{
  "name": "Yusuf Young",
  "formerly": "Yusuf Hasanogullari",
  "tagline": "I build software products.",
  "intro": "I build software products from Stockholm, under my company Yusuf Young AB. Right now that's Aether, a runtime that lets a company own and run its own AI instead of renting one, and Event Risk Trainer, which lets investors rehearse the next market crash on the real history of past ones. Before this I founded and exited FunnelBud, a CRM and marketing automation company.",
  "email": "yusuf@yusufyoung.com",
  "links": {
    "linkedin": "https://www.linkedin.com/in/yusufyoung/",
    "x": "https://x.com/yusufyoung"
  },
  "projects": [
    {
      "name": "Aether",
      "url": "",
      "status": "building",
      "description": "An AI that joins your company, learns how you work, and spawns agent teams to run it. Runs on infrastructure the company controls, not a rented API."
    },
    {
      "name": "Event Risk Trainer",
      "url": "https://eventrisktrainer.com",
      "status": "live",
      "description": "Practice making investment decisions through history's market crises. Replayable lessons built from real events; the first lesson is free."
    },
    {
      "name": "FunnelBud",
      "url": "https://www.funnelbud.com/",
      "status": "exited",
      "description": "CRM and marketing automation for small and medium-sized Swedish companies. Founded, grown, and exited. A decade of watching businesses bend themselves around generic software."
    }
  ],
  "positions": [
    {
      "kind": "belief",
      "title": "What I believe",
      "heading": "Sovereign AI",
      "url": "https://yusufyoung.com/thesis/",
      "summary": "Four companies control the world's AI. That's a dependency problem, not a technology problem.",
      "full_text": "Four companies control the world's AI. That's a dependency problem, not a technology problem. If OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or xAI changes their model, their pricing, or their terms of service, your business adapts. If they decide not to serve you, you're done. You don't own your intelligence. You're renting it from someone who can evict you. I wrote about where this leads in how the software industry changes when development costs near zero. When building software becomes cheap, generic SaaS loses to custom software built per company. The same shift applies to intelligence itself: when AI is powerful enough to run a company's operations, renting a generic brain from four vendors won't be competitive with owning one that knows your business. I also wrote about the path from LLMs to AGI. We're closer than most people think, and the mechanical path is clearer than the philosophical debate suggests. The thesis: every company needs its own AI, trained on its own data, running on its own infrastructure, under its own control. Not a rented API. Not a shared model. A sovereign intelligence that belongs to the company the way its codebase and customer list do. This is what I'm building with Aether. A runtime that lets any company run its own agent, on a server it controls, with full visibility into what it does and why. The long-term goal is a network of independent, cooperating agents, each owned by the entity it serves. The technology for this exists. The bottleneck isn't capability. It's trust: companies need to trust their own AI the way they trust their own employees. That's a sovereignty problem, not a model-size problem."
    },
    {
      "kind": "plan",
      "title": "Also upcoming",
      "heading": "CRM As A Service",
      "url": "https://yusufyoung.com/crm-as-a-service/",
      "summary": "I spent a decade building and selling CRM software. FunnelBud competed with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive in the SMB market. I learned something most CRM vendors don't want to admit: their software is generic by necessity, and every customer bends their business around the software instead of the other way around.",
      "full_text": "I spent a decade building and selling CRM software. FunnelBud competed with HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive in the SMB market. I learned something most CRM vendors don't want to admit: their software is generic by necessity, and every customer bends their business around the software instead of the other way around. That was annoying in 2019. It's going to be indefensible in 2027. When software development costs near zero, the economics flip. I wrote about this in detail: how the software industry changes when building software becomes cheap. The short version: building custom software for a single company will become cheaper than researching and selecting the right off-the-shelf product. Generic SaaS doesn't survive that shift unless it's the dominant scale player. So I'm building the thing that kills generic CRM: a service that builds and maintains custom CRM software for each customer. Not a no-code platform. Not a configurable SaaS. A service that delivers software built around your actual workflow. The hard part isn't building the software. AI handles that. The hard part is knowing what to build. Most agencies skip this step. They ask you what you want, you list features, they build features, and you get software that's as generic as HubSpot but with worse UI. The moat is a system that observes how your team actually works, learns what they need, and generates specifications from real usage patterns instead of feature requests. That system is the product. The software it produces is the deliverable. No customer can replicate it because the intelligence lives in the observation and learning layer, not in the code it outputs. Phase 1: replace HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive for mid-market companies. I know this domain cold. Phase 2: expand to other software categories using the same methodology. Phase 3: replace any legacy software. This is early. I'm building the core system now."
    }
  ],
  "writing": [
    {
      "title": "The future of value [IN PROGRESS]",
      "url": "https://yusufyoung.com/the-future-of-value/",
      "date": "2025-12-26"
    },
    {
      "title": "How to combine bottom-up and top-down problem-solution finding to create genius level new companies",
      "url": "https://yusufyoung.com/how-to-combine-bottom-up-and-top-down-problem-solution-finding-to-create-genius-level-new-companies/",
      "date": "2025-11-29"
    },
    {
      "title": "What is CRM and how will it change in the age of abundant intelligence?",
      "url": "https://yusufyoung.com/what-is-crm-and-how-will-it-change-in-the-age-of-abundant-intelligence/",
      "date": "2024-12-21"
    },
    {
      "title": "The path from LLMs to AGI",
      "url": "https://yusufyoung.com/the-path-from-llms-to-agi/",
      "date": "2024-07-14"
    },
    {
      "title": "Comprehensive Guide: How to understand what your customers need based on qualitative interviews",
      "url": "https://yusufyoung.com/comprehensive-guide-how-to-understand-what-your-customers-need-based-on-qualitative-interviews/",
      "date": "2024-07-06"
    },
    {
      "title": "How the software industry will change when development cost nears zero (who will still make money?)",
      "url": "https://yusufyoung.com/how-the-software-industry-will-change-when-development-cost-nears-zero-who-will-still-make-money/",
      "date": "2023-06-16"
    }
  ],
  "looking_for": [
    "Engineers with depth in agent systems, evals, or infrastructure. Aether is the hard version of this problem and I'm not solving it alone. Email me.",
    "Companies that want to own their AI rather than rent it, or that are tired of bending their process around generic CRM. Early ones shape the product. Get in touch.",
    "Investors who understand that AI changes the unit economics of software, not just its features. Let's talk.",
    "Anyone rebuilding a career around AI after being displaced by it. I think experience plus AI skill is the strongest position in the market right now, and I want to hear from people doing it. Say hello."
  ]
}