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 DeepMind 2025 scaling research.
2025 - Present
ViewProjects
Lab
Maestro
Open SourceAn orchestration layer for AI coding agents that implements research-backed principles rather than unlimited agent scaling. Point your IDE at the repo and augment your existing agent config — no dependencies, no SDK, no configuration.
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
20 May 2026 · 31 min read
Prompt Engineering Is Dead. Context Engineering Is the Job Now.
Clever prompt wording stopped being the bottleneck once models got good at following instructions. The real work moved to engineering what goes into the context window.
6 May 2026 · 28 min read
What 18 Months of Production AI Agents Actually Taught Me
Five things that broke, three that worked unexpectedly, and the cost arc that surprised me. A first-person retrospective from running AI agents in production for 18 months.
22 April 2026 · 30 min read
The Automation Paradox: Why AI Agents Create More Work Before They Create Less
Teams deploying AI agents see a productivity dip before gains materialize. The supervision tax, the correction loop, and the trust calibration period are predictable, manageable phases, not signs of failure.