Algavo is Dissolved. Good.
Let’s cut the shit.
I’m sick and tired of the theater. Sick of watching people who’ve never built a single real thing in their lives play-act at changing the world, while actually achieving nothing except burning through money that was never theirs to begin with. This is about Algavo. About the seaweed industry. About the green energy hoax. About the venture capital circus. And about the rot of dishonesty that runs straight through the middle of the entire innovation economy.
The Algavo Story: Simple, Honest, and Dissolved
Algavo AS. Norwegian company. Seaweed refining. That was the idea. We came out of a Brazilian background, tried working with “real knowledge” people — the supposed scientists, the credentialed ones, the ones sitting at a certain age suddenly realizing they have no legacy, nothing they can point to and say “I built that.”
They’re that age with nothing to show for it for a reason. They’ve spent their whole careers making damn sure nobody else gets there either. Guarding their little fiefdoms, their “expertise,” their precious IP, like Gollum with his ring — clutching it so hard nothing of value ever actually gets built. Whether it's a personality quirk or not depends on who you ask and what side of the story you're on. That’s the mechanism. That’s how an entire generation of “scientists” turned entrepreneur manages to produce absolutely nothing while acting like the rest of us are too stupid to understand the complexity of what they do.
So we cut them loose. Continue this ourselves. How hard can it be?
It's not complicated. I’m not going to pretend otherwise to sound impressive. Most companies are dramatically overselling how complicated their “deep tech” actually is, because the reality, seen from any height at all, is embarrassingly simple. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered.
People don’t want to hear that, because if it’s simple, then they’re not wizards. They’re not chosen. Or perhaps they are. At the very minimum, they didn't get there first, yet they keep everyone else out. Strip the mystique away and what’s left is mediocrity protecting itself.
A Familiar Shape
I’ve watched this exact pattern play out around me more than once — adjacent projects, adjacent people. I’m not naming names or companies here. That’s not the point, and frankly the individuals involved aren’t interesting enough to be the point. What’s interesting is the shape, because it repeats like clockwork.
A founder talks a much bigger game than what exists on paper. No real IP. No real product. Just momentum manufactured out of promises to whoever’s next in line to believe. This issue isn't the talk, it's the lack of transparency. People sign on because they need stability — a salary, a title, a slice of something — and get strung along on “next week” for months, sometimes years, until they’re the ones left holding nothing.
And then, like clockwork, someone writes The Letter. The long public one. Names, dates, grievances, a call for everyone to “cut ties,” warnings that anyone still nearby is “complicit.” You’ve seen a version of it. Long, supposedly righteous, sent to a mailing list full of people who know neither party well and can verify none of it regardless.
I don’t know these people well enough to defend them, and I’m not trying to. What I care about is what the letter itself tells you about this entire world, and it’s not flattering to the writer either.
You signed a contract with a startup that had zero funding secured. Check. You took the risk because you needed the money. Check, fine — that’s not a moral failure, that’s a bad bet, and everyone in this space makes one eventually. But when it goes wrong, the story doesn’t become “I made a bad call, lesson learned.” It becomes a public campaign. A crusade. Calls to arms against a person you’re simultaneously furious at and somehow still emailing a mailing list about eighteen months later.
Where’s the adult in that story? Where’s the person who eats the loss and moves on instead of turning their own bad judgment into a public spectacle demanding an audience’s sympathy? Nowhere. Because that’s not what this world produces. It produces spectacle, and spectacle sells better than accountability ever will.
The VC Industry: Teenagers Playing With Other People’s Money
Which brings me to venture capital. Same razer-thin coin, other side.
Algavo dissolved because we stopped playing that game. Full stop.
You know how it actually works? You sit across from some kid barely out of university — never built anything, never run anything, never risked a single euro of his own money — and he gets to decide, with total unearned confidence, whether years of your work deserve to exist. Not because he’s smart. Not because he has vision. Because he’s currently the gatekeeper standing between you and someone else’s cash. That’s the entire qualification. Snotneus (in Dutch). Runner boy. Little shit with a LinkedIn title and zero skin in the game, deciding who gets to build something real.
What business does a twenty-five-year-old finance grad have deciding whether a seaweed refining operation in Norway deserves to exist? None. Zero. He has no vision, no experience, no risk exposed, nothing except a pile of money that isn’t his, and the arrogance to think that makes him qualified to judge people who’ve actually built things.
Algavo isn’t dissolved because the science was wrong or the market wasn’t there. It’s dissolved because I looked at that game and decided I’d rather build nothing than to keep begging little kids for permission to build something in which I recognized some value. For others, and myself.
