Jordan Melin on Engineering for Serendipity

Jordan Melin is an investor at Heartcore Capital in Copenhagen. Before that he spent most of 2026 at Lovable, working on product experience and applied AI.

I first met Jordan last year and we became friends. As of this autumn we are also neighbours, with Heartcore a short walk down Bredgade from the BlackWood office.

He got hooked early on two things at once, building software and understanding markets, and has been following both ever since. Fintech sales in Stockholm, data analytics at Mercer, a Baby VC fellowship, then Lovable, and now investing. What ties it together is a curiosity that never seems to switch off, and a habit of excelling at whatever he picks up.

Rumour also has it he makes the best köttbullar in Copenhagen, so there is no need to go to IKEA :)

Over coffee last week he pointed me to Thomas B. Ward's work on structured imagination and the idea of the tyranny of the particular. I went away and wrote a piece on it, sent it to him, and his reply made it clear we had to dig deeper and get him on Meeting of the Week.

We sat down to talk about what he learned inside Lovable, why he moved to the investor side, and what he actually looks for in a founder.

Q&A

1. You were drawn to technology and to finance early, and your path since has moved between the two. Where did that start, and how do the builder side and the markets side show up in how you think today?

My interest in technology is clearly connected to my fascination with computers from an early age. I played a lot of games, and wanting to understand how they worked pulled me towards both software and hardware.

I was also involved in youth politics during high school, as I thought this was how to make an impact. Lo and behold, I was wrong. I ran lots of odd businesses as a kid. At one point I was flipping sneakers for a small profit. This led to an early interest in startups, and then in finance as a means of understanding companies.

Both of my interests merged during my gap years, when I started working in client acquisition sales in fintech, where I got to see how data and machine learning projects work in practice. That is when I realised I wanted to combine the two interests in academia, and that is how I ended up at Copenhagen Business School.

Being an operator at heart, I am naturally very curious about technology in general, but I also want to go beyond opportunism and think long-term. It's fun to talk about DCF with later-stage investors, and transformer architectures with engineers. Venture capital sits in between, scratching both itches.

2. You joined Lovable in January 2026 and worked on product experience and applied AI while it was one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe. What did you see from the inside that people looking from the outside get wrong?

Outsiders assume everything is super structured. A rocket ship of that velocity faces new challenges all the time.

To make this work, Lovable hires people who can own a problem from start to finish. When a new problem arrives, it just needs to be solved. There is often no time, and no one, to ask for permission or help. What I truly liked was how much the leads trusted you: you get true autonomy and ownership from day zero. Besides that, they're amazing people and I'm fortunate to call many of them my friends.

3. Leaving Lovable at that point is not an obvious move. Why go to the investor side now, and why Heartcore?

I have always moved between building things and understanding markets, so the investment side has intrigued me for a long time. This was not a new idea. Being an operator allowed me to get a taste of what works, and I wanted to see that across many companies instead of just one.

Spending time in software and applied artificial intelligence made it clear to me that I wanted to broaden my scope. Everyone knows software is becoming commoditised, as we no longer value software companies by the engineering time that went into them. I love that so many people create software today, and it leads me to believe more people can build in other fields too. Other technologies are advancing: robotics, quantum computing and space tech. They still look very much like sci-fi at first glance, but they are becoming a reality. That is why the timing felt right.

Heartcore was a perfect platform for me to do so. Not only is the team experienced in many of these fields, but they are also genuine and great to work with. It became obvious to me early on that this is a great team to grow with. Their need for more Nordic coverage, especially in Sweden, made the role especially interesting to me, because I would have room to shape it myself.

4. When I sent you my piece on the tyranny of the particular, you replied that the most successful founders are experienced, just in other domains, and that bringing that expertise into a new field unlocks a kind of creativity incumbents do not have. Can you unpack that, and why do young founders do so well during big technology shifts?

What's important here is that new perspectives are not the same as inexperience.
Thomas B. Ward showed that it's hard to break away from structured imagination. When he asked students to draw animals on another planet, as different from Earth animals as possible, underlying Earth structures still showed up. Bilateral symmetry, organs and even feathers were prominent, so the novelty stayed shallow. Imagination is therefore structured, not free, as we default to the path of least resistance. A great way of countering this is to bring in fresh minds from a different domain. I think execution is still an important capability in founders, but this is where naivety becomes a strength. Yet lack of experience also limits your ability to draw from a playbook, which is why some great founders are experienced but bring new perspectives into incumbent domains. Max Junestrand went into legal tech with great expertise in artificial intelligence, but a clear lack of insight into the legal system. By putting himself in close proximity to lawyers and observing their bottlenecks, he was able to revolutionise the industry.

At Lovable, one of our biggest challenges was not the technical capabilities of the product, but rather unlocking human creativity. Reputation and cognitive perception are difficult to change once fixed, much like the structured imagination Ward describes, and I spent a lot of time interacting with users to overcome this challenge. It's not until users get the "Aha" moment that they truly unlock the potential. Great visionaries keep pushing themselves to the edge of what is possible.

When the technology changes, incumbent knowledge depreciates and unfixated people start from the new primitives. That is why young founders do so well in these moments: they have less to unlearn, and lower opportunity costs, so they can chase ideas in a way that would be unreasonable to someone with the burden of a mortgage.

5. You also said the outliers engineer for serendipity, and that having 20 crazy ideas a day is not the norm for most senior professionals. How do you spot that, and what does it look like when someone has kept that mindset 20 years into a career?

A great visionary will radiate that vision from the beginning. It's usually clear within the first five minutes whether someone is thinking big and novel enough. They can describe the world they want to exist in, while staying epistemically clear and humble. It's an invitation, not an oversell.

While being young and naive gets you to the same vision at times, an experienced professional will have a much larger toolset. Combined with the ability to keep challenging their cognitive limitations, or structured imagination as Ward put it, that toolset is one of the reasons why most unicorn founders are not 20-year-olds, but rather around 35 on average. It's one of the most important traits, in my opinion, that I look for in exceptional founders.

6. When you joined Heartcore you wrote that you are seeing a new wave of builders in AI, robotics, quantum computing and space. Where specifically, and what would you most like to back first?

What I see is builders bringing the speed and ownership they learned in software to harder, more physical problems. Real technology opportunities are popping up in more and more domains as a result of artificial intelligence. There are also entirely new problems arising from the speed of innovation.

I am currently on the lookout for founders who build the future of security. For instance, rogue agents are already harming society and encryption is becoming increasingly vulnerable, so I think it's increasingly important to find a company that works not only on defence, but also on offence. There is so much compute out there, so what if a company built a solution that says: if you slap us, we slap you back a thousand times? There needs to be ramifications for this sort of behaviour, so that attackers are incentivised not to. A red team flipping the offense. If you are building in this space, I'd love to hear from you.