#62: Inka Mero - backing deep tech startups that are changing the world

Summary

In this episode of The Growth Pod, host Janie Mero talks with Inka Mero, the co-founder and CEO of Voima Ventures, a venture fund focused on deep tech startups in the Nordics and Baltics. Mero shares her journey into venture capital, her mission of scaling technology solutions for significant global challenges, and her vision for deep tech innovation in areas such as biotech, energy, and quantum computing. She offers insights into the complex process of commercializing scientific research into market-ready innovations, underscoring the importance of strong entrepreneurial teams and strategic focus areas. The conversation highlights the critical role of venture capital in fostering transformative technologies that can disrupt industries and create meaningful change in society.

Highlights

• Inka Mero discusses the mission of Voima Ventures to invest in deep tech that addresses global challenges. 🌍
• A focus on deep tech entails investing in startups that leverage scientific research to create disruptive innovations. 🧬
• Voima Ventures targets investments in biotech, energy, health, new materials, and quantum computing. ⚛️
• Mero highlights the challenges and excitement of commercializing scientific research into marketable products. 💡
• The interview explores the critical elements of successful entrepreneurial teams and how these contribute to the success of deep tech ventures. 🤝

Key Takeaways

• Deep tech startups in the Nordics and Baltics focus on scientific innovations with the potential to transform industries and society. 🌍
• Voima Ventures invests in early-stage deep tech companies, aiming to scale solutions for people, planet, and industry. 🚀
• The fund focuses on areas like biotech, energy, quantum computing, and other transformative technologies. ⚛️
• Inka Mero shares insights on the importance of commercialization and the role of venture capital in bringing scientific discoveries to market. 🧬
• Voima Ventures emphasizes collaboration with other investors and the development of a deep tech ecosystem in the Nordics. 🤝

Overview

In this episode of The Growth Pod, Inka Mero, co-founder and CEO of Voima Ventures, shares her journey into the world of venture capital with an emphasis on deep tech startups. Mero's path is not only framed by her experiences in technology and entrepreneurship but also by her vision of leveraging deep tech to tackle global challenges such as energy crises and healthcare accessibility.

Voima Ventures, under Mero's leadership, focuses on investing in early-stage companies that innovate across diverse domains such as biotech, food technology, energy, and quantum computing. These fields, rooted in scientific research, offer the potential for groundbreaking innovations that can drastically alter industries and improve lives.

