Hey, I'm Mathias.

I try to make useful things, mostly software. One of them turned into a company.

Along the way I slept in a closet, sold my apartment to keep the company alive and got featured by Apple (it didn't help). I also got some big things wrong.

Here's the story so far…

Timely

In 2013 I launched Timely from a closet in a San Francisco hacker house, which is also where I slept for three months. I'd built it for myself: I was freelancing as a designer, logging hours for clients, and I wanted a time tracker that filled itself in.

For the first three years we had no money, so everything was about doing as much as we could with nothing. I paid for it with freelance work and turned down a job at Facebook to keep going. When my savings ran out, I sold my apartment and put everything into the company.

I kept visiting Apple until they featured Timely as the best new app on the App Store. Our downloads quadrupled overnight, and it amounted to nothing: the people downloading it weren't the people who needed it. It was an important lesson in growth.

In 2014 I also co-founded Sporty with two friends, an app for finding people nearby to play sports with. Getting two companies off the ground at the same time was incredibly hard.

We bootstrapped until 2016, then raised $20 million over three rounds. Along the way we made tracking fully automatic, and I moved the company home to Oslo after finding it was a better place to build it.

Some of what we did was ahead of its time. We were remote-first long before that was normal, and we set up our own subsidiary in Pune, India, and built an office there.

Other things were just wrong. We grew to 70 people, renovated a big office, and tried to build a whole family of products around Timely instead of making the one product great. Then Covid hit, the funding market dried up, and I had to let go of half the company. We went back to doing one thing well, and it was the right call.

In January 2026 we launched AutoSheet: the whole product rebuilt around AI agents that fill in your timesheet. Today 5,000 businesses in 95 countries use Timely. We're a team of 30, we're growing faster than ever, and we're profitable.

Before all that

I worked in advertising in Oslo as a designer and creative, on campaigns and digital products for Dell, Norwegian, Siemens, Universal Music, Unicef, DNB and Tele2.

I designed the entertainment system on Norwegian's Dreamliners, the first one built on Android. It won the Norwegian Design Council's Award for Design Excellence, and winning the Norwegian Young Lions took us to Cannes.

Since then I've mostly been nominated and lost: Leadership Talent of the Year, Founder of the Year and Best AI Startup of the Year.

Home

I live in Oslo, Norway, with my wife and our two kids. We once moved the whole family to India for three months.

Mathias Mikkelsen on a rock at the beach below the Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco

Press

I've been on TV more than I'd like. It's all on the press page.

Contact

me@mathiasmikkelsen.com

Short emails with a clear ask get the fastest answer.

Next chapter

That's the story so far. Leave your email and I'll tell you when there's a new chapter.