Martin Källström
knowledge / companies

Narrative

Narrative — born as Memoto — was Martin Källström's second company: a Swedish startup that spent 2012 to 2016 trying to give everyone a photographic memory. The idea came out of grief. After losing both parents to cancer within a decade of each other, Martin realized no one was left to tell him about his own childhood, and that the photo albums he had only ever held the curated, happy moments — never the ordinary ones that actually make up a life (▶ 39:16, breakit-se ↗). He built a tiny wearable clip camera that photographed automatically every 30 seconds, no shutter, no framing, no off switch — and it went from a Kickstarter campaign that funded in five hours to a company with offices on two continents, roughly $12.5 million in venture capital, 40,000 cameras shipped, and, in September 2016, bankruptcy — a casualty of investors deciding, almost overnight, that wearable hardware was dead. Martin has called the walk out of that bankruptcy one he could make with his head up, because by the time it happened the team had tried everything.

Origins: a camera born from grief

Martin spent six years building Twingly before restlessness set in — the company had shifted from invention to sales and maintenance, and he'd stopped learning (▶ 24:29). He negotiated down to four days a week at full salary, using the fifth day to search for what came next.

The Spreadsheet That Couldn't Commit. Over nine months, one day a week, Martin kept a Google Spreadsheet of business ideas — eventually 45 to 50 of them — and "burned" for each one for a couple of days before moving on. It got bleak enough that he worried he could never start a company if two days was his limit. The pattern broke when he saw a teardown of a Finnish Wi-Fi SD card and it sent him back to an idea he'd earlier dismissed as too bulky: a camera worn on the body. This time it stuck — for weeks. ▶ 35:51

Reaching Björn Westin: network momentum and a surprise yes. Needing a hardware co-founder, Martin asked a former Axis employee not for himself but for a referral — and got pointed to Björn Wesén, Axis's own R&D head, someone Martin didn't expect to land. He drove to Lund, showed Wesén the prototype, and days later Wesén called to say he'd talked it over with his brother and was in. Martin's read on it: luck is having all your tentacles out. ▶ 45:15

From Memoto to Narrative: a trademark forces a rebrand

Motorola's trademark enforcement and the rebrand to Narrative. Motorola objected to "Memoto" over the "moto" fragment. Rather than rush a fix, Motorola and the startup took time to find the right identity — and the name that emerged, Narrative, better captured what the company had actually become: a platform and app ecosystem, not just a clip-on camera. slashgear-com ↗

The Kickstarter that funded everything

See Memoto Kickstarter Campaign for the full story.

The Kickstarter Launch. Martin set an alarm to publish the page at 7am from his sister's Stockholm apartment. Within a minute — too fast to have even watched the pitch video — the first backer came in; then they poured in continuously. The $50,000 goal fell in five hours; by one month later the campaign had raised $500,000, with another half-million in pre-orders on top. ▶ 8:30

Narrative Kickstarter and the customer-support crisis. The campaign's success brought an unanticipated wave: the team worked around the clock just answering messages. Martin later named this a blind spot — he had planned the product, the supply chain, and the campaign mechanics, but not the operational demands of sudden success. ▶ 9:09

The Train Conductor's Immediate Buy-In. On a train from Stansted to London with prototypes on the table, a conductor stopped, sat down for five minutes, and immediately volunteered a use case: he faced harassment on his commute and wanted proof of his presence on record. He suggested pitching it to his employer, Greater Anglia. ▶ 11:09

Funding & investors

The lucky Passion Capital pitch. In 2012, short on travel budget, Martin's team implied to a London VC that they had other meetings lined up — mostly by accident, their first pitch meeting even happened almost as a fluke. Passion Capital sent a term sheet within a week. Martin later reflected on the paradox: he could never know what he might have missed by moving that fast, even though speed itself was part of what won investor confidence. ▶ 9:40

Product & technology

Full detail lives on the dedicated pages: Narrative Clip 1, Narrative Clip 2, and Narrative App & Platform.

The GPS Antenna Echo Chamber. The team designed a tiny 2×3mm GPS antenna using the PCB itself as the antenna — flawless in the lab. Inside the actual camera casing, the metal shell turned into a perfect echo chamber and killed the signal outright. They rebuilt around a wire antenna with Swedish antenna specialists, moving PCB components iteratively until the interference cleared. slashgear-com ↗

The Complete Rebuild: throwing away a year of code. By October 2013, a year after the team started, not one line of the original software remained and none of the original hardware prototype survived either — the early builds couldn't scale to a workable product, so the team rewrote everything gradually, without ever formally deciding to. slashgear-com ↗

Building a camera around a 6.5-year-old sensor. Asked how startups pick hardware, Martin explained it's less about the best spec on paper and more about what a small company can actually get supported. The Clip 1's image sensor was already about five years old when design started in 2012, and roughly 6.5 years old by ship date — a technology-access penalty he said closed only once Narrative became a recognized brand. ▶ 36:21

The Launch Decision: shipping "ready enough" versus perfect. At launch, search was pulled because it didn't work yet, the Windows uploader was unfinished, and GPS browsing was deferred. Martin chose to ship anyway — hardware deadlines don't move the way software feature lists do, and real users would teach the team more than more months in the lab. slashgear-com ↗

Growth, team & culture

The spoof-email attack on Narrative. Around 2014–2015, attackers made dozens of calls into the company posing as vendors, mapping out who approved payments and how. They then sent the controller a spoofed urgent email, apparently from Martin, requesting a large transfer to a new foreign account. It failed because Narrative was flat enough that the controller knew to check with Martin directly before acting — a structural defense against social engineering that Martin later connected to broader thinking about fraud and AI-era deepfakes. ▶ 22:45

Privacy by design

Privacy wasn't an afterthought bolted onto a camera that recorded everything — Martin has described it as central from Memoto's very first sketches.

