What they most need.

Criterion one

"You are a strong generalist, who is able to do research, build models, interview experts, form a view, and communicate clearly."

This is the shape of my career rather than one line on it. I trained as a social anthropologist, which is formal training in exactly this loop: enter a field you do not know, observe what people actually do rather than what they say, interview until the pattern holds, then commit to a view in writing. I have run that loop commercially four times in four unrelated fields: netnographic research for a Norwegian regional business development network, stakeholder systems across roughly eighty countries at TOMRA, commercial strategy for a travel-technology SaaS at Byteform, and veterinary clinical infrastructure at Veterinærhåndboka, a field I entered knowing nothing and where I now work daily with practitioners and academics.

The views I formed are published as essays in my journal, and one of them contains a formal relevance model I built to test whether the thinking held. Forming a view in public, where it can be checked, is the part I would point to.

Criterion two

"You are good with numbers. You can, or could quickly learn how to, build a cost-effectiveness model, spot key variables, and communicate uncertainty."

My quantitative record is commercial and structural. At Byteform I owned pricing, go-to-market arithmetic and investor material, where every hour and krone had to justify itself against an alternative use. In my published work the numeracy is visible in two forms: a weighted scoring model with explicit similarity, decay and exposure terms, where every parameter is a stated claim about what attention is worth, and a business-model analysis that reads a decision-support company's 41 percent operating margin as evidence about what clinicians actually buy. I have also operationalised Elevate Philanthropy's own Top New Funds evaluation into a working prototype that turns the report's comparison table into deterministic, decomposable scoring.

What I have not yet built is a DALY-denominated cost-effectiveness model. The skeleton is familiar: identify the variables that move the answer, state the assumptions, carry the uncertainty honestly. I expect the gap to be idiom rather than aptitude, and I would want early feedback on my first models to close it fast.

Criterion three

"You are calibrated about your own uncertainty, and you say so without being asked."

This one I can evidence in print, unprompted. My essay on advisory intelligence marks the exact line where borrowed knowledge ends: "Here is where my own thinking begins, and where I am least certain." My essay on Veterinærhåndboka opens by stating what I am not: "I am not a veterinarian," and builds the entire system so that people with actual expertise, not me, hold the final word.

I also build calibration into products, not just prose. The clinical tool is engineered to abstain rather than produce a fluent guess, and The Sorting Hat returns "no confident match" instead of padding a list when fit is genuinely poor. A confident wrong answer is worse than no answer; I have written that sentence enough times that I can be held to it.

Criterion four

"You look to optimise processes to save time rather than add hours."

The clearest example is the ticketing system I built for the people function at TOMRA. The insight was not the tickets; it was that once recurring questions became visible, they could be answered once, in a document published before the question was asked, instead of forty times in private threads. That system then fed a governed AI assistant answering only from a closed, audited source, so routine requests stopped consuming human hours at all.

Veterinærhåndboka runs on the same conviction at smaller headcount: automation does the heavy mechanical lifting, content is classified by how fast it decays so revision effort follows need rather than the calendar, and the scarce expert attention is spent only on the one thing experts alone can do, which is judging whether it is right. My essays argue that the systems that help us think well are the ones with the discipline to leave almost everything out. I try to build, and work, accordingly.

"Steep learning curve. Projects land you in fields that are new to you, and you're expected to keep up."

I have made a career of being the newest person in the room: veterinary medicine, deposit-return systems across eighty countries, travel technology, regional development. Anthropology is formal training in exactly this situation: entering a field you do not know, earning a working map of it fast, and checking that map against people who know better before acting on it.

"Feedback is constant. Daily to weekly contact means your thinking gets challenged; we appreciate healthy disagreements."

Fieldwork is the daily experience of being corrected, by informants, by colleagues, by reality. I have kept that structure in everything since: Veterinærhåndboka is built so that experts overrule me by design, and at Byteform the discipline that mattered most was killing our own plan when the buyer disagreed with it. I do not experience challenge as friction. It is the fastest instrument I know, and I sharpen against it.

"We move fast. We'd rather ship something workable this week than perfect next quarter."

The Sorting Hat went from Elevate Philanthropy's published report to a working, testable prototype in days. Byteform's go-to-market ran as weekly bets, each chosen to teach the most per hour spent, because with two people there is no other honest way. I would rather ship the workable version this week and let contact with reality improve it than polish in private for a quarter.

"Some of the work is unglamorous. It does not work well for people who see that kind of work as beneath them."

I am a fourth-generation farmer's son. Barn work has no audience, and it does not care how you feel about it. The projects I am proudest of ran on exactly that kind of labour: reviewing and categorising years of historical documents so a governed AI assistant could be trusted, writing the boring security model, sweeping the workshop so the tools can be found. The glamour of a system is downstream of somebody's patience.

One project deserves a closer reading here, because of what its business model says. Veterinærhåndboka is impact-driven innovation in the strictest sense I know how to practise. The model is deliberately self-limiting: priced to be near enough free for the practising veterinarian, scoped to Norway because the clinical knowledge is irreducibly local, and built from day one to be handed over to the institutions that ought to own it, a research institute and the veterinary association.

On conventional venture metrics it is a bad company: a capped addressable market, thin margins by design, and an exit that is a handover rather than a payday. That is precisely the point. The return the model optimises is social: cost per supported clinical decision, per hour of cognitive load lifted off a profession with documented and serious distress, per animal treated better in a barn at three in the morning. Judged as private equity, it fails. Judged as philanthropy, it compounds. I built it that way on purpose, and of everything on my CV it is the line I would ask a reader to weigh most carefully.

"Impact should be your driving force for taking this role."

I want to answer this plainly, because it is the only criterion I cannot evidence with a link. I am built for change the way some people are built for stability. Stagnation reads to me as a small death; the feeling that things are moving, and moving in a direction that leaves people and animals better off, is not a preference I hold but the condition I function under. I have one life and a farm-bred conviction that it should be spent on work that means something.

Starting things is one scale of that. Veterinærhåndboka can change the working lives of a few thousand Norwegian veterinarians, and that matters. But a single month of work at Elevate Philanthropy can shift where tens of millions of dollars a year flow. Capital at that scale, pointed well, is the largest lever I could put my hands on, and the access the role carries, to the people, projects and decisions that shape whole fields, is a footprint I cannot justify watching from the outside. I do not know how to want this by halves, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.