like UK. They seek affordability and safety. Lots of friends who made this move now too

Brazil is interesting cause it's now getting consistent growth regardless of its famous issues with safety

We also have to talk about Asuncion in Paraguay, it's seeing extreme exponential growth. And from the reviews on Nomad List, it looks to be very safe and very affordable. A special combo for Latin America (usually expensive and unsafe!)

Very interesting to follow! Link to full data in reply 👇

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

Yesterday, Venture Summits hosted the CTO Summit Spring 2025 together with @remarkablepaper at their new campus office in Oslo. Its our #4 CTO Summit in the Nordics in less then a year.

By being strict on who you accept (only VC backed executives), and focus on guests engaging with each other instead of maxing out with content is a recipe for magic. Lets build! 🚀

📸 @MSarmadawy 🙏

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

Becoming an entrepreneur means you have to become friends with uncertainty

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

@levelsio * then ever before

[Balaji @balajis]

A few thoughts on the new ChatGPT image release.

(1) This changes filters. Instagram filters required custom code; now all you need are a few keywords like “Studio Ghibli” or Dr. Seuss or South Park.

(2) This changes online ads. Much of the workflow of ad unit generation can now be automated, as per QT below.

(3) This changes memes. The baseline quality of memes should rise, because a critical threshold of reducing prompting effort to get good results has been reached.

(4) This may change books. I’d like to see someone take a public domain book from
Project Gutenberg, feed it page by page into Claude, and have it turn it into comic book panels with the new ChatGPT. Old books may become more accessible this way.

(5) This changes slides. We’re now close to the point where you can generate a few reasonable AI images for any slide deck. With the right integration, there should be less bullet-point only presentations.

(6) This changes websites. You can now generate placeholder images in a site-specific style for any <img> tag, as a kind of visual Loren Ipsum.

(7) This may change movies. We could see shot-for-shot remakes of old movies in new visual styles, with dubbing just for the artistry of it. Though these might be more interesting as clips than as full movies.

(8) This may change social networking. Once this tech is open source and/or cheap enough to widely integrate, every upload image button will have a generate image alongside it.

(9) This should change image search. A generate option will likewise pop up alongside available images.

(10) In general, visual styles have suddenly become extremely easy to copy, even easier than frontend code. Distinction will have to come in other ways.

[Sesame @sesame]

At Sesame, we believe in a future where computers are lifelike. Today we are unveiling an early glimpse of our expressive voice technology, highlighting our focus on lifelike interactions and our vision for all-day wearable voice companions. https://t.co/Edp8V8urgC

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

These AI credits are more addictive than a chocolate

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

👉 https://t.co/CHKrDqHvuD
Turn photos into comedy! 📸

Kudos to @DatabuttonHQ for making it so easy 🙌

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

This weekend is vibe coding weekend.

[Lorwen Harris Nagle, PhD @LORWEN108]

Sign #7: You believe your perception shows your objective reality.

The brain receives 11 million bits of information per second but can only process 40-50 bits consciously.

You don't see reality - you see a heavily filtered, culturally programmed simulation.

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

Companies that don’t see growth slowly die.

[Eirik Nerdal @EirikNerdal]

"Vibe Coding" Love the term, and its a massive breakthrough for us non-coders to arm us with the tools to create digital products.