Designing a camera that looks honest, not hidden. Asked what would happen if police wanted to use the Clip, Martin described a genuine enterprise variant — a two-camera rig streaming over LTE — then pivoted to the deeper point: the Clip's visible, unashamed look was the product of deliberate focus-group work, so bystanders, not just wearers, would feel comfortable around it. He pushed back explicitly on press coverage that lumped Narrative in with Google Glass, arguing Glass never achieved that same feeling of honesty. ▶ 13:59

Privacy by design vs. streaming. Martin contrasted Memoto with Google Glass point by point: Glass streamed to the web by default, risking accidental capture of private moments; Memoto stored everything in a private diary by default, with publication requiring an explicit, conscious choice each time. ▶ 25:33

Privacy Concerns and Social Friction (Arthur Guy's review). After an enthusiastic unboxing, Arthur confronted the social cost head-on: his girlfriend refused to be in the same room while he wore it, and he recognized the device could trigger the same fear Google Glass had. He tried rationalizing it as personal-use-only, while admitting society's discomfort was legitimate. ▶ 8:55

Five years of wearing the Narrative Clip. Over five years of intermittent use, Martin built an intuitive social sense of when photography felt appropriate — and only twice in five years did anyone explicitly ask him to turn it off, far fewer times than he'd expected. He removed it himself around others more often than they asked, feeling more self-conscious about photographing them than they seemed to feel about being photographed. He theorized Google Glass failed partly because it felt socially rude to ask someone to take off their glasses — whereas asking someone to unclip a camera felt normal. ▶ 19:12

Real-world impact: what the camera was actually for

The Photographer Email. Asked what success looked like, Martin didn't reach for a sales number — he described an email from a photographer left in a wheelchair after a traffic accident, unable to operate her professional gear, thrilled that the Clip let her express herself through photography again. That single email meant more to him than any revenue figure. slashgear-com ↗

The Autism Son's Communication Gateway. A family wrote in about their autistic son, who couldn't describe his school day in words and rarely used a digital camera they'd given him. With the Clip taking a photo every 30 seconds automatically, the family finally had the everyday conversation — what he did, who he played with — other families take for granted. ▶ 12:01

The Police Officer Scenario. Martin recounted a YouTube comment from a Black man in America describing how the Clip could protect him during a police stop — showing his location history on his phone if asked where he'd been the day before. The commenter's own words: "boom, life transformed." ▶ 13:45

Sofia's Lifelog: love and care through documentation. In the Lifeloggers documentary, a mother describes her daughter Sofia's diagnosis with a fatal genetic disease — one of only 8–10 children worldwide living with Niemann-Pick type A at any time. The family built a Narrative Scrapbook and systematically documented Sofia's life through photos, notes, and video, turning grief into community and care into meaning, through to the day of her death. ▶ 14:10

Cathal's eight-year devotion to the Clip. Years after Martin left the company, he got an email from Cathal Gurrin, deputy head of Dublin University's School of Computing, revealing he was still using his Narrative Clip seven or eight years on. For Martin it reframed the whole venture — not a failed startup, but a prescient data-collection platform whose real value modern AI was only now positioned to unlock. ▶ 0:58

The wearables market dies: decline and bankruptcy

See Narrative bankruptcy for the fuller account.

Narrative's Rise, Delays, and Letting Go. Martin built the company to 55 people plus contractors, hit real milestones, and watched half the early hires quit stable jobs for a prototype. But margins stayed thin — engineers wanted perfection, investors wanted lower prices — and when the market declared wearables dead after GoPro's crash, fundraising simply stopped. Martin says he systematically worked through five or six potential rescues — acquisition conversations with Apple, Google, Amazon, Snapchat — each its own extended process. When all of them failed, he felt no regret, because he knew he'd exhausted every option. ▶ 17:19

The bankruptcy reckoning and the walk through the wreckage. In September 2016, after months of trying every rescue scenario with investors and bankers, Narrative filed for bankruptcy. Martin describes it not as a sudden crisis but as the conclusion of exhaustive, honest problem-solving — the moment came when the team could no longer credibly believe in a viable recovery. Having done that work first, he could walk out with his head up, without regret or paralysis. ▶ 22:10

Aftermath: bought back, and echoes in later work

From Heywear to Meta: the full circle of wearable vision. Martin later connected his own history — Narrative Clip and, in 2019, Heywear — to Meta's AI glasses finally fulfilling the vision both attempted: hardware that captures your life and runs AI on top of it. Where Google Glass failed by feeling nerdy and invasive, Meta succeeded by getting the form factor right and shipping capable multimodal AI alongside it. ▶ 2:41

People

See people & partners for fuller profiles.

Worth remembering