Throughout the interview, Mero underscores the importance of strong entrepreneurial teams, strategic planning, and collaboration in the venture capital landscape. She passionately discusses how crucial it is to combine scientific prowess with business acumen to transform brilliant ideas into viable, market-ready products aimed at addressing some of the world's most pressing issues.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction The introduction chapter sets the stage for 'The Growth Pod,' which is presented by Janeiro, a prominent growth agency in the Nordic region. The podcast features interviews with marketing experts, business leaders, and entrepreneurs who share their stories and strategies for achieving profitable growth.
• 01:00 - 03:00: Co-founding Voyma Ventures This chapter delves into the journey of becoming the co-founder and CEO of Voyma Ventures, a venture fund focused on deep tech. It starts with an exploration of what deep tech is and how the speaker ended up in this field, especially as one of the pioneering venture capitalists in Finland with a focus solely on deep tech. The chapter also highlights the geographical focus of Voyma Ventures, which is primarily on the Nordics and Baltics.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Deep Tech Investments The chapter "Deep Tech Investments" discusses the growing trend of investing in science-based startups. It highlights that deep tech has become a popular and fashionable area within the startup and venture capital (VC) world as it holds potential solutions for significant challenges like the energy crisis and the AI boom. The text suggests that everyone is eager to engage in deep tech due to its promising advancements and innovations. Furthermore, the chapter aims to define what "deep tech" means in their context, establishing a specific framework or criteria for these types of technological investments.
• 05:00 - 07:00: Impact of Deep Tech Innovations The chapter explores the profound effects of deep tech innovations, which are deeply rooted in scientific research. It highlights how these innovations, though challenging to bring to market, can significantly transform the world when successful. The discussion is not limited to software or AI but extends to fields such as biotechnology, energy, and food, demonstrating the wide reach and disruptive potential of scientific advancements.
• 07:00 - 10:00: Nordic Deep Tech Ecosystem This chapter focuses on the Nordic Deep Tech Ecosystem, particularly the innovative intersections of hardware and software. It discusses advancements in health, new materials, quantum computing, and next-generation chip architectures. The essence of deep tech is explained as being beyond just digital innovations, integrating tangible product-related innovations with software solutions.
• 10:00 - 14:00: Building Voyma Ventures Fund The chapter discusses the process of building the Voyma Ventures Fund. The speaker elaborates on the challenges of bringing certain technologies to the market, especially those that are potentially revolutionary. There is a discussion about the disconnect observed between the purported mission of venture capitalists to back world-changing entrepreneurs and the reality of their portfolios, which often include products and services that do not contribute positively to societal change. The speaker expresses excitement about working with groundbreaking technologies.
• 14:00 - 18:00: Assessing Founders and Teams The chapter "Assessing Founders and Teams" emphasizes the importance of scaling innovative solutions to address significant societal issues. The focus is on solutions that cater to societal needs such as aging populations, chronic illnesses, and democratizing healthcare to ensure accessibility for all. Furthermore, it discusses sustainable practices for the planet by using new materials and disrupting traditional production methods to conserve resources.
• 18:00 - 21:00: Investment Strategy and Areas This chapter discusses an investment strategy focused on global problems and transformative industries. It emphasizes storing energy, advancing mobility, utilizing space technology for earth monitoring, and transforming industries to achieve planetary balance. The thesis is structured around these issues, which are seen as high-value opportunities for the next decade. The strategy is grounded in practical solutions rather than speculative science.
• 21:00 - 26:00: Scandinavian Competitive Advantage The chapter discusses the demographic challenges faced by Nordic countries, particularly Finland, highlighting an aging population, low birth rates, and minimal immigration. It emphasizes the importance of attracting talent to address these challenges.
• 26:00 - 33:00: Valuation and Due Diligence The chapter discusses the alignment of talent attraction with company growth and purpose, especially in deep tech companies. It is noted that there is a trend where individuals involved in research are increasingly participating in startups. The chapter also touches on various tools available to support this transition.
• 33:00 - 38:00: Role of VCs in Startups This chapter discusses the role of Venture Capitalists (VCs) in startups, focusing on the challenges and opportunities in commercializing innovative ideas. It mentions a specific fund launched in 2019, highlighting its significance as the first in the Nordics to invest in science-based spinouts. This fund aimed to overcome capital bottlenecks and support the transition of scientific knowledge into groundbreaking products and services.
• 38:00 - 44:00: Challenges and Learnings The chapter titled 'Challenges and Learnings' discusses the landscape of deep tech investments across different regions, focusing on companies with a scientific foundation. The text mentions the variation in technology readiness levels among early seed stage companies. It highlights the differences in deep tech investment shares within the venture asset class category, noting that in the US and China, these shares ranged from 35 to 40%, while in Europe, they were around 20 to 25%. This summary underscores the varying levels of investment readiness and the different scales of investment across these major regions.
• 44:00 - 52:00: Future of Deep Tech and Entrepreneurial Insights The chapter discusses the current momentum in the realm of deep technology and entrepreneurship, particularly in the Scandinavian, Nordics, and Finland regions. Despite previous lagging, these areas are now advancing rapidly with a focus on basic and applied research. They boast one of the best university systems globally, contributing to a high number of engineers per capita and a proliferation of unicorn startups. The chapter highlights the growing entrepreneurial talent within universities and the need to address massive global challenges.
• 52:00 - 57:00: Closing Remarks and Poem The chapter 'Closing Remarks and Poem' discusses the momentum around startups, particularly those nurtured within research institutions. The speaker notes a lack of mechanisms to take these technologies to market, unlike well-known software companies such as Spotify, Supercell, or gaming startups. With nearly 30 years in the tech industry, the speaker highlights their personal experience as both an investor and founder of over seven startups, in roles such as CEO and head of product.

