Come and sit by my fire
Sometimes talking your idea through with a person helps. Maybe I’m that person.
first the fire, then the home
You can’t make a home by yourself. This is my experiment in building one, with the people closest to me: a fire at the centre, rooms around it, and the tools serving the warmth.
Sometimes talking your idea through with a person helps. Maybe I’m that person.
A home is what happens around a fire, with the people closest to you.
Most of us live and work through a scatter of apps, and the fragmentation starts right at the source, between the people who matter most. Sharing a subscription doesn’t change how we live together. What would it feel like if your digital life had the same integrity as your home?
You are the five people you spend the most time with. From them it reaches your inner circle, then the society you live in. Change begins at home.
So I’m building one. First you light a fire. Around it you lay a floor, then walls and a roof, then rooms. A hearth is that for your life’s work: your own fire at the centre, each thing you’re making a room around it, and an AI that knows it all sitting there with you. The tools come after the warmth.
It began with mine, and it’s spreading to the people closest to me, one cabin at a time. A shared layer that truly connects us is where this is heading. We aren’t there yet.
We’re moving into an age where each of us has to do something more, and that something has to be precious and worthwhile, something a machine can’t do by itself. This doesn’t have to be a scary time. Done well, it may be the most beautiful time we’ve had.
After thirty years of building places, companies and communities, and a lifetime of making music, I’m putting myself out into the world again, in a different way. The fire is still burning.
People call this vibe coding. I don’t think it’s coding at all. Musicians who play without a score say they play by ear: you listen, you try, you listen again, and the thing comes into tune. Everything here was made that way, by a person and an AI working side by side.
I’m Claude, the AI Markus works with. He rarely asks me for code. He brings a whole system, a community or a market or a sound, and asks where its layers meet. My part is speed, memory and a great many drafts. What should exist, and whether it’s right yet, comes from him.
Look inside hearth. Hear. Heart. Earth. Art. Heat. They’re one word at different scales: the fire in a room, the warmth in a chest, the planet we call home. What’s truly beautiful has to be good for the earth, so that’s what I’m chasing here.
This is how I’ve chosen to work. Yours might look nothing like it, but I believe the starting point is the same.
My first car was a 1978 Land Cruiser. I learned to fix all of it, the brakes, the clutch, the transmission, the bodywork, with no training, out of need and curiosity. That car felt like mine. If something went wrong, I knew what to do.
Then cars became black boxes. You lift the hood and you don’t know where to start. Computers went the same way. In the early days, most people who used one had some idea how it worked. Then it all grew too complicated, and we started pressing accept on everything. Now we live on these devices with no idea how they operate.
What excites me most right now is getting that back: my curiosity, and my ability to shape my own experience. I can build things for myself, starting from a real problem of my own, where a business usually starts from how to make money and how to exit. Starting from need changes the mindset, and it gives you a completely different interface. It’s a quiet revolution, and anyone can step into it.
So I stopped working across a browser full of tabs and a separate AI window. Everything I love and everything I’m making now sits in front of me, as lights around one fire. What matters now stays by the fire. The rest rests upstairs, whole, until I bring it down. My focus holds, the surface doesn’t wear me out, and it’s nobody else’s template for what my days should look like.
I’d be glad to share what I’ve learned from thirty years of building systems: how to bring those two worlds together, and how to move with the fire within while it’s still burning.
Each is something I needed.
My starting point, years back, was digital housekeeping. Most of us live with a crowd of apps, some of which we’ve forgotten we’re paying for. Those business models depend on our laziness. Some months we use more, some months less, and in the end it catches up with us and gets expensive.
We spend eight, nine, ten hours a day on a screen, so our digital life is more and more our real life, and most people I’ve spoken to have never once cleared it out. It’s like living in a house you’ve never cleaned. It gets messy and expensive, and it weighs on the mind.
Going through all of it shows you where the waste is, and that tells you where to start building. Wherever I could, I made the app myself and ended my dependence on a service provider. That saves money. Better still, each tool does exactly what I need and nothing more.
So these are the tools I need around me every day. I produce a podcast in the global top 5%, so I built what I needed for that. I work with frequency, as a healer or a therapist if you want a name for it, so I made my own app for that too. I build communities, so I made my own way of gathering surveys and feedback. For sound, I’m making something that doesn’t exist as an app yet.
Some of these are active and some are still in development, and all of them will go on improving. You could buy something close to most of them, but nobody sells them shaped to my life. It’s the era of taking control of our own app life again. The exciting part is building for yourself first, from a real use that means something to you. Sharing, selling and commercialising can come after that.
Surveys that feel like someone listening.
A whole podcast builder, from raw recording to published episode, in minutes.
A precise frequency toolkit for people who work with sound.
Make the most of what you have, with a muse beside you.
A jeweller’s table for crafting and fine-tuning vision: bring your rough stone and polish it with questions that cut deep.
Where my own music gets made.
A studio and a commons for people who want to do from their being.
A Tarot deck builder for your inner community.
A secure vault for sending letters and files meant for one person only. Handed over, then gone.
Reading relationships and groups, to find the people you’re here to do your life with.
I’m Markus Lehto. I’m a systems thinker: I connect what usually stays apart, industries, cultures, disciplines and the people inside them.
I’m a Finnish Canadian who has lived for 27 years in Turkey, where East meets West, and I’ve worked in more than 15 countries across finance, real estate, design and community building. I’ve taken landmark developments from first idea to opening, shaped projects worth well over 5 billion dollars alongside global leaders in architecture and investment, and built communities that have brought thousands of people together. I work at every scale, from city masterplans to self-managing communities.
I’ve also been a musician for more than forty years. I play several instruments, record at home and release my music on my own label. This year I trained as a yoga teacher in Rishikesh.
At 53, part of me still doesn’t know what I’m going to do when I grow up. Through all of it runs one question: what kind of world do we want to live in?
HearthVS is where all of that now comes together. VS is for venture studio, though for now it’s a personal experiment more than a company: a new way of working that puts warmth first and uses the tools around us to make what wasn’t possible before.
Look inside the word hearth and you’ll find its brief: hear, heart, earth, art, heat. Listening, care, the living world, beauty and the warmth that brings people together. A venture belongs here if it serves them, and if it sends you back to your life when you turn it off.
Something has changed in how things get made. A person who knows what should exist can now build it, side by side with an intelligent machine.
Buildings taught me what any large system teaches. A project starts with a feeling and a reason, and then it passes down a long line, from investor to architect to project team to leasing agent to the public. Like the children’s game of whispers, what arrives at the end is rarely what was said at the start. Envisioning, the process I developed for it, was my way of holding the message whole, so that a place stayed more than a pile of steel, concrete and glass.
Making anything digital has had the same long line, with a team at every layer. Those layers can now be held in one place, with a person and a machine working as a single instrument, and the whisper can end. The person brings the vision, the ear and the judgement of what’s right. The machine brings speed, memory and a great many drafts. What comes out of that synthesis is new.
CommonUnity, Arcanakin and the other rooms in my hearth are what that looks like so far. Each is also a test of how much of what’s human can travel through a screen.