Linus Ekenstam

A designer first

Linus Ekenstam describes himself as coming from the design world, and in 2023 he put his time as a product designer at almost twenty years^[8]. His own site traces the side projects back to 2006: WeAreSuperFamous, a blog on technology, design and photography that ran until 2016; Copygram, a web viewer co-created in 2012 that grew fast in Instagram's early years; and Ladda Portable Energy, a battery pack business that launched the Ladda X1 in 2014 and 2015^[3].

From August 2015 to November 2017 he was a lead product and experience designer at Typeform in Barcelona, working on its design systems and, in his words, making web forms a little more human^[3][6]. Around it he kept starting things: Kids Hack Club, co-founded in 2016 to teach children aged 4 to 15 STEAM subjects; Sailaroo, a peer-to-peer sailing trip service; and Habitat, an urban micro-housing think tank whose Urban Micro Cabin was shown in Poble Nou, Barcelona, in January 2018^[3].

In January 2018 he became Head of Design and Product at Bamboo, an app that invests spare change in gold, silver and digital assets; its product video is still on his YouTube channel^[6][20]. Crunchbase also lists him as Head of Design and Product at Thingtesting and Principal Designer at Flodesk, without dates^[6].

Bedtimestory.ai

In 2022 he co-founded Bedtimestory.ai, a tool that writes and illustrates personalised bedtime stories with a child and their family as the characters, letting parents choose the genre, art style and moral^[12]. It launched on Product Hunt on 22 December 2022^[12]. A month later he published Grandpa's Sea Tales, in which an animated, Pixar-style grandfather tells one of its love stories straight to camera; the D-ID watermark sits in the corner of the frame^[13]. He talked through AI storytelling and the product with Jon Radoff on Metavert Meditations in May 2023^[22].

Inside My Head

In March 2023, after a wave of new followers ("a full stadium joined basically yesterday", as he put it), he launched a YouTube channel under the name Inside My Head^[8]. The pitch was to learn in public rather than to teach from above^[8]. The same name went on his newsletter, which he describes as applying an element of play to the world of AI, and which he reports at about 21,000 subscribers^[4][5]. On X, where his account dates from April 2007, he now has about 245,500 followers and describes his beat as everything AI and robotics, deep dives and hot takes^[1].

I'm by no means a professional, I'm by no means an expert, I'm just sharing my learnings.

Linus Ekenstam^[8]

In May 2023 he posted a what-if conversation between Bill Gates and Socrates, with his own script and AI-made visuals and voices; the German business magazine Business Punk picked it as its must-see of the day^[21]. That June he co-taught Build Your AI Workflow with Scott Meyer, a course on using Midjourney for mood boards, on-brand images from seed images and advanced prompting^[7]. His Midjourney threads, among them a showcase of the style tuner, and guides sold on Gumroad grew out of the same work^[29][30].

The tool tests

His most watched YouTube videos are short, visual first looks at new tools. In September 2023 he recorded one English take and used HeyGen to clone his voice, translate it and re-sync his lips in Hindi, Korean, French, Portuguese, Mandarin and Dutch, noting that 80% of the world's population does not speak English^[9]. At about 12,900 views it is the most watched video on his channel^[2].

Two months later his Magnific first impressions ran a before and after slider over a tiny source image of Shrek and its upscale, summed up as "five pixels, millions of pixels"^[10]. He was just as quick to point out where the upscaler invented detail he didn't want, such as an extra eye inside a pair of goggles^[10]. Earlier tests covered Midjourney 5.2's zoom-out, Meta's Segment Anything and, in January 2024, a 26-minute look at the Rabbit R1^[11][33][32].

A studio in Barcelona

Between November 2023 and January 2024 he turned an old warehouse in Barcelona into a studio and AI maker space, doing most of the work himself and filming it as he went^[14][15]. The build film ends in the finished room: his microphone, a desk and a neon strip on bare walls^[15]. He also turned up as a guest on other shows: Cal Fussman's Big Questions in June 2024, ThursdAI in May 2025, Nordnet's Swedish-language investing podcast Sparpodden, and Jordan Bayne's interview series^{[23][24][27][28]}.

The Linus Podcast

In May 2025 he started the Linus Podcast, opening with Javi Lopez, the co-founder of Magnific, the upscaler from his own tool test^[16]. The second episode was recorded live with Julie Zhuo at the Upscale Conference in San Francisco^[17]. In March 2026 a long interview about Polsia asked how much of a company AI can now run on its own^[31].

On AI LIVE

On 9 October 2025 Linus co-hosted AI LIVE Ep. 95 with Chris Branch, in the season when the show was billed as AI LIVE via Creativize.ai, Chris's name for the show at the time^[25]. In February 2026, on Ep. 110, Chris credited him for constantly finding Seedance 2.0 motion design examples on X, then showed a video-to-video dance test in which Linus, MetaPuppet and others from Chris's WhatsApp group were swapped in from photos^[26]. The glitch the hosts laughed at most was Linus's and MetaPuppet's faces trading places every time one dancer passed in front of the other^[26].

Building again

In 2026 he went back to making products, this time with AI doing much of the building. In September he showed a small volumetric video viewer made by pointing the AI builder Astra at his own site^[19]. On 1 October he released PLY, a browser-based 3D designer for mini-ramps and whole skateparks that turns a design into construction plans, a bill of materials and cut lists, with EU and US standards and price estimates from stores^[18]. His media kit lists brand work with Notion, Canva, Passionfroot, HeyGen, Hume AI and Higgsfield^[5].