Mark Laursen
Advisor · Founder · Board Member
Building software since age five. World champion by twenty-one.
Twenty-five years shipping software. Nine companies. Forty million users.
Started on a TI-99 at age five. Never stopped shipping.
Texas Instruments 99, then a Commodore 64, an Amiga, then PC. I was writing games and shipping software before most people had internet access. As Nihilum, my World of Warcraft team won BlizzCon 2008 and held a world-first winning streak across 2007 and 2008. The Ensidia spinoff took DreamHack Summer 2009 and Intel Extreme Masters gamescom 2009. I competed top-4 in Counter-Strike. Built Manaflask into the largest European WoW community portal, 500,000 unique users in the first twelve months. Shipped proprietary engines including PlayOn, plus MMO server work at FortemWorks. Pioneered live streaming via XFire and Dyyno before Twitch existed. Today I run Govyn, co-found Brainjuice Labs and Marathon Variety, and produce on Star Thieves and Ezekiel.
25+
Years shipping
40M+
Lifetime users
10+
Companies built
2
Acquisitions
Current
Active Ventures
Executive Producer
NC Gaming
Leading production for Ezekiel: Noa and the Automaton Urbis, a third-person shooter RPG set in a steampunk-cyberpunk universe featuring an innovative moral AI system that dynamically shapes narrative outcomes.
December 2025 - Present
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Founder & Sole Developer
Govyn
Open-source AI agent governance proxy and commercial SaaS platform (Govyn Cloud). Agents receive scoped proxy tokens only. Policy bypass is architecturally impossible, not conventionally discouraged.
2025 - Present
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Co-founder
Marathon Variety
Operator-studio for gaming and emerging tech. Co-founded with Amber Sutera in Portugal, 2025. All of my individual engagements (executive producer, advisor, board, fractional) are contracted through Marathon Variety.
2025 - Present
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Co-founder & Product Lead
Brainjuice Labs
AI tools for game development and SaaS businesses. GameFrame for version-controlled game design, Hangar for cross-platform mini-app deployment, plus a growing catalogue of casual games on Telegram, LINE, STAN, and WeChat.
2026 - Present
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Advisor & Executive Producer
Botto Entertainment
Collaborating with a talented team to bring Star Thieves to life — a real-time heist card game with simultaneous play, destructible boards, and deep tactical strategy.
August 2024 - Present
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Undisclosed
Morning Star
An undisclosed defense project. Details are confidential.
2026 - Present
ViewIP Creator
Stealth Company
Original intellectual property developed and licensed to a partner studio for full production. Details under wraps until the official announcement.
2024 - Present
ViewCo-Founder & Agent Architecture Lead
Stealth AI Venture
Building managed multi-agent LLM systems for non-technical markets. Designing the core agent construction pipeline grounded in 700+ research sources, with peer-based coordination architectures informed by DyLAN, MAST, and Google's 2025 agent-scaling research.
2025 - Present
ViewProjects
Lab
Maestro
Open SourceA local multi-CLI fusion engine: fan one prompt across Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro, have Opus judge the answers, then synthesize a grounded response. It runs on a proven discipline layer: verified done-claims, surgical scope, and a research-backed multi-agent gate. Zero dependencies, opt-in, off by default.
Brainboard
In DevelopmentA visual thinking operating system for teams that think big. Start with an infinite whiteboard — drop in notes, shapes, images, and frames. Wire them into executable node graphs that actually run.
Reboot Resort
Shelved · 2026 Open SourceAn open-source toolkit concept for diagnosing and repairing AI agents post-deployment. Shelved in 2026 once dreaming-by-default landed in production models.
Track Record
Previous Companies
Bright Star Studios
Founder & CEO
2018 - 2025
FortemWorks
General Manager & Game Director
2018 - 2023
Starcade IO
Co-Founder
2017 - 2024
PlayOn ApS
Founder & COO
2016 - 2018
Djobs - Digitale Jobs
Co-Founder
2016 - 2018
IO Games Space
Business Advisor & Interim COO
Apr 2018 - Jun 2018
Akeeweb
Founder & CEO
2014 - 2016
Donkey Crew
Executive Producer
2012 - 2015
Manaflask
Co-Founder & Head of Product
2010 - 2015
Ensidia
Co-Founder
2009 - 2015
Nihilum / Mousesports MMO
Co-Founder, Manager & COO
2005 - 2009
Skibanden
Founder & CEO
1998 - 2005
Writing
Blog
1 July 2026 · 18 min read
Done Means Done: Why Status Tokens Beat Status Updates
Agents reporting completion in prose is the leading source of false-green builds. A four-token discipline (VERIFIED, UNVERIFIED, PENDING_REVIEW, FAIL) is what makes long-horizon agent work actually verifiable.
16 June 2026 · 19 min read
Frontier AI Performance at Home, Without the API Bill
Maestro fuses the model CLIs already on your machine into one answer that beats any of them alone. It is the same mixture-of-agents method OpenRouter's Fusion API benchmarked at frontier level for about half the cost, except it runs on the flat-rate subscriptions you already pay for instead of a metered API bill.
3 June 2026 · 37 min read
Why I Stopped Using Multi-Agent Frameworks (And What Replaced Them)
After 18 months of building with AutoGen, CrewAI, and LangGraph, I replaced all of them with explicit decomposition and deterministic orchestration. Here is why, and what to use instead.