Hey there,
I have been sitting on this entry for two weeks, waiting to find out whether I was right.
Part of the delay was practical. The past weeks have been hard to work in at all, for reasons I will come to. The rest of it was that I wanted to see what really turned out of the eclipse before I wrote a word about it.
This morning the decision on the Estonian grant reached us. Approved. The wait is over and it has come full circle.
So this is a celebration piece. We have landed a collaboration and a piece of funding that buys a young and fragile startup some breathing room, and with it the chance to keep building inside the Estonian startup ecosystem, which we have properly fallen for. The cyber accelerator in Tallinn, the people it put us next to, the habit of treating Estonia as where we are from rather than where we are registered. It is a small country that takes its startups seriously, and a young company gets further into the room there than it would in most places.
The Headaches and the Eclipse
I dealt with severe headaches over the past few weeks. Not the kind you work through. I could not focus on working with Claude or hold the sessions I had running, and after a few attempts I stopped trying. Calls were the exception. I could talk to people all day and do it well, then sit down in front of something that needed building with nothing to bring to it.
When I journaled about it at the time I put it down to overwork. I had been running too many sessions at once and they were asking more of me than I had. The explanation was sitting right there and I took it.
Then the headaches intensified on the morning of the eclipse, and I realised this was probably solar. The eclipse itself. I have since read that there were big flares and other activity across the same days that may have played a part. I did not go far down that road. I took it as a sign to slow down, pay attention, and enjoy the intensity of the energies and what was to come.
In the evening we went down to Scheveningen to watch it go. The full shadow was somewhere else, up over Iceland and northern Spain, so what reached our stretch of coast was partial. It was still the strangest light I have seen. I felt the temperature shift, and there was this rare intensity over the sea, the shore and the skyline. And I noticed the headaches leaving.
Two Meetings on the Monday
Through all of this the Estonian grant had come back asking for additions. I had a good feeling about that one. They would have stopped it long before if it was not going to fall our way.
Then on the Monday morning right after the eclipse I was rushed into two meetings back to back. The first, with Turku University of Applied Sciences and RISE in Sweden, I had not properly registered. I came into it late and off guard, expecting to find out whether the idea had legs. Instead they told me they were very interested in the proposal I had written, and that they saw a real opportunity to form a consortium and apply to a specific Horizon call.
The money is the smaller part of what that means. A consortium puts the development into institutions that already have the people to do it, which is a very beneficial way for us to resource this. It also builds our network and our expertise inside the Nordics, one of the most advanced cybersecurity regions in the world. I would rather be building inside that than watching it from across the water.
The meeting straight after was with the compliance manager at Qwello. Two of our agents already run on their Dutch branch, the cybersecurity one and the contract management one. We came out of it with a verbal agreement to look at scaling those to the whole group, so that everybody can reach them in Slack rather than one branch having them to itself. That is seven member states and a step across Europe in one move, out of a single conversation, with nothing new to build.
All the Pieces Clicking Together
The Estonian grant landed still inside two weeks of the eclipse, and that is what showed me the roadmap unfolding, with all the pieces literally clicking together right after it.
It shows itself like this. The Estonian grant establishes us further into the Nordic ecosystem and shows that we are a good subsidy partner, which builds our track record around these things. It also buys us a year of research and development with an institute as good as TalTech. In parallel we work with RISE and Turku to develop the proposal for the Horizon call, which we submit around November next year. If that works out it is a budget of one and a half million euros. Small for a Horizon call and for institutes of that size. Very big and very impactful for us as a young startup.
Qwello runs through all of it. Their expansion gives us a European-wide client base we can use across the research, which is a great spine for the whole thing to sit on. It will also give us a lot of credibility for winning clients elsewhere in Europe. Three pieces, and each one makes the next easier to argue for.
Knowing Where to Look
That roadmap came together right after these intense eclipse energies, and the eclipse clearly had a European theme to it. Its shadow ran the length of the continent.
When you know how to pay attention to the right things, you can see these things coming. I was alluding to this event four months ago, writing about it in these entries, and I can hold what I wrote back then against what has landed now. Never knowing, of course, exactly how it was going to fall together. But being confirmed again.
This is the way that it works, as far as I can tell, and learning the specifics of it each time is still a beautiful surprise. It helps me believe that we are on the right track, and it lets me watch these things arrive synchronistically rather than by force. It runs all the way back to the beginning of this one. The meeting with Tiia in the accelerator programme is where the proposal came from in the first place, and all of that has now come together in this converging moment of the eclipse.
Which is exactly why I get so excited about journaling about it in this way, where I can share it and show it to people.
With care, Ben