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, got featured by Apple (it didn't help) and ran out of money three times. I also got some big things wrong.

Here's the story so far…

Timely

I built Timely for myself. I was freelancing as a designer, logging hours for clients, and I wanted a time tracker that filled itself in. The first launch in April 2013 failed miserably, so I rebuilt the whole thing from a closet in a San Francisco hacker house, which is also where I slept for three months, and launched it again that December.

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, said no to a job at Facebook, and when my savings ran out I sold my apartment and put everything into the company. It was the first of three times Timely ran out of money.

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.

In 2014 I also co-founded Sporty with two friends, an app for finding people nearby to play sports with. I learned that I can't get two companies off the ground at the same time, and I left Sporty to focus on Timely. The highlight was ending up on Dagsrevyen, Norway's main evening news. The lowlight was a stranger coming up afterwards to tell me I was terrible at basketball, since I never hit the hoop in the segment. He was right.

We bootstrapped until 2016, then raised $20 million over three rounds. Raising money didn't mean we had enough of it. The second time we ran out, we couldn't make payroll, and one of our earliest investors gave us an emergency loan.

I also moved the company home to Oslo, after finding it was a better place to build it.

Some of what we did was right: we were remote-first long before that was normal. 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 and the funding market dried up. It was the third time we ran out of money, and the bank wanted my apartment as collateral, just as we were having our first kid. I'd already given up one apartment for the company, so I talked them out of it. I still had to let go of half the company. We went back to doing one thing well.

When I started Timely, the technology couldn't do what I wanted. More than ten years later it can. 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 30 people, and we're profitable.

Before all that

I started out in advertising in Oslo. I came up with ideas for companies that, unlike Timely, had money, and then built them for real.

I designed the entertainment system on Norwegian's Dreamliners, the first one built on Android. It won an award, and another one took a colleague and me to Cannes.

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

Home

I live in Oslo, Norway, with my wife and our two kids.

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

Press

That's my version. Other people's are 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.