About
First principles. First rank.
A note from the founders
One path. One conviction.
Niklas spent fifteen years bringing best in class SEO and digital capability to Italy, helping over three hundred companies take the step from offline to online. He built an agency, scaled it, and sold it. Piero spent a decade inside small and mid sized enterprises, implementing ERP systems and learning where technology actually moves the numbers. David built AI products and data platforms, applying artificial intelligence to investment research, analytics and business operations.
From different angles we watched the consulting machine repeat the same broken model. A partner sells the work, then hands it to people who have never done it before. Clients tolerate it because there is no alternative.
AI changed that. The volume work that justified the pyramid is now done better by a senior with the right engine. So we built the firm we wished existed: small, senior, honest about price and outcome, fast. Digital fluency, operational depth, and applied AI, sitting in the same room.
If you have paid the big firms and resented it, this is for you.
Beyond Orion Primis, Niklas also works as a fractional and interim CMO and CEO for companies that need senior leadership without the full-time commitment.
His work extends across adjacent ventures at Lindahl Capital, his personal investment vehicle for founder-led, cash-flowing businesses.
On the leadership side, he takes on fractional CEO and fractional COO mandates when a business needs steady hands without a permanent hire, steps in as a turnaround CEO when things need to be rebuilt, and works through a temporary manager network for shorter assignments. Companies looking specifically for senior marketing can engage a fractional CMO, and for cross-functional leadership a fractional manager.
Outside client work he writes. Long reads on modern leadership at Lead, Manage, Follow, notes for people rethinking corporate life at 9 to 5 Survivors, and short pieces on decisive execution at Action Is Now. In Swedish he publishes at Ten Perzent and Plats 1, and covers the Sweden to Italy corridor at Sverige Italien.
Niklas Lindahl, Piero Porro, David Diaco
Founders
Founding team
The people who do the work.
Click a card to read the bio.
The claim
First principles. First rank.
First Principles
Borrowed from physics and engineering: reasoning up from what is fundamentally true, not by analogy from what was done before. The opposite is what the big firms sell: a framework pulled off the shelf, the same 2x2 matrix, the same playbook they ran on your competitor last quarter, your logo dropped on the cover.
We build the answer from your reality, not from a template. We start from your numbers, your market, your constraints, and reason up. It signals rigour and an engineering mindset, which fits the AI-native positioning. It is the antidote to consulting speak.
First Rank
Primis means the first rank, the foremost. As a claim it means the most senior people in the firm do your work, not juniors. The person who wins the engagement is the person who delivers it. No pyramid, no bait-and-switch, no analyst two years out of school learning on your account.
It is also a confidence flex. First rank. Best in the room. It carries the gravitas without naming a competitor.
They map to the two things a buyer actually fears when hiring a consultancy. First, "will they just give me a generic answer?" First Principles answers that. Second, "will the smart person who pitched me actually be on my project?" First Rank answers that.
One is about the quality of the thinking. The other is about the calibre of the people doing it. The parallel construction makes it stick, like it was always the firm's creed. And it decodes the name, so anyone who reads it understands what Primis means without us explaining it.
Principles
01
The senior does the work.
02
The answer over the deck.
03
Fixed fee, no surprises.
04
We tell you what we found, not what you hoped.