Why I moved to Marbella

People usually assume moving to southern Spain is born from a holiday fantasy, a momentary lapse in judgement after a week of sunshine and too much sangria. It didn't happen like that for me. The actual decision was made on a relentlessly grey Tuesday in Stockholm. It was November, that specific time of year when the Swedish sky lowers itself to about ten metres above the pavement and stays there until March. I was walking to the office through freezing, ankle-deep slush, doing the arithmetic in my head. I calculated how many hours of daylight I actually saw my children during the working week. The answer was approaching zero. You leave the house in the dark, you return to the house in the dark. The weekends become a frantic attempt to cram all your outdoor living into a forty-eight-hour window, assuming it isn't raining.

The arithmetic of winter

At that point, Fredrik and I had been running Mediapilot for roughly seven years. We built it from nothing. When I first met Fredrik years earlier at a PR agency, where I was working commission-only sales against the advice of literally everyone I knew, he told me I would be good at this. He was right, and we eventually created more than a hundred jobs in Stockholm. I was proud of what we built. But the treadmill was moving extremely fast. I have this habit, which I still keep, of writing out an annual life plan. Every year since about 2010, I sit down and rate different areas out of ten: family and friends, health, finances, work, and personal time. The work and finance numbers were doing fine. The health and family numbers were taking a serious beating. I was a father to young kids, but my energy was entirely consumed by the business and the sheer logistics of surviving the northern cold. I realised that if I didn't change the geography, I wouldn't change the routine.

We packed up and moved the family to Marbella in 2018. The pitch to my family, and frankly to myself, was that this was going to be a two-year experiment. A brief hiatus to thaw out, reset those life plan scores, and then return to reality. We are still here. I will be honest with you. I told people at the time it was a highly strategic move for a better lifestyle, but a large part of it was simply escape. I was completely exhausted. I wanted to play tennis badly on a Tuesday morning without checking my phone twelve times. I wanted to eat good food and drink wine without feeling a low-level guilt about an early meeting the next day in a freezing conference room. I wanted to run away from the pressure of being a Stockholm founder.

I told people at the time it was a highly strategic move for a better lifestyle, but a large part of it was simply escape.

The two-year plan that never ended

Marbella is a strange place to live. It has a loud reputation for excess, which is incredibly easy to find if you go looking for it. But beneath the surface of holidaymakers, tourists, and beach clubs, there is a very normal, very functional daily life. Living here full-time is completely different from visiting for two weeks in July. The novelty of the permanent sun wears off eventually, and you still have to figure out who you are and what you actually want to build. I spent time working with Happeo on their commercial side, learning how to operate effectively from a distance. Then came a small number of angel investments and property, and later the companies I am building now. We are working on Anchor, building AI to help alienated fathers, and Substrat, which provides infrastructure for AI builders. It turns out you can build serious technology just as easily from an office in Andalucia as you can from central Stockholm. The main difference is that when I close my laptop, I walk out into the light.

What the scores say today

When I look at my life plan today, the scores make much more sense to me. The time with my children is concrete, not abstract. I actually see them in the mornings, and we have evenings that do not feel like a miserable rush against the dying of the light. My tennis has not improved much, if at all, but I get on the court often enough to keep the health score respectable. Moving countries obviously does not solve your internal problems, but it completely alters your external variables. I got the geography wrong for years, assuming I had to be suffering in the cold to be truly productive. I still do not know exactly what the next decade looks like, or if we will stay in Spain forever. I haven't got this entirely figured out. But I know I do not miss the Stockholm slush.