There is a strange assumption that experience automatically means you should continue doing what you have always done. If you have spent thirty years producing events, developing projects, coordinating people, solving technical problems and turning complicated ideas into reality, then surely you should carry on doing exactly that. Perhaps as a consultant, an adviser or a senior project manager. Preferably with an impressive LinkedIn profile, a carefully constructed professional offering and a business model explaining how all those years of experience can be converted into billable hours.
But what if you are no longer particularly interested in selling your experience that way? What if the thing that still motivates you is not the assignments, the organisations or the job titles, but the act of creating something? That brief, almost electric moment when an idea suddenly begins to take shape and you can see something that does not yet exist but might actually become real.
That is more or less where PROTO begins.
Not with a market analysis, an investor presentation or some grand ambition to build Europe's next technology company. It begins with a fairly simple realisation: I want to keep creating, but I no longer want to build an entire organisation around every idea.
When Experience Becomes an Asset Rather Than a Job Title
For much of my professional life, creativity has been inseparable from production. Film, concerts, international events, sports productions, scenography, technical installations and different forms of project development have all had something in common. An idea was never enough on its own. It needed people, money, schedules, suppliers, meetings, permits, transport, technology and an almost endless number of decisions before it could finally become reality.
I enjoyed that world. Not least because it taught me to see opportunities where others saw problems, to understand the connections between people and technology, and to recognise fairly quickly whether an idea was practically achievable or simply looked convincing on paper.
But that world also has a downside. The bigger projects become, the less time there often is for the things that made them interesting in the first place. Creativity risks drowning in administration. The organisation becomes more important than the idea. Success is measured in turnover, staff numbers, budgets and completed projects rather than in what has actually been created.
It is a development I no longer feel particularly compelled to participate in.
When I began reconsidering my previous project, which for many years had served as a platform for project ideas, visual concept development and creative collaborations, it gradually became clear that this was not really about changing a business. It was about changing my own relationship with work, creativity and the future.
That earlier project had emerged from a world in which ideas were developed into concepts that would then be presented, financed and realised by organisations. It was a natural continuation of my professional experience, but also a way of holding on to familiar working methods. The more I began exploring artificial intelligence and digital development, the clearer it became that I no longer needed to work in the same way.
PROTO grows out of a different idea: that concepts can exist, be explored, tested and sometimes become finished digital products without my necessarily having to build an organisation to manage them. I can still develop concepts that other people or companies choose to bring to life, but I can also create working prototypes myself, experiment with digital services and allow curiosity to determine the direction.
It may sound like a small difference. To me, it is fundamental.
Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Who Gets to Create
There is endless discussion about how artificial intelligence will transform the labour market. Which jobs will disappear, which companies will make money, which skills will become obsolete and how much productivity the technology is expected to generate.
Far less attention is given to another possibility: people who have never considered themselves programmers, software developers or technology entrepreneurs can suddenly begin building digital products.
I belong to that group.
I am not a trained programmer, nor do I have any ambition to become a conventional one. What I have done for much of my life, however, is understand problems, develop solutions, formulate concepts and turn relatively vague ideas into something other people can use, experience or develop further.
Previously, the distance between a digital idea and a functioning application was often considerable. You needed developers, designers, technical project management and money. Quite frequently, the process began with trying to sell an idea before anyone even knew whether it worked.
That order is beginning to change.
With AI-powered development tools, I can describe a function, reason through the needs of potential users, explore different solutions and gradually build a prototype. I can use one tool to write code, another to analyse its structure and a third to help identify problems. This does not mean the technology always understands what I want, or that the resulting code is automatically safe and reliable. On the contrary, judgement, verification, testing and sometimes specialist expertise are still essential.
But the entry ticket to digital creation has changed.
And that may be far more revolutionary than yet another impressive demonstration of what a language model can do.
We have become accustomed to the technology industry describing innovation as something that happens in environments full of venture capital, young founders and people devoting most of their lives to scaling businesses. But what if the next wave of genuinely useful digital solutions could just as easily come from a retired teacher, a former nurse, an experienced logistics specialist or someone who has spent thirty years organising major international events?
People who understand problems because they have actually lived with them.
AI does not replace that experience. It can make it useful in entirely new ways.
I Do Not Need to Build the Next Big Company
There is another idea within startup culture that I find increasingly difficult to accept: the assumption that every good idea must have the potential to become enormous.
Almost everything has to scale. User numbers must rise, investment must be secured, new markets must be conquered and the business should ideally develop along a growth curve that looks impressive in an investor presentation.
But why?
If a small digital service helps a few thousand people solve a real problem, why should it be considered a failure if it never grows beyond that? If an application can be built by one person, operate independently and deliver limited but genuine value, why must it become a company with employees, executives and investors?
It is not growth itself that bothers me. It is the assumption that growth must always be the ultimate objective.
PROTO is a European startup project, but I want to explore whether such a project can also be organised around values other than the traditional pursuit of expansion. Independence, curiosity, creative control and the freedom to work on different ideas without having to turn every experiment into a long-term commercial operation.
Some ideas will undoubtedly prove commercially interesting. Others may be better suited to partnerships, licensing or further development by people with different skills and ambitions. Some will probably not work at all.
