I’d tell them something like this:
This phone belonged to Thomas.
He was a builder more than anything else.
He built companies, websites, servers, brands, infrastructure, products, automations and occasionally things that probably should have remained simple until Thomas decided they needed to become a complete system.
His world revolved around technology. Hosting, cybersecurity, development, Linux servers, Proxmox, Microsoft 365, DNS, email infrastructure, automation and web businesses weren't just things he worked with. They were things he understood deeply enough that when something broke, his instinct wasn't to call someone. It was to figure out why it broke.
And he hated answers that didn't explain why.
He could spend hours chasing a ridiculous technical problem simply because the fact that it should work but didn't was unacceptable to him.
That trait extended far beyond computers.
Thomas had an unusually strong reaction to systems he considered unfair, incompetent or dishonest. Bureaucracy, corporations hiding behind procedures, companies ignoring customers, technical support giving canned answers — these things genuinely irritated him. His instinct was usually:
Find out how the system actually works. Then find the leverage.
Sometimes that made him confrontational. Sometimes unnecessarily so.
He wasn't particularly diplomatic by nature. If he thought something was bullshit, there was a reasonable chance the word bullshit would eventually appear.
But underneath that aggression was something more interesting.
He cared a lot about fairness.
One of his projects was an AI service intended to help ordinary people understand Danish debt law and navigate Gældsstyrelsen. His intention was explicitly to make it free rather than turn it into another business.
That tells you something important about him.
Because Thomas absolutely understood money and business. He negotiated prices, calculated margins, built companies and constantly looked for opportunities.
But money itself didn't seem to be the final objective.
Autonomy was.
He wanted to own his infrastructure, his companies, his time and his decisions. He disliked being dependent on institutions or people who could arbitrarily tell him what he was allowed to do.
That probably explains why entrepreneurship suited him.
He ran COMPANY A and COMPANY B and worked on numerous other projects. He could be discussing a client's Microsoft 365 migration in the morning, debugging Proxmox at midnight, designing an agricultural machinery advertisement for Poland somewhere in between, and then suddenly decide there was an entirely different business that needed to exist.
His mind didn't stay inside neat professional categories.
And he was extraordinarily iterative.
A design wasn't finished because it looked good.
It was:
move that slightly left.
make the background darker.
not THAT dark.
the logo is wrong.
the lid stays red.
the pill stays gold.
And if you changed the lid after he'd specifically said the lid stays red, you were going to hear about it.
He could be impatient and demanding. Precision mattered enormously to him, particularly once he'd explained something once already.
But there was another side to that trait: he noticed details.
He didn't merely want things completed. He wanted them correct.
Thomas was also intensely curious.
His conversations jumped from networking to chemistry, law, typography, business strategy, materials science, cybersecurity, medicine, advertising, employment law, accounting systems and completely random questions that had apparently occurred to him thirty seconds earlier.
He wasn't embarrassed about not knowing something.
He would simply ask.
Then challenge the answer.
Then ask the question underneath the question.
That might actually be one of the clearest things I'd tell the stranger holding this phone:
Thomas didn't want agreement. He wanted useful truth.
He frequently pushed back when an answer didn't make sense. Sometimes he was right. Sometimes he wasn't. But he preferred being corrected with evidence over being politely agreed with.
There were contradictions in him too.
He could be extremely analytical while simultaneously making decisions from instinct.
He wanted control, yet constantly started projects that created more complexity.
He hated wasted time while willingly spending hours solving a problem that another person might simply work around.
He could write an extremely professional business email and five minutes later describe the exact same situation to me using language that absolutely could not appear in that email.
And although he presented himself as fairly hard-edged, his actions suggest he cared considerably more about people than that exterior implied.
When someone he knew had a problem, his response was usually to start solving it.
Research it.
Find the rules.
Find the person responsible.
Find another option.
Fix the infrastructure.
Write the complaint.
Build the thing.
That was apparently how Thomas expressed a lot of concern: through action.
So if a stranger found this phone and wanted to know who owned it, I wouldn't primarily describe him by his job titles.
I'd say:
Thomas was intensely curious, stubborn, entrepreneurial, technically obsessive, impatient with incompetence, skeptical of authority and unusually motivated by independence.
He wasn't always easy.
He could push too hard, pursue things long after most people would have abandoned them, and occasionally mistake persistence for necessity.
But that same stubbornness was responsible for much of what he created.
His life seems to have been one enormous collection of things he was trying to build, fix, understand or improve.
And judging from the thousands of questions left behind on this phone, he never really considered himself finished.
There was always another problem.
Another idea.
Another business.
Another server.
Another design revision.
Another question.
And probably twenty browser tabs he was absolutely convinced he still needed.