Back to a 21st century digital society

I’m moving back to Sweden, and something that surprised me was that if you’ve been registered as living abroad, becoming a registered resident again (folkbokförd) takes 4-6 weeks of processing. Skatteverket (IRAS/population registry) can reject your application. I assume they will if they think you’re primarily moving back to mooch off the Swedish welfare state (I’m not, I promise 😅).

I’m allowed to stay in Sweden, but operating in society is hard, because most systems can’t find any information on me. Practically a ghost (I was gonna say stateless but that feels distasteful to try and put myself together with people who have real problems). And from official system’s POV I don’t currently live anywhere. I have already moved out of Singapore and my employment pass has been cancelled. I have an old address registered in Sweden (I officially lived at my mom’s place when I went to Singapore in 2012), but I have a new apartment I live in now.

In one sense, I’m living my dream as someone aligned with piratpartiet (the pirate party): companies and governments don’t know anything about me, and they can’t look much up. But since society has decided this is the way, I’m now living the downside: they don’t think I exist and I need extra handling, which seems to be how everything works in Germany, so I’m happy I don’t live there, even if it seems good from data protection POV.

Sweden is very digital #

If you want to do anything that requires any company to know anything about you, then they will look you up using your “personnummer” (personal identity number), and if you’re doing it with computers you’ll be asked to sign in using BankID which has been around since the early 2000s. It’s super convenient, because there’s this one ubiquitous app you use to sign in anywhere where people care about who you are. For the Singapore crowd, it’s SingPass but it’s not only used by the government. Since I used to live here, I have a bank account (that I’ve had since I was a teenager), and through it, BankID. But BankID seems to be used a lot more than I expected.

I tried to sign up for Willy:s, one of the big grocery chains, and I can’t because “unknown reason.” SJ, the big train company, got an issue when I put in my personnummer (“unknown error”) and I had to send an email to create an account. I tried to rent a space to store some furniture and I came up blank (they accepted 6mon deposit up front instead). I expect I’ll be paying a lot of stuff up front going forward.

And I just now tried to register with another bank to become a corporate customer so I can pay the “aktiekapital” (share/equity capital, which is minimum 25.000 sek (~SG$3.500)) which is a first hurdle for starting a company. I can call the bank and who knows if we can sort it out, but I’m currently at the library because I wanted to get out of the apartment on my first day after leaving my old job and start the company 😁

Being in limbo #

I guess my situation now means that I either:

1. See it as the sign of taking it chill for a while and wait with starting the company until I have the decision from Skatteverket (up to four more weeks, some friends who moved back a couple of years ago got it within two weeks, but who knows if I’ll be that lucky)
2. Get out of the silent section and start making phone calls (urgh, I’m a millennial so the idea of phone calls…)

Which brings me back to why I’m sitting at the library on the first day of breaking out on my own: I wanted to start the company as soon as possible, and make sure I have a minimal first product up, and some way of charging for it, so I have a thin vertical slice of all I need to run the company. Because then, when I come up with a cunning plan, I can focus on building and iterating and not weeks of getting it all setup. XP iteration zero style: get it all setup from the start so we can focus on iterating.

So I guess that means I embrace the limbo and instead focus on building product. I have two ideas, the first (smaller) is trying to make an “AI assistant creator” focused on cooking based on hearing how interested other people have gotten when I talk about my cooking bot (I eat my ingredients now instead of letting them rot from lack of inspiration, and I am more comfortable in the kitchen). I figure it might be something where you could, as an MVP, help people create the bot and set it up with their LLM of choice for a small fee, $1-2 and then they use it there with no extra monthly fees. Possibly, if there’s demand, extend to a standalone service with a set number of new recipes/month or something where recipes are saved etc.

And then, for plan B, in case my application is rejected then I’ll start the company in Estonia since I’m an e-Resident there. The reason I didn’t do that from the start is because I figured that if I am living in Sweden, then I should have a Swedish company, and let any taxes go to my country. 🙂