And that has to be acceptable.
It also means that PROTO will not be exclusively about apps or code. Visual concept development, environments, social ideas, creative projects and music can still have their place. The difference is that I no longer need to regard all these activities as parts of a conventional business that must be held together by a single business model.
What connects them is not an industry, but curiosity about what might be possible.
Age, Experience and the Right to Begin Again
There is also a personal dimension to all this that I believe extends far beyond my own project.
We live in societies where people are expected to work for longer, while the labour market often treats experience as an asset with a strangely arbitrary expiry date. Companies like to talk about diversity, talent shortages and lifelong learning, yet people who pass a certain age often discover that their experience has become increasingly difficult to translate into new opportunities.
At the same time, retirement has traditionally been presented as a kind of final destination. You are supposed to travel, play golf, volunteer, renovate the house or find a pleasant hobby. There is, of course, nothing wrong with any of these things. But why should the curiosity to create something new automatically disappear simply because your working life is approaching its end or has already ended?
I have occasionally thought about how people once spent hundreds of hours building model ships from matchsticks. It was creative, demanded patience and undoubtedly provided considerable satisfaction. But today's digital tools offer an entirely different possibility. Someone with the same curiosity and persistence can now use those qualities to build a functioning application, develop a service or create something that other people might actually find useful.
This does not mean everyone over a certain age should become an entrepreneur. It means they can finally gain access to tools that allow them to continue creating on their own terms.
An app has no age. It does not develop grey hair, has no birth date on its CV and cannot be rejected during recruitment because someone considers it too old.
At its best, it is judged by what it does.
This is one of the ideas behind PROTO PLUS, a concept within PROTO that I want to develop for people in the later stages of life. The intention is to combine digital workshops, AI-assisted creation, the exchange of experience and a network where people aged 60 and over can explore and develop their own ideas. Not as a charity project for older people who need to be taught modern technology, but as an environment where experience can meet new tools on equal terms.
There are undoubtedly practical difficulties to resolve before such an idea can work. But the problem behind it is interesting: we constantly talk about skills shortages while enormous amounts of human experience risk being excluded from the creative economy.
Perhaps what we need is not more conventional training. Perhaps we need better tools and entirely new environments in which people can use what they already know.
PROTO Is an Experiment, Not a Finished Answer
It would be easy to present PROTO as a vision of the future of creative entrepreneurship and then fill a website with ambitious language about innovation, transformation and limitless opportunities.
But I am rather tired of that kind of language.
I do not yet know which of PROTO's ideas will work. I do not know which applications will find users, which concepts will become relevant to others or whether any of them will generate enough revenue to justify continued development.
What I do know is that the possibility of experimenting has become too interesting to ignore.
Among the ideas are digital services designed to help people navigate difficult situations, tools for identifying digital fraud and concepts intended to make complicated information easier to understand. TRUSTCHECK and FRISTEG are examples of such projects. They begin with fairly concrete human problems, not with the assumption that the world needs another app simply because the technology makes one possible.
Other ideas will be more playful. Games, visual experiments or digital concepts that begin with nothing more complicated than the question: Could this actually be done?
I believe preserving that freedom is important. If every idea must immediately be assessed according to its commercial potential, many of the most interesting possibilities will never be explored.
At the same time, we must be able to distinguish between a functioning demonstration and a finished product. AI makes it possible to achieve a great deal in a short time, but it can also create the illusion that something is complete when the most difficult questions remain unanswered. Security, reliability, usability, privacy and responsibility do not disappear simply because code can now be written quickly.
An important part of PROTO's work will therefore be acknowledging the limitations as well as the possibilities. Being able to say that an idea failed, that a prototype needed to be rebuilt or that an AI tool produced something convincing on the surface that did not survive closer examination.
I am far more interested in that reality than in yet another story about someone building a successful company over a weekend.
Work Less. Create More. Live Full.
It would be easy to misunderstand those words as another promise that technology will make us richer, more efficient and more productive.
For me, they mean something quite different.
I have spent enough years organising work to understand how easily the act of working can become an end in itself. We work to keep organisations functioning, generate new assignments to finance existing structures and fill our calendars with meetings that produce still more meetings.
Eventually, it can almost seem provocative to suggest that perhaps we could simply do less of all that.
Not less creating. Less of everything that gets in the way of creating.
Artificial intelligence may very well be used to extract even greater productivity from people who already work too much. It may become another instrument of control, measurement and efficiency. It would hardly be the first time a technology that promised freedom was instead used to accelerate the pace of work.
But it can also be used in the opposite direction.
To give individuals greater independence. To reduce the need for large organisations. To allow people to develop their own ideas without first having to convince a manager, investor or board of directors that those ideas deserve to be tested.
That is the possibility I want to explore with PROTO.
Not to prove that one person can replace an entire development team. Not to build a machine that produces hundreds of applications. And certainly not to fill another website with impressive words about the future.
But to discover how far experience, curiosity and new digital tools can actually take an independent creator.
I have no idea exactly where PROTO will be in a few years. For the first time in a long while, that does not feel like a problem.
Perhaps that is precisely the point.
Welcome to PROTO.
Work less. Create more. Live full.
