Martin Källström

Founder & engineer · Linköping, Sweden

Martin Källström

Twenty-five years of building tools for memory, expression and belonging — blog search with Twingly, a wearable camera for human memory with Narrative, same-day eyewear with Heywear, a creative operating system with Multiply, and now AI-native work at Elysium and Kindship. This site is one life on the record: every claim traceable to the second it was said or the page it was printed on.

In my own words

— Martin Källström

playable moments

Life

Turning points

full life history →

Martin lost his father at age 22; formative loss behind the Memoto idea.

Martin and his wife moved to Japan (she at Ericsson Yokohama); he did web development for Swedish companies incl. Gadelius. Returned to find Framfab gone.

Founding of Twingly

Starting the blog search engine Twingly in Linköping — Martin's first venture-scale company, grown out of Primelabs.

Gotland offsite

Twingly team offsite on Gotland where an attempted co-creation exercise with Anton collapsed — an early lesson in collaboration.

Martin lost his mother roughly a decade after his father — the lost memories of his parents became the seed of the lifelogging idea that grew into Memoto/Narrat

Leaving Twingly CEO role

Martin stepped down as Twingly CEO to pursue new ventures.

Memoto Kickstarter

The record-breaking Kickstarter for the Memoto lifelogging camera — $550k from 2,871 backers, turning a decade-old idea born from lost family memories into a co

Narrative bankruptcy

Narrative's insolvency after raising ~100M SEK — and the unusually open public processing of failure that followed ('Konsten att gå i konkurs').

Post-Narrative chapter in Asia: Entrepreneur in Residence at Expara in Bangkok (2017–2018) while building a Europe–Asia fintech with co-founder Anix Lynch, spli

New York & Heywear

Martin split life between New York and Sweden, building and running the Heywear same-day glasses studio in Manhattan (opened NoHo 2021, closed ~2024).

Meeting Veronica

Martin met his partner Veronica Gullbrandson on Tinder — goldsmith and owner of Ädelsmedjan in Kisa. The relationship was openly polyamorous from the start, wit

Founding of Multiply

Starting the AI venture Multiply with Rasmus Adler Wahlberg; home of the Co-creating with AI podcast.

Founding of Kindship

Martin's current venture focused on AI capability for families/relationships (kindship.ai).

Philosophy

How I think

all of the knowledge →

Views on AI

AI co-creationCo-creation demands equal agency — an AI-native product lets AI do everything a human can do in it, iterating together in a shared surface, not fielding prompts through a chat window.

AI adoption & societyAI hype consistently outruns actual adoption — the real bottleneck is human and organizational, not technical — and staying optimistic isn't naive, it's the only way to actually help shape good outcomes.

AI-native interfaces & productsChat made AI mainstream by being familiar, but it can't be the only interface — a truly AI-native product lets AI do anything a human can do in it, through UIs built for how people think, not text boxes.

Data ownership & AI ethicsIn the AI age, the company with the best data has the best AI. Training a model on copyrighted work is no different from an artist learning from artists before them — it shouldn't require payment.

AI engineering practiceThe case for self-hosting AI isn't cost, it's control over data flow — commercial APIs lock you into pipelines you can't shape. Match model capability to each pipeline stage; never compromise on the reasoning step.

AI business & valueFoundational models, not the apps layered on top, are the most defensible and valuable piece of the AI stack — and the shared open-source ecosystem around them is real collaborative strength, not fragmentation.

Personal development

Vulnerability & masculinityEmotional vulnerability isn't a gendered weakness — it's the foundation of authentic leadership and real connection. Armor that's meant to protect you actually just cuts you off from yourself.

Meditation & balanceRest isn't a luxury, it's infrastructure — a handful of hours in real flow beats a day stretched thin, and being well-rested is what makes it possible to lead from intuition instead of checklists.

Startup philosophy

Growth strategy & riskThe greatest danger for a successful company is believing its own hype instead of watching the market. A business isn't sustainable without real margin — check that before chasing growth, not after.

Hardware & manufacturingHardware is the easy part to copy; the real differentiation is what you build around it. Design returns tenfold to a hundredfold on what you invest — it communicates the vision before the product even works.

Fundraising & investorsCompanies don't die from bad products — they die from running out of cash. Pricing to maximize growth instead of margin, under investor pressure to stay "affordable," is what kills startups.

Failure & resilienceThe worst thing that can happen to a company isn't failure — it's stagnation, treading water for years without getting anywhere. Strive to create value, not success; value survives even when success doesn't.

Leadership & organizationProblems are invitations to enlist the right people, not puzzles to solve alone. Unions deserve support even when their tactics go wrong — the fix is to modernize them, not abandon them.

Memory & lifelogging

Memory & photographyHuman memory fades far faster than it feels like it does, quietly fabricating detail even while it feels reliable — which is why remembering has to be engineered for, first with a camera and now with AI.

