personal conversations with the entrepreneurs and investors creating a future worth getting excited about
He co-founded a company that hit a $3B valuation, then watched hackers steal $620M from it. That experience changed how Aleksander Larsen thinks about security, and it sent him somewhere almost no crypto founder goes next: defence.
In this episode I sit down with Aleksander Larsen, co-founder and CEO of Stendr, the Oslo company building AI-driven interception systems for a sovereign Europe. Before Stendr he spent seven years as COO of Sky Mavis, scaling Axie Infinity into one of the most-traded games in the world.
We get into the full arc: what it takes to run infrastructure serving millions of users, why the Ronin hack became the turning point, and how a gaming founder ends up building hardware for the modern battlefield. We also talk about why Europe can no longer outsource its defence, and what it means to build a Nordic defence prime from a standing start.
Norway shares one of NATO’s longest borders with Russia. Aleksander thinks that geography is a feature, not a footnote.
