Hype, Raise, Burn, Repeat
- Emin Askerov
- May 12
- 2 min read
I’ve recently watched a video by Patrik Boyle, ”The Inevitable Decline of WeWork”, which ended with the story of Adam Neuman, the founder, raising another $ 300 M+ after crashing WeWork, on some unspecified startup in, ahem, real estate. I had a good laugh until my LinkedIn feed supplied me with an announcement in a timely manner that Mr. Peter Carlsson, the ex-founder of Northvolt, had launched another venture, Aris Machina AB.
The venture would use artificial intelligence to optimize manufacturing processes, and according to co-founder Siddharth Khullar, it has already attracted early-stage investment from investors such as Earlybird, Village Global, AENU, and Planet A.
It seems that Mr Carlsson was disappointed at the way his team could not bring the Northvolt factories up to speed. In keeping with modern times, Mr Carlsson found a perfect solution - AI! Let’s just replace those pesky workers with AI and robots, so that Mr Carlsson and Mr. Khullar could run a factory very efficiently and in peace! Managing people is so tedious!
Same as all investors, I, for sure, adore Mr Carlsson’s genius. I just hope that in his genial spark, he won’t be using Northvolt’s data as an input to train his AI. After all, as most AI scientists say, garbage in, garbage out. I would doubt, though, that Mr Carlsson could find a willing battery OEM to share with him the necessary data.
Jokes aside, I would imagine that after a blunder as big as Northvolt, Carlsson would be persona non grata in the investment world. But it seems that I am fundamentally missing something here. It just doesn’t make sense to me that investors continue to invest not only in failed founders (that’s ok, failures happen), but in those who blew it out of all proportion, like Adam Neuman or Carlsson.
If that were to happen in Russia, I would assume that Mr. Carlsson pocketed the money, shared it (kicked back) with the fund managers, and let the venture die. Nice and clean way of separating investors from their money. Then he would go and repeat it with another venture, with all the fund managers cheering him up as a founder who tried, but failed, and deserves to try again, as he now has "experience". But of course, such a thing could only happen in criminal states like Russia, it is simply implausible for it to happen in Sweden.
It must be Mr. Carlsson’s vast experience that allows him to rise again and again. The most visible demonstration of this, as you might have noted, is how deftly Mr. Carlsson rode the wave of battery hype, and how timely the “batteries” theme is now replaced with the currently hot AI theme. Hype, raise, burn, repeat.
Could someone please recommend outlandishly expensive online courses or Bali retreats, where I could learn the wisdom of raising billions, burning them, and raising again? Because I am definitely missing something here.