The Green Energy Hoax
Same picture, different costume. Wind energy. Everyone’s so proud of their windmills — the great green miracle, humanity saved.
Here’s what people conveniently leave out. You pour a genuinely massive amount of concrete, steel, and glass fiber into a single turbine. It lasts maybe fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years if you’re lucky. Then you bury it. A literal crater of waste where your “clean solution” used to spin. Add the shadow flicker eating into people’s daily lives, the constant whooshing, the vibrational noise driving marine life away if it’s offshore, and a genuinely low energy yield relative to what it cost to put there.
It only looks “functional” because it’s on permanent life support from subsidies — because it costs more to build and run than it ever returns, and the difference gets quietly siphoned out of taxpayers who have no fucking clue what they’re actually funding (or are ignorant enough that they think they do). That’s not a talking point. That’s a numbers game, and you can be as offended by it as you like, it won’t change the net number.
Same rot as seaweed refining. Same rot as the VC circus. An industry built to make people feel virtuous while achieving practically nothing, funded entirely by money that belongs to others.
Germany, As a Warning Label
Zoom out and you get the exact same pattern at the scale of a country. Germany — the largest economy in the EU, the single biggest driver of the entire European project — and the story you’re fed right now is “Porsche is struggling, Volkswagen is struggling, it’s brutal Chinese competition.”
Convenient story. Not the real one. Germany, like many others, made a political choice to walk away from a cheap gas supplier and lean instead on a far more expensive, far more distant one, and now runs some of the highest electricity costs on the entire continent. You don’t get to make that choice, watch your own industrial base buckle under the resulting energy bill, and then act baffled and blame Beijing. That’s not China outcompeting you. It’s been set in motion all by yourselves, dressed up in a story that lets nobody in charge take the blame. That's called a cover-up people…
Different arena, identical disease: decisions made on secret ideology and optics, sold as seemingly inevitable, with the bill quietly handed to everyone downstream who had no meaningful say in it.
So What’s the Point?
The point is this. The world is soaked in theater, and almost everyone reading this is complicit in it whether they’ve noticed or not. The scientists guarding their “precious” IP while shipping nothing. The VCs playing kingmaker with money that isn’t theirs. The companies marketing themselves as green while the actual math says otherwise. The governments choosing ideology over numbers and handing you the invoice afterward. The people who’d rather write a public grievance letter than admit they made a bad call.
These moments all have the potential to become anchor points for self reflection. And at a grandiose scale I dare say. But sadly, they end up getting covered up over time.
I’m done being part of it. Done with all that theater.
But not done building.
Algavo is dissolved, and I don’t mourn it. What it taught me is exactly why every bit of my energy now goes into NEXUS Werkstatt, and nothing about that is a retreat.
NEXUS Werkstatt is a physical place. Ground floor, no theater, no pitch deck. We repair bikes. We sell bikes — real ones, mechanical, meant to be understood and worked on with your own hands, not disposable garbage designed to die on schedule. We run specialty coffee and tea, slow brew, done properly — no milk drowning out what’s actually in the cup, none of the sugary nonsense people mistake for coffee. The real thing, made by someone who refuses to serve you crap.
And we run Werktage — masterclasses for the people who see the world the way I described it just now and look for a way forward in it at their own terms. People who look around at how things are currently run and think “this is genuinely insane,” and start wondering if they’re the crazy ones. They're not. You’re not. The people running the show are the crazy ones. Noticing that and refusing to play along is the sanest thing you can do right now.
None of this is cheap, and I have zero interest in apologizing for that. A fixie from us runs 2,600 euros, not 500. The real coffee costs more than the chain down the street. The Werktage aren’t priced for everyone, on purpose. Quality done honestly costs what it costs, and I’m not comparing myself to competitors who cut corners to hit a lower number. Don’t ask me to.
This is what I’m building: something small, physical, and unapologetically real, in a world that is still mid-collapse from the old way of doing things into whatever comes after. We are not at the bottom of that collapse yet. This is what it looks like to keep building while it happens instead of waiting for permission.
If you’ve read this far and you’re angry, or you’re thinking about hitting unfollow — go ahead. I’m not interested in being palatable to the masses. I’m interested in the people who read this and feel relieved, because it turns out they weren’t the crazy ones after all. Everyone else can leave. I’d rather have ten people who mean it than ten thousand who don’t.
Algavo is dissolved. NEXUS Werkstatt is where the real work is.
— Wout