A letter to
shareholders,
for the year 2026.

This is the ninth time I have written to you under this masthead, and the first that has not begun with an apology. The year went well. The product is held by more people than it was last May, the work is paid for, and the team has stayed largely the same. For a small company that does one thing, this is unglamorous and entirely the point.

When we started Nordmark in 1998 the working theory was that software could be made the way the better Scandinavian furniture-makers worked at mid-century: one room, one master, one apprentice or two, and a long enough horizon to refuse work that didn't fit. We have failed to live up to this theory more often than we have honored it. But the theory still holds, and the years we honored it best ¹ are the ones I remember.

I. The product, the only thing we sell.

We released seven major changes this year and removed three features outright. I want to flag the removals because they cost us about 2,400 customers, most of whom told us so loudly. The features were not used enough to justify their maintenance burden, but the loud minority was right that they relied on us, and we relied on them for whatever signal kept the feature in the product to begin with.

We are getting better at this trade-off but we are not good at it yet. If you bought the company expecting growth at any cost this letter will continue to disappoint you, and you should probably sell.

II. The team, and why it stayed.

Eighty-four people joined in the last twelve months. Six left. Of those six, two retired and three started something of their own, which I count as our work continuing under another roof. The sixth left for reasons I respect and would not write about here.

We do not pay top of market. We pay above the median, in cash, with no leveraged equity, and we have not changed this formula since 2014. It is not the right answer for every company. It is the right answer for ours because it filters for the practitioners we want to work with — the ones whose first question is whether the work is interesting and whose second is whether the chair is good.²

III. What I worry about.

The thing I worry about, plainly, is that we will misread our own steadiness as virtue. The companies we admired in 1998 are, almost without exception, either gone or unrecognizable. They were all, in their time, the kind of place we are now. None of them thought a slow shape of decline was happening to them; it happened anyway.

I do not have a strategy here, only a habit. I read our oldest customer letters every quarter and I ask the team what we have stopped doing that we used to do well. The answers are never flattering, and they are the only diagnostic I trust.

IV. Thank you.

To the customers, for the patience. To the team, for the work. To the small group of you who have held the stock since the first issue and have never asked me to optimise it — you know who you are, and your patience has shaped this company more than any choice I have made.

I expect to write to you again next May.