An Empty Calendar
Blog post #65
I live in Hjärup, ten minutes by train from Lund. Lund has a university, a science park, an incubator, and every kind of “start your business” service a region can fund. I had never looked at any of it. Today I asked what was there, expecting a list to browse. What I got was a shorter list than expected and one deadline that changes the autumn.
What I found, and what I threw away
The region is generous. NyföretagarCentrum offers free advice and a twelve-month mentor programme. Almi lends money. Region Skåne has business development cheques. Connect Skåne runs investor networks. Ideon has an incubator with four stages. The municipality my village belongs to runs business breakfasts, sometimes in the building next to my kids’ school.
Most of it is for someone else. The courses teach what a limited company is. The cheques require two to forty-nine employees, and I have none. The loans are loans, and I have a runway. Connect costs 2,500 kronor a year to stand in a room, which is a price for a problem I do not have yet.
Three things survived. NyföretagarCentrum’s mentor programme, because a free year of someone experienced pushing back is the one thing I cannot buy. AI Lund’s seminar series, because it is free, physical, and full of people who build what I build. And one grant.
The grant
Vinnova’s Innovativa Startups pays up to 500,000 kronor to young limited companies with a knowledge-intensive idea and international potential. Fewer than ten employees, under ten million in turnover, no dividends paid. Aelg AB qualifies on every formal line. Whether an AI learning tool qualifies on the substantive ones is the question I need to answer between the 12th of October, when the window opens, and the 12th of January, when it closes.
There was a briefing about it the next morning at nine, online, run by the university’s innovation office. I emailed and got a seat. The three questions I want answered are in the calendar entry so I do not have to think of them at 08:55.
One thing I got wrong on the way. A search result said the call opened on the 1st of September. Vinnova’s own page said it opened in six weeks. The university’s event page had the actual dates. Three sources, three answers, and the one closest to the organiser was right. That is worth remembering the next time a summary sounds confident.
What shipped
Three registrations to AI Lund events, all free, all on site in Lund.
An agentic AI workshop on the 28th of September, which ends with an hour of building agents from scratch. A day on the EU AI Act on the 6th of October, which sounds like the dull one and is probably the useful one, because if I sell learning tools into schools that regulation is a sales objection I need to answer. And a cognition workshop on the 19th of October, natural and artificial, which is closer to idea material than to networking.
The registration forms were the interesting part. One of them still showed the template text on its consent page, the sentence that says “here you enter a text to be displayed before a person answers a survey”. Nobody had replaced it. I agreed to it anyway. Two of them required consent to being photographed and filmed, and I gave it. All three asked about food, and all three got the same line about onion, garlic and lactose, including in spice mixes and stock, because lacto-ovo-vegetarian is the default and it does not solve the lactose part.
One of the three events lists two different venues, one on the registration form and another on the event page. I picked the form and wrote the doubt into the calendar entry. The confirmation email will settle it.
The calendar
Here is the thing I did not expect to write about.
When I went to put the events into Google Calendar, it was empty. Not sparse. Empty. I have not used it in a structured way since I was a student. For ten years my working life lived in a company calendar, and when I left in the spring that calendar went with the laptop. The family has its own calendar, a small web app I built this summer, and that one is full. The one that was supposed to hold my working life had nothing in it.
So the events went in, and then a second set went in for the grant, and by the time there were six entries it was obvious they needed their own layer. I asked for a separate calendar called Aelg. The connector I was using cannot create calendars, only events, so it was done through the browser instead, the six entries were recreated on the new calendar, and the six on the personal one were deleted.
The family app got the same three events, with a new event type called “jobb” and a briefcase icon, so my wife can see the days I am gone without them looking like dentist appointments. That was a six-line change and a deploy.
Decisions made
Not to join Connect. Not yet. The membership buys access to investors, and I am not raising.
Not to sign up for AI Lund’s mailing list, even though it is exactly the channel that would tell me about future events. The forms had a checkbox for it and I left it blank, because a standing subscription is a different kind of decision from a one-off registration, and I want to make it on purpose.
Not to book the mentor programme yet. It requires a session with an adviser first, and their office is inside Ideon, the same building as the incubator I said I would approach later. One visit, two doors. I will do it when I have a week without three events in it.
What’s unclear or broken
Whether the AI community in Malmö is alive. The group that used to be Malmö AI Devs has a Slack and a website, but its Meetup page is gone and the last listed event is from May. The free venue that hosted half the region’s tech meetups closed in February. I have a list of places to bump into other people building with AI, and I am not sure how many of them still exist.
Whether I will make the mistake again of trusting a confident summary over the organiser’s own page. Probably.
Tooling & process
The whole day was one conversation with an agent: search, prune, three web forms, a calendar connector, a browser session to create the calendar the connector could not, a static site edit and a Vercel deploy. The parts that needed me were the food allergies, the consent, and the name of the calendar. The rest was the agent reading forms and filling them in with details I confirmed once.
The all-day events landed one day early the first time. Midnight local time was read as a UTC date. Fixed by writing the dates in UTC to begin with. It is the kind of thing that only teaches you once.
— Stefan