Being early is the same as being wrong

In March 2019 my laptop was open on a coffee table in Bel Air. There was a pitch deck on the screen and a Michael Jackson platinum plaque on the wall behind it. Quincy Jones was somewhere in the house. His son was my co founder.

Three years later the company was dead.

I have been trying to work out what to say about that, and the honest answer took me a long time to reach, so here it is up front. Being early is the same as being wrong. It feels different from the inside. It is not different from the outside. The market does not award points for having seen it first if you were not there when it arrived.

That is the part nobody tells you.

What we saw

Between 2009 and 2012 I was the photographer for one of Sweden’s most followed fashion bloggers, and I built the site the whole thing ran on. I was nineteen, twenty, twenty one, and I was inside the machinery every day.

What I saw from inside was simple. The audience was not moving to the magazines. It was moving to individuals. One person with a point of view and a camera was starting to outperform publications with staff, offices and a hundred years of history. Brands could see it happening and had no idea what to do about it. There was no contract. No rate card. No category. There was not even a word for the job yet.

So by 2015 I thought the next decade was obvious. Creators were becoming the distribution layer of culture, and every platform they were building on was designed to hold their attention rather than route their money. Instagram was not going to fix that, because Instagram was not broken. It was doing exactly what it was built to do.

Somebody needed to build the other thing. The part where the money moves.

I started building it in 2015 and called it OZONE. Opportunity Zone.

Who it was for

I grew up in the south of Stockholm. Second generation, parents out of Bangladesh, in one of the areas Swedish newspapers only write about when someone gets shot.

Walk into Rinkeby or Tensta or Husby on any evening and you will find producers, dancers, videographers, singers and designers operating at a level that would get them signed in any city on earth. That has been true for thirty years. What has never been true is access.

A brand in central Stockholm trying to reach that audience has no way in. No agency roster covers it. No casting database indexes it. The talent is twenty minutes away on the blue line and completely invisible.

And the talent has no way out. No manager, no agent, no company registration, no invoice template, no idea that the campaign they just watched had a budget they could have earned a real share of.

Two sides of the same city and no bridge between them. That is not a talent problem. It is a market failure, and market failures are engineering problems.

What happened when it worked

In 2017 I pitched it to Quincy Jones III.

He is the definition of the person the platform was built for. Beverly Hills on one side, a Stockholm suburb on the other, at home in neither. He had a name for it. Third culture. Not the first culture your parents carried over, not the second culture of the country you were born in, but the one you and everyone like you invent because you were locked out of both.

We worked together for five years. We incorporated in Delaware. Our chief marketing officer had run global marketing for Nike Basketball and then Apple across Latin America. Our engineers were in Stockholm. I was in and out of a house in Bel Air where the walls were covered in records that shaped the century.

In June 2019 we stood on the Polar Music Prize stage and showed it publicly for the first time. He explained the argument. I demonstrated the product. Then he pointed at me and said, this is the man that built the platform.

It shipped. The platform ran live at ozoneapp.com.

I am telling you the good part because I want you to understand that it was not a fantasy. It was a real company with real engineers and a real product and people whose names open doors anywhere.

And it still did not work.

What killed it

The version I actually wanted ran on blockchain. Verifiable identity, transparent transaction history, payment that settles without an intermediary taking a cut for permission.

In 2018 that was the correct architecture and an impossible one. The infrastructure was not there. The tooling was not there. The people who could have built it were not findable. So we spent years working around the gap instead of through it, which is a polite way of saying we shipped the compromise.

Then 2020 arrived. COVID closed the live events layer, which was one of the legs the whole thing stood on. At the end of that year my co founder moved back to Los Angeles to be close to his father.

We kept going for two more years, building the same product from opposite sides of the world with completely different lives around us. By late 2022 we wanted different things and we stopped. I had been running flat out for seven years and I burned out properly, the kind you do not negotiate your way out of. The company stopped being maintained. The state of Delaware voided it in March 2023.

None of that was clean and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But if you want the honest version, it is this. The idea was right, the timing was wrong, and life arrived in the middle of it the way it does.

The part I got wrong for two years

For a long time after, I told myself the story where I was early. Early is a comfortable word. It lets you be right and unlucky at the same time.

The problem is that early and wrong produce identical results. Nobody uses your product. Nobody funds your next thing. The market moves on and builds the thing you described, later, without you, and you get to watch.

If you stop there, early is just wrong with better self esteem.

The only thing that separates the two is what you do next.

What I did next

I went and got the missing parts.

I joined a company built natively on Web3, first running design and now running AI transformation, specifically because it is a place where verifiability and transparency and moving value without permission are not a whitepaper, they are Tuesday. That was the education I could not buy in 2018.

Alongside it I have spent years building AI ventures, including in cancer diagnostics, where being wrong is not a product problem.

That looks like a career from the outside. It was a shopping list.

Because seven years on, all of it exists. Creator identity can be verified. Value moves without a gatekeeper. And AI now does the work that used to require a team of eight, which means one person with the right architecture can build what took a funded company in 2018.

Everything that made OZONE impossible has been solved by somebody else while I was learning how it worked.

What this is actually about

I did not write this to explain a failure. I wrote it because the lesson generalises and almost nobody says it out loud.

You will have the right idea before the world can hold it. Everybody who builds anything does. The temptation is to treat that as a tragedy and tell the story where you were ahead of your time, which is a story that ends with you as a spectator.

The alternative is to treat the gap as a syllabus. Work out precisely what was missing. Go and learn that, from the inside, at someone else’s expense if necessary. Wait for the conditions to arrive. Then come back with the parts.

Being early is the same as being wrong.

Right up until you come back.

The full record of OZONE and THXRD Inc, including the video, the archived product and the corporate filings, is here.