If you asked me why I joined Helsing four years ago, I would have talked about the mission. I’d have told you about the importance of protecting the sovereignty of European democracies.
A couple of years later, I’d have talked about the craft. The fascinating design and engineering complexity of physical-AI systems and high-stakes user interfaces.
Today, I mostly talk about the team, why this group of people makes this place special—and a strange phenomenon we’ve built here: a collective "reality distortion field."
When you look at the systems we are building—from autonomous fighter jets and AI strike drones to underwater autonomous vehicles and more—by all traditional standards, each should require hundreds of people, layers of committees, and years of "requirements gathering" and "alignment".
Then you get here, and you watch a handful of people build and ship in a couple of weeks—work you’ve been taught should take months or years.
How does something like that actually happen?
I think there is a simple, mechanical reason for it. It isn't just about "hiring smart people"—most tech companies do that and still drown in inertia. It happens when you combine three specific things: surreal talent density, extreme individual agency, and a culture of raw, high-substance curiosity grounded in first principles.
No matter how niche, complex, or obscure the topic is — you are always exactly one Slack message away from someone who deeply understands it. The distance between a hard question and a frontier-level answer is virtually zero.
I find myself reading my inbox, Slack, and Confluence pages with the same excitement I had reading Hacker News 15 years ago—you are reading people writing deeply about the raw truth of how things work, charting entirely unknown territories, and demystifying things you once thought were far too difficult to understand.
When you put exceptionally capable people in a room under those conditions and let them own things end-to-end, you don't just work faster—you change what the team believes is possible, and collapse traditional timelines.
I remember reading Steve Jobs’ biography many years ago, wondering what his "reality distortion field" must have actually felt like. It sounded like some kind of black magic—one charismatic leader convincing a room that the impossible was simple, just by force of will.
But what I'm experiencing here is different. It’s still a reality distortion field, but it isn’t being imposed from the top down. It is a collective property of the team itself.
This collective distortion field isn't just a nice cultural perk; it’s the entire game. It’s our ultimate unfair advantage.
You stop saying "that will take two quarters, 20-person teams, and deprioritizing X, Y, and Z," and start saying "let's take this handful of people, have a simulation running by next week, and make it fly within three months." And because you are surrounded by people who believe they can do it—and who have the raw capability to back it up—you do.