The ones who don't know what's impossible

What working with people at the start of everything does to someone thirty years in — and why we built a channel for it.

In March I stood in a cold industrial hall in Hirtshals, at the top of Denmark, watching a Navy frogman disappear under the surface of a flume tank — a long glass-walled channel of moving water used to test how things behave in a current. In the water with him was a drone. On the bank, two young men watched a screen, said very little, and changed one setting. Then they ran it again. Then they changed one more thing, and ran it again. Testing, listening, adjusting, testing. For hours. The frogman surfaced, gave feedback, went back down. They changed something and ran it again. A third young man — a cousin of one of them — filmed it all.

I have sat in a great many meetings in thirty years. I am not sure I have seen concentration like that in any of them.

The two are the founders of Nereus Dynamics, a defence-tech company my wife Cecilia and I cofounded with them in September 2025. They are building a drone that works in two domains — air and water — which is the kind of thing that sounds like science fiction until you watch someone spend a freezing morning in Hirtshals making it true, one adjustment at a time. They have known each other since they were nine. They met at a robotics school in Moldova, went to competitions, and won a world championship in mathematics and robotics in 2019. They studied at Aalborg University. And now they work seven days out of seven. Whenever I call, they are at the warehouse — early morning to very late. Not because anyone asks them to. Because they want this, in a way that is total.

Here is what I did not expect at my age: it is contagious.

What it does to you

There is a particular energy in people who do not yet know what is supposed to be impossible. They have not been told, over enough years, all the reasons a thing cannot be done — so they simply try it, and fairly often it turns out the reasons were softer than everyone assumed. I have spent three decades accumulating those reasons. It is useful knowledge, most of the time. It is also, if I am honest, a slow sedative. You learn what does not work, and somewhere in there you can stop testing whether it still doesn't.

Being around the Nereus founders is the antidote. Not because they are naive — they are the opposite of naive; they are rigorous to a degree that embarrasses people twice their age. They reflect, they learn, they move on, and they are genuinely humble about all of it, which is the rarest part. It is that they have not yet let experience calcify into caution. They test the thing rather than assume the answer. And watching them do it, hour after hour at the flume tank, I remembered that this is what the work is actually for — not the meetings about the work, the work.

I do not think you are supposed to admit, as a CEO in his fifties, that a pair of twenty-somethings in a cold warehouse reminded you why you do this. But they did.

Why we built a channel for it

The mistake would be to treat this as a nice feeling and leave it there. The more useful response is to ask a harder question: that hunger — the total, seven-days-out-of-seven, test-it-again hunger — is the single most valuable thing in any company, and it is also the most fragile. It does not survive being managed badly. It does not survive a year of being told why things cannot be done. If you do not build a channel for it, it leaves — or worse, it stays and goes quiet.

So at Context& we built one. Our Accelerator Program takes people at the start of their curve and gives them the one thing that hunger needs: real work, real responsibility, and enough room to test the thing rather than wait for permission. It is not a training course with youth as its theme. It is a deliberate decision that the energy I felt in Hirtshals is not a lucky accident of a startup — it is a resource a company can either cultivate or waste, and most companies waste it, quietly, by degrees.

I cannot write about the program without writing about the person who built it. Elisabeth Niemeyer Laursen conceived the Accelerator and has carried it for the last ten months — and she has, without my ever pointing it out to her, exactly the mindset I watched at the flume tank. Humble, relentless, genuinely hungry to make a difference. What she keeps saying to the rest of us is: let's do it again. And again. And again. She is not satisfied with a good first cohort; she wants a better second one, and a better third. That is the same seriousness the Nereus founders bring to a drone in a water tank, pointed instead at the question of how a young person gets the best possible start in a profession with a very steep learning curve. The program is real because she is.

We are not naive about this either. Structure without hunger is bureaucracy; hunger without structure burns out in eighteen months. The point of the Accelerator is the and — the room to move fast and the people around you who have made the mistakes already and will catch you before the expensive ones. That is the same both/and this whole company is built on, pointed at the beginning of a career instead of the middle of one.

The thing I keep

I will hold onto the image of that flume tank for a long time. The frogman under the water. The screen. The two who had known each other since they were nine, saying almost nothing, changing one setting and running it again — and the cousin behind the camera, catching it. People at the very start of everything, doing the work with a seriousness that most of us have to be reminded of.

The reminder is the gift. Building a place where the next ones like them have somewhere to land — that is the responsibility. I am thirty years in, and they made me want to test the thing again. The least I can do is make sure the company does too.