#62: Inka Mero - backing deep tech startups that are changing the world Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] The Growth Pod is brought to you by Janeiro, a leading growth agency in the Nordics. We interview marketing experts, business leaders, and entrepreneurs to uncover the stories and strategies behind profitable growth. [Music] All right, thank you so much for coming on and uh welcome to the show. My
• 00:30 - 01:00 pleasure. Thanks for having me. So I' I'd love to start with just um kind of understanding how you came to be co-founder and CEO of Voyma Ventures, which is a a kind of deep tech focused uh venture fund. So, if you could explain what is deep tech and how did you end up doing doing deep tech as as the the first or maybe the only VC focused in Finland focused only on deep tech or Yeah. And we already know um we're focusing in Nordics and Baltics.
• 01:00 - 01:30 So, we're one of the very rare ones that invests purely to science-based startups. M so deep tech is a very generative general uh fashionable world now in in the world of startups and and VCs due to the fact that everyone has suddenly figured out that okay if we want to solve let's say energy crisis or there's this major AI boom everyone wants to do deep tech and and and this cool stuff but we've defined uh deep tech as follows so we're basically
• 01:30 - 02:00 talking about innovations that have roots in scientific research and typically this science Scientific research has uh paved the way for a new technological innovation which is typically very difficult to commercialize but when you succeed in that one you also end up typically changing the world in a drastic drastic way. So they can be particularly very disruptive and this is not only in the area of software or or AI. We're talking about biotech, energy, food, um anything
• 02:00 - 02:30 relating to our health as well as of course let's say new materials, quantum based computing, next generation process chip architectures and so forth. So deep tech the way I like to explain it to my mother is that it's not only uh uh bits and bites it's also like real stuff. So typically there's a hardware or product related innovation combined with software which makes it quite quite
• 02:30 - 03:00 difficult to take to the market. That must be very interesting because one of the things I I found like there was a disconnect between how VCs I mean like American VCs used to talk about what they're doing like founding backing entrepreneurs who are changing the world and then you look at the portfolio and it's just like Martekch and a lot of s and a lot of like apps and things that in my view are not changing the world at least not for the better but so it must be very exciting to work with I mean some of the technologies you mentioned are like potentially revolutionary right
• 03:00 - 03:30 um for society. Absolutely and and our mission is really to scale solutions for the people, planet and industry which means that these innovations tend to solve major uh problems we have with the aging society or chronical illnesses or even democraticizing the the health care system. It's not fully accessible for everyone today or um for the planet meaning that we sustain resources with new materials or we completely disrupt the traditional means of producing or
• 03:30 - 04:00 storing energy or we provide a new ways of of mobility or uh sort of a use space tech in order to predict what's actually happening on earth. uh or industries which obviously have to transform to planetary imbalance. So we've built our thesis around these major global problems um and we believe that this can be the highest value generating opportunities during the next 10 years. So it's nothing like you know hi-fi uh science
• 04:00 - 04:30 fiction that we're focusing into companies that would be reality in 50 years. But at the same time this purposefulness is super important. We're living in in the Nordic countries which has probably the most difficult and Finland particular the most difficult demographic structure in the whole Europe. So really highly aging population uh and very little uh birth in the society and very little immigrant flow as we know particularly in Finland. So we need to also attract the best
• 04:30 - 05:00 talent to these companies and typically nowadays the best talent works in a companies that want to grow but also are purposeful. So most of these deep tech companies tick the boxes in in in both senses. Okay. So there's a lot of then talent wanting to work for these types of companies. Um it's maybe gotten more common and popular for like people who are involved in research to now also become involved with startups and there's lots of tools and we help you