Presence & attentionThe best technology gets out of the way — built so people can be present in a moment, not narrate it for an audience. Devices should disappear into life, not demand attention or performance.

Other

Privacy & surveillancePrivacy has to be the default state, not an opt-out, and a visible camera is more trustworthy than a hidden one. That same logic now favors local, self-hosted AI over cloud APIs that never let data be fully owned.

Stories

How I tell it

all the stories →

How I explain things

Luck is having all your tentacles outLuck doesn't exist, in his telling: it is the discipline of putting yourself and your product in enough rooms, proven by two nervous students, a referral in Lund and a rushed London pitch.

Old fears, new machinesPrinting press, Walkman, a grandmother who refused the telephone: every new panic gets a historical parallel.

Work is machine simulationA working glossary of his AI-era vocabulary: machine simulation, copy-paste monkeys, System 2, the pineapple canary.

Colorful socks and the peepholeThe images he reaches for when asked what a company, or a life, is for.

What it did to other people

Letters from usersA photographer in a wheelchair, a train conductor, a family with an autistic son: the mail that became his success metric.

The reviewersLeo Laporte's secret month, a girlfriend leaving the room, and the 2014 review wave: the Clip as outsiders saw it.

Lifelogging as careSofia's parents, Alzheimer's research and a seven-year SenseCam wearer: the uses that had nothing to do with gadgets.

Watching AI land on other peopleClassmates, a goldsmith, an agency watching a workflow appear in five minutes: adoption as he observed it in others.

Told and retold

The photo albums and the ninth birthdayNarrative's origin story, telling by telling from 2013 to 2017, and what shifts each time.

The spreadsheet of ideasThirty ideas in 2013, fifty in 2014, seventy in 2021: the founding-idea story and how its numbers drift.

The newspaper raceTwingly's breakout in the sanitized version and the true one: two rival newspapers launching the same day by accident.

Eighteen cows and no VCRThe Småland farm childhood, and the different trait each retelling uses it to explain.

Rules I paid for

Decline the traffic you can't carrySaying no to Aftonbladet's front page, and the Kickstarter that buried the team in support: capacity honesty as a rule.

Commit before you're readyA Vienna booth signed before the co-founders agreed, 1.3 million on design, and the cost when the bet ran too hot.

Kill early, never abandon nearly doneClean kills of a classifieds site and a fintech, and the one abandonment two months from beta he still regrets.

Clone the repo before you believe the demoDevin, Gemini, Figure and Cursor Composer: his method for hype, and the price he paid for skipping it once.

An honest pitch beats fake opennessA staged co-creation workshop on Gotland he still feels shame about, and the flat organisations that held.

Companies

The ventures

Martin's first company (mid-2000s), creator of Twingly; later renamed Twingly AB.

16 claims5 sources

Consulting firm (handelsbolag) Martin co-founded 2004, spun out of a housing-portal dev department; predecessor context to …

5 claims5 sources

Blog search engine and blogosphere data company, Linköping, founded 2006. Martin was co-founder/CEO until 2011.

335 claims57 sources

Lifelogging camera startup founded 2012 as Memoto AB, renamed Narrative 2013, bankrupt 2016. Martin co-founder/CEO.

1967 claims197 sources

Martin's applied-AI company (Be Here Now AB, org.nr 559106-3036, registered 2017-03-25, Kisa; Martin sole board member and CEO) …

51 claims11 sources

NYC same-day optical retail startup (founded 2018–19, retail launch March 2021 at 363 Lafayette St NoHo, closed ~2024). Martin …

149 claims15 sources

Martin's AI-native 'creative operating system' company (Stockholm, founded 2020; legal entity Fluent Development AB, org.nr …

399 claims69 sources

Alversjö Natur

Alversjö Natur AB (org.nr 559357-0145, registered late 2021, seat Kinda) — the community-held land company that owns the …

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Martin's current venture (martin@kindship.ai).

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Backers along the way: Servisen

Projects

What they built

Narrative Clip 1

Narrative Clip 2

Narrative App & Platform

Co-creating with AI

Memoto Kickstarter Campaign

Alversjö Natur

Alversjö & The Borderland

Twingly Blog Search

Lifeloggers Documentary

Cross-cutting

Go deeper

Biography beyond the named events

People & partners

Everyone who mattered along the way

Unbuilt ideas, still implementable

Serendipity

Didn't see that coming

Recordings

On the record

all 186 recordings · ~51 hours →

Primelabs presenting @ Podcamp Europe 1/2

Intervju med Martin Källström, CEO Twingly

MTD 2013 - Martin Källström

Memoto logs your life in pictures (#FMT @ #qseu13)

Martin Källström - Wearable Technology

IND13 - Martin Källström

Document Your Life! The Narrative Clip Wearable Camera at PhotoPlus Ex

Brave New Connected World - How Wearable Tech is Transforming IoT

Press

In print