About us
We believe every founder has a story worth sharing.
Peik counted what a company was worth. Nicolas listened to what it was becoming. Then we both left to run ventures of our own and learn everything in between — the messy middle where a spreadsheet meets a story, and neither one survives alone. Nicolas shapes the narrative; Peik keeps it honest to the numbers. What we share is a love for crafting narratives, products, and experiences. Crafting stories worth remembering.
Nicolas Dolenc
Storycrafter
Live to learn, and you'll learn to live.
Most founders know what they're building. Far fewer know how to talk about it — not because the story isn't there, but because they're too close to it. I help founders find that distance, shape the narrative, and share it in a way that actually lands. I'm an entrepreneur, business coach, author and a former basketball player — but before all of that, I am a storycrafter, and my experience has taught me not all stories can be told, some can only be experienced.
My path started on the basketball court, playing as an athletic forward for the Wolfpack. What started as a passion for a competitive sport became a love for producing experiences — I moved from the court to organising events, and from events to eventually landing at Slush, where I served as President and Executive Producer. I then spent years at Smartly.io as a Human Catalyst — a Chief of Staff role focused on internal communications, onboarding employees and managers, culture design, and people analytics — and despite my interests always lying in experiences and story crafting, somehow completed a Master's in Computer Science from Aalto University along the way. Both Slush and Smartly.io received the Presidential Award for Internationalization while I was there — Finland's highest recognition for companies driving global impact.
What followed was a few years of honest searching: producing events for VCs and agencies, consulting on narrative and knowledge work, creating content for others and for myself. An idea of a thesis, but mainly just a lot of trying. The thread running through all of it, the one I kept returning to, was story crafting — how founders capture what they know, share who they are, and build something that outlasts the pitch deck. The last three years have been about following that thread relentlessly: writing on Substack, creating podcasts as part of Just Thoughts, and publishing Answers to Love, Life and Leadership in an AI-driven World — a poetry collection exploring what it means to be human in an AI-driven world. Story crafting moved through different ventures and formats, until it all became the work.
P.S. I have an ever-lasting love for the city of Helsinki. I built sukkela.life out of that love — and out of a deep belief in what Finns call hyötyliikunta: movement that serves a purpose, getting somewhere on your own terms. Sukkela ("swift" in finnish) is the smartest way to ride Helsinki's city bikes, and it's how I explore the city.
Peik Lehtonen
Co-Crafter
The small things are the ones that matter.
I met Nicolas on his first day at Smartly.io, at a dinner table in the Canary Islands. I was in finance. He was in people. On paper we shouldn't speak the same language. Then came a day he had no words for, and my team walked past the way we always did. I stopped and asked whether there was anything I could do. He said he could use a hug, so I gave him one. That is more or less my whole method: notice, then act. Small things, done properly.
I learned to make friendships fast — a couple of childhood years in Paris, where people arrived and left in a matter of weeks — and I grew up alongside a sister who set the bar impossibly high: a swimming world championship competitor who went on to a double major in law and economics and a doctorate in the first. I answered that by pushing my own limits with a straight face. I race Ironman without the proper gear, because gear would feel like cheating, and I finish with the blisters to prove it. And I rebelled against being another well-behaved overachiever by writing a book with my sister Katja instead of collecting the consultancy badge everyone expected of me.
Then I built Corle — an intelligent earring that reads heart activity at medical-grade accuracy without getting in the way of a life. I built it, in the most literal sense, to save myself: flagged early for a risk of heart complications, I worked out that the earlobe was the one place on the body a swimmer could be measured properly, and patented it.
Today I work the numbers side of the craft as a fractional CFO — the part of a founder's story that has to add up. I read a balance sheet the way I read that corridor: looking for the small thing everyone else walked past, and asking whether there's anything I can do about it.
P.S. Peik has raced national championships in nine different sports and world championships in two — with medals from three of the nationals and one world championship. He doesn't rate his athletic odds at the Olympics, so he's busy looking for a loophole where the athletic part wouldn't matter.
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Manifesto
A Founder's Friend is first and foremost a storycrafter.
A storycrafter is not a storyteller. A teller speaks; a crafter shapes — the stories that get spoken and the ones that only ever get lived.
The values a storycrafter lives by
Humans over systems
Every tool keeps the human in the loop and the human voice intact.
Time over money
Protect the one currency everyone shares before optimizing anything else.
Community over audience
Density of real relationships beats reach. Rooms over feeds.