• 05:00 - 05:30 people working to help facilitate that kind of transition. is is the main like bottleneck capital or what's the what's the kind of bottleneck do you see for taking like all this knowledge and and commercializing into like really revolutionary products and services? Well, you asked about this question about founding boy moment. So, we launched the fund in 2019 and that was our first fund that we call that fund number two. It was 45 million with a 50 million topup fund and we were really the first ever fund in the Nordics to invest into science spinouts from
• 05:30 - 06:00 universities also other deep tech companies with scientific foundation from preed seed to early A rounds. of these early uh seed stage companies. Um but the variation tends to be the technology readiness level what these companies have and at the point of time when I looked at the macros um already in US and China the share of deep tech investments within the venture asset class category was between 35 to 40%. In Europe it was around 20 25%. So Europe
• 06:00 - 06:30 has been lagging behind here. That's why there's a big momentum around it now. But in the Scandinavian, Nordics and Finland, it was roughly 15%. And at the same time, we have one of the best university systems in the world. We do a lot of basic and applied research. We have the highest per capita number of engineers, really high number of unicorn startups, a lot of growth momentum, entrepreneurial talent growing in the universities and all of that. So you look at the mega trends that okay massive amount of problems to be solved
• 06:30 - 07:00 big momentum around startups and a lot of these technologies nurturing in the in the research institutions there was just wasn't nobody sort of a taking them out in the same mechanism these uh software uh companies like vaults and and gaming startups like supercell have been grown or Spotify of the world and for me I have close to 30 years in tech uh through through my career I've been an investor and a founder you know more than seven startups and I've been a CEO and a head of product and head of
• 07:00 - 07:30 marketing and sales and even during my investment angel investment journey before Vulma Ventures uh I invested more or less to anything that sort of grows and is interesting but at the end of the day it's been a lot of unnecessary crap if you think about it uh we have only certain amount of time to preserve the planet we need to make this world meaningful for our children as well So finally I got to do something really meaningful and the story goes like this.
• 07:30 - 08:00 Um I got a phone call from BTT the National Technology Research Center of Finland. They had been spinning out deep tech companies already for the last 15 years but they were just very passive owner. They spun the companies out invested a bit if there was a lead investor and they were sort of a left alone. So some of the companies did well, some of them didn't. And they felt that okay, a new deep tech VC fund is needed in Finland major mainly to fund their own spin-offs. And I got a call
• 08:00 - 08:30 and and request could I help them to set this fund up and I said like hell no. Um I had been trying to build my own venture fund earlier. Anyone who is in this industry knows that it's extremely difficult journey to build a new venture capital fund. M um in investors in these funds are uh pension funds, institutional investors, family offices, uh national players like TESI and others in in each similar country. And they tend to be very conservative. They look at a team and they consider that would I
• 08:30 - 09:00 invest to their fund the fund lifetime is 10 years uh or additional years on top of it. Has this team really done it before? and I've been part of these journeys before and most often the answer is no because you don't have the history of venture reinvestments and you sort of can't have it uh before you have a fund. So it's a bit of a chicken and an egg. At the same time this multiundred trillion dollar industry only 2% of capital is managed by women founded funds or women women led funds.
• 09:00 - 09:30 So there is a unconscious bias in the industry as well. I've never let that bother myself but I my first reaction was like okay to whom would I sell this you know which investor would really be willing to take the leap but then I look at the macro numbers and I saw that really this unhidden potential and also we built a completely new strategy and all of that we took into account many different aspects and the main important thing was to say that okay this is not a VT tide fund we're instead of we're
• 09:30 - 10:00 building a functioning deep tech ecosystem to the Nordics all the other co-investors are willing to join along. Everyone can invest to their spin-offs like into any other university spin-offs and so forth and and you spoke about this uh great entrepreneurial team. So this was from the beginning part of the thesis. We said that yes we have our view on the technologies few of the mega trends view where we want to go into is it for example hydrogen not necessarily the full stack but maybe some value
