Jul 22, 2025
Meet our founding engineer Gustav Lidén: an engineer with a track record of tackling complex, high-impact projects throughout his career. Few engineers bring the range Gustav does. He’s led the design and delivery of Tobii’s next-generation SaaS platform for eye-tracking analytics, built an engineering team developing low-latency live streaming clients at Prime Video, and advised top Nordic organizations like Klarna and the Norwegian Oil Fund on cloud architecture and scaling machine learning workloads while at AWS.
Across all of these roles, Gustav has built a reputation as one of Sweden’s top engineers, combining technical depth, leadership, and a relentless focus on building systems that do the work that brings true value.
We sat down with Gustav to hear what drew him to Normain and what excites him about the journey ahead.
Q: What drew you to Normain at this stage of your career?
A: Throughout my career, I’ve worked across a wide range of verticals and team structures, from being a solo contractor to taking on engineering leadership roles across startups and large tech companies like Amazon. What’s remained constant throughout is the deep satisfaction I get from building things and solving hard problems through code, systems, and collaboration.
Joining Normain felt like a natural progression and, in many ways, a return to the roots of that joy. At this point in my journey, I was looking for something that combined technical depth with impact. What made it especially compelling was the opportunity to come in at an early stage and help shape both the technical direction and the culture of the company. Normain stood out for its small, highly ambitious, and sharp team with a great vision for how AI can reshape knowledge work.
Q: What was your first impression of the Normain team and culture?
A: My first impression was that this is a team that’s deeply focused on delivering real customer value. That focus shows up in how decisions are made, how people prioritize work and how success is measured. It was clear from the beginning that everyone is motivated by impact, not just output.
The team is also determined to be world-class - not just in terms of product or technology, but in the standard they hold themselves to. They have strong personalities and distinct ways of thinking but also a genuine curiosity for each other's perspectives, which creates room for creative tension where magic can happen.
There is also a culture of internal transparency that supports this. People are open about what’s working and what’s not, and feedback flows freely. That creates trust, and makes collaboration feel honest and productive, even when the work is challenging.
Q: What excites you most about the problem Normain is solving?
A: It’s a messy, complex problem, and that’s exactly what makes it exciting. Solving it means getting a lot of things right at once: the technology, the experience, the integrations. Our customers need Normain to be reliable and intelligent, like a companion they can depend on and trust. It’s hard. But that challenge, and the impact it can have, is what makes it worth doing.
Q: How do you see the future of AI?
A: Amara’s Law comes to mind: “We overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” That feels especially relevant with AI right now. There’s a lot of hype and speculation, and while the pace of progress is real, I don’t think there’s a straight line from where we are today to AGI, by just scaling up LLMs and making incremental improvements. There are foundational breakthroughs still needed. But AI is already reshaping how we work, and we’re still very early.
Q: What’s a tool, language, or framework you can’t live without—and why?
A: Evaluation frameworks are absolutely essential when you're building AI-driven systems like Normain’s. As use-cases and application size grows, you need clear and fast feedback that your changes are doing the right thing, where things are failing and how to measure progress over time.
Q: What’s one highlight from your time at Normain so far?
A: There isn’t one main highlight, rather it’s the many small moments compiled. Part of that has been our wide-ranging lunch conversations. One minute we’re wrestling with a technical challenge in Normain, and the next we’re exchanging personal stories or debating abstract ideas. It’s these spontaneous discussions where people share unexpected insights that bring the team closer and keep things exciting beyond the day-to-day work.
Q: Anything else you want to share?
A: I’m always drawn to people who explore ideas deeply and seek truth - whether through music, writing or thinking. Some favorites I encourage people to explore:
Music – Radiohead, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bobo Stenson, Aphex Twin
Thinkers/Writers/Explainers – Sam Harris, Lena Andersson, Simon Wardley, Andrej Karpathy
