Building with technology since 2010
My name isJoachim
Aschim.
I live in Trondheim, Norway, and have been building things with technology and starting companies since 2010.
Follow the years
What I like most is finding something that sits unused, building something out of it, and keeping it running until it can be measured.
What I run now
- Havspor
Coastal boat traffic, on a map people use every day that pays for itself.
- The rest of the portfolio
What I build with open data. The current list lives at Oddworks.
- Norwegian AI Championship
I entered on my own. Here is what I wrote about the competition and what I learned.
How I think
What I have done
Some things worked out. Others taught me something. I took both with me.
- 2003–2007
- High school in Sandefjord and on the Isle of Man, then a year at art college. I still draw, mostly picture books.
- 2010
- Co-founded Global Illumination, which made digital signage out of ordinary TVs and some software. We won the first round of Venture Cup in Trondheim, travelled to Taiwan to meet TV manufacturers and sold to a few customers. In 2014 we called it a day. It was my first experience of a good product not selling itself.
- 2011
- Started Oddworks. First I put money and time into a development team that later grew internationally. From 2013 I built websites, apps and systems for small businesses. The company is still mine, and it is where I build my things today.
- 2011–2020
- Co-founder of the investment company WorldView Innovation in Oslo. We owned and followed up several smaller companies. I left in 2020.
- 2014–2016
- CEO of SuperEgo. We built digital tools for mental health, based on methods with documented effect, for organisations working on behalf of the public sector. We received EU funding. I learned how long things take in healthcare, and how important it is to keep going.
- 2017–
- Board member at Nidaross, which invests in early-stage companies. It lets me see what founders look like from the investor's side.
- 2017–2024
- Responsible for IT and business development in Scandinavia for an international fashion company. I connected finance systems, set up electronic trading with the retail chains, built an online store that turned a profit, and trained the shops in the new tools. Seven years of daily contact with people who run shops for a living.
- 2023–
- I build internal tools for large organisations, much of it on Microsoft's low-code platform. Almost all of it is about getting more out of data they already have.
- 2026
- On holiday in Malaysia I built a map of boat traffic along the coast. A regional newspaper wrote about it before I got home. That spring I entered an artificial intelligence competition on my own. Now I build with open data, and have put together a machine at home that keeps it all running.
Most of the things I have started began with something that annoyed me. Why does digital signage cost so much? Why do people wait so long for mental health support? Why is there no map that shows where the boat is? I find it hard to leave questions like that alone.
I have learned that it pays to launch early. A simple website that works, on a real domain, says more than a presentation. Afterwards I watch who uses it and what they do, and let that decide what I build next. It is often not what I expected.
Norway has a remarkable amount of public data that sits open and almost unused. The road authority, Entur, the coastal administration and Statistics Norway publish data on roads, trains, boats and pay around the clock. I like pulling it down and seeing what can be made from it. What accumulates becomes, over time, something nobody else has.
I use artificial intelligence in most of my work, and it is the reason one person can keep several services running at once. I do not trust that something works until I have measured it. Even so, it is conversations with people from completely different fields that teach me the most.
Things I have written
I write now and then at oddworks.no, mostly about technology and what it does to us. Most posts are in Norwegian; the site has an English switch.