• 10:00 - 10:30 adding components but there always has to be a great entrepreneur and if the science team coming to us wanting to found a company or building their company doesn't have that great entrepreneur will bring that to the company because what these companies tend to lack is a commercialization capability and that growth mindset, that quick iteration, customer centricity, value adding uh sales, building this sort of a bigger solution for customers instead of just tiny innovation where
• 10:30 - 11:00 they think like okay this one tiny bit or innovation is enough and you don't do that if you want to grow a half a billion or billion worth company. No. Um so if the entrepreneur team and the the founder is kind of key um do you typically find that you're able to take people with a really deep technical science background and turn them into these entrepreneurs or do you have to have combination where you combine like someone with the commercial expertise and mindset with a science back team and
• 11:00 - 11:30 and just in general you know given that you've been involved with this a number of years has there been any big shifts in what you look for when you consider You evaluate lots of companies, lots of different teams. What do you look for? How much of it is like pattern recognition, gut feel versus like objective anal or like qual quantitative analysis? I think it's a bit of both. So I would say like best teams science backgrounded women or men um with
• 11:30 - 12:00 researcher background and strong scientific knowledge. Let it be for example biotech building some sort of a next generation precision therapy platform whether that's for example on stem cells or something they can grow to become great entrepreneurs. So many of these uh individuals and teams they're so smart that if they expose themselves to this rapid development of a startup and they take the investor feedback and they have good advisors and and this growth mentality they grow to become
• 12:00 - 12:30 great entrepreneurs. Then at the same time I'm a a not an a scientist uh myself or I'm not even an engineer. I I've studied economics in in in university way back. Um but I've been always very curious on technology. So super interested how it works, what can it possibly do, uh what is the competition, what is what is it based on. So I always say like it's not rocket science. Even I can be a a chairperson of a a space company. So I'm saying like
• 12:30 - 13:00 it comes with both ingredients. So you need to have commercially mindseted people who are very interested on customer and market opportunities and are capable of translating those needs and requirements to to the tech development and then you need to have a tech team who is very customer oriented. So those tend to be the ingredients. The reason why investors talk a lot about serial entrepreneurs is that there's just very few of these outlier individuals who really succeed with
• 13:00 - 13:30 their first company. Typically, you do a lot of mistakes. It's tough to hire a good person. It's even tougher to fire a bad person. It's tough to raise capital, but it's even tougher to grow the company, to get revenues, all of this. So, um having a one serial entrepreneur in the team always is a plus. So that's definitely learning what we've uh gained throughout the years. So we're currently uh bu building our fund number three. So we we're roughly at 110 million and and
• 13:30 - 14:00 we closed that fund and we're actively investing from there. And you asked about our learnings and thesis. So we have three areas we invest into. Green transformation for future planet balance. Uh exponential health solutions we call that for polarized societies. We do everything but drug development. So precision therapies, medical tech, uh even health tech but with scientific foundation and and and scalable technology digital components. And third category what what we call as game
• 14:00 - 14:30 changers and it's a tough category because it's difficult to say what the game changer is broad. Yeah. Typically we know afterwards what was a game changer. Maybe Tesla was a gamecher because it changed the whole industry to electric vehicles. Or maybe even Oatley was a gamecher of its time because it brought this vegan based sort of a oat based milk to the markets and consumer was able to create consumer pull and push many other players and the whole industry to new direction. But uh we we look at in the game changanger category
• 14:30 - 15:00 we talk about semiconductors, optics, photonics, quantum technologies, AI platforms uh platform technologies that can provide frog leaves to whole industries even space tech. Is there any you mentioned a lot of different areas is there any one of them where we in the Nordics or or Baltic countries have a kind of unfair or natural competitive advantage? I'm thinking like you mentioned US and China have been investing not just more in percentage
• 15:00 - 15:30 but in absolute like dollars and euros like way more than us and they have probably have some advantages. So is there any kind of place specific area or industry where where it would make sense for companies here to focus on when it comes to deep tech? Yeah, you need to focus because we're a small and nimble opportunity a market in the Nordics and Baltics. Yes, we're roughly the size of Bay Area. M the amount of venture capital investments last year was in this domain uh 6.4 billion uh in the peak year in 2019 was
• 15:30 - 16:00 roughly 19 billions. So what's scarcity? Capital is scarcity absolutely particularly capital for this early stage grow uh frogly growing where you don't yet have full proof of the business like in software company you might say that okay there's a proof of business you know the product is working customers like it the team knows that if they put 5 to a marketing they always get like 50 back over time from the customer so that's called you know
• 16:00 - 16:30 repeatable business model and and you know that okay if we invest more we can actually grow this business In tip deep tech it's rarely like that. You've developed a quantum processor chip and you've proven that you can take it from 1 cubit to 6 cubits to 10 to 100 cubits but still the whole ecosystem is there yet to be uh grown. So this growth capital is definitely needed. Um so coming back to um the strengths of the ecosystem it's typically the area where the research is the leading of its kind
• 16:30 - 17:00 in the world. This tends to be in the areas where we already have big companies. So material sciences that's the heritage of our pulp and paper industry. Um of course chemical and process industry uh they tend to be process industry innovations but there are a lot of companies working with like for example food innovations or biorefinery or sort of a next generation products which are biiobased. Um other area is optics and photonics highest per
• 17:00 - 17:30 capita amount of patent in the world in the area of photonics in Finland in the world there a lot of so there's all these companies from AR VR varios and and other sort of a and that's of course a big in heritage of Nokia ecosystem micro electronics so that all goes to MEMS u uh semiconductors all of that so that's a big opportunity And then on this region I would say of course nor
• 17:30 - 18:00 Norway is shining with energy related innovations and there's lot lot of subsidies for that and those tend to be very capital heavy and then Denmark with pharma because Novo is creating a massive halo. Estonia uh or Baltic countries very strong with AI and scaling uh digital innovations and Sweden a bit of everything uh very big market as well. So each of these countries have a has have a bit of a different strength
• 18:00 - 18:30 strong survey strongholds but at the same time all of them need more capital. They need more access to global markets. They all um have certain challenges and and they're really understanding which ones to choose and which ones to go with. It's uh I would sort of say like one uh rule is that you go with the best with their sort of a technological innovation combined with this commercial talent. That's a great kind of overview
• 18:30 - 19:00 of the different strengths that we have in the different markets and it um certainly to me as a as a lay person is not something I really consider. I mean sometimes you read about ISAI or like IQ and all these companies and you're like whoa I wonder where did that come from? um somewhere like in you you you understand that but you don't necessarily understand like why it is that all of a sudden Finnish company is like worldleading in this specific uh field but so you then you meet a lot of different different companies probably a
• 19:00 - 19:30 lot of them at quite early stages valuations is is always I I'm guessing a really tricky thing when it comes to startups and when you have a deep tech company that's like you know the product I mean the ecosystem is not there the market isn't there the product may be years and years and years ahead or like away. So, how does it and so how do you approach valuation and how do you even figure out if if it's just hot air, if it's just sci-fi that they're like, you know, you probably hear a lot of very kind of high-flying, you know,
• 19:30 - 20:00 technologies that potentially could be really revolutionary, but how do you go about doing the due diligence to figure out if this if this is something real? Because I'm thinking like it's it's on the cutting edge. like there's, you know, who who's going to be able to validate whether or not this team is is doing something real or because they're the only ones in the world who are doing it. So, how do you approach those two like due diligence and valuation when it comes to deep tech startups? Let's start with valuations. Uh it's quite simple math at the end of the day. Uh we have roughly 110 million fund. We're going to
• 20:00 - 20:30 do around 25 investments from the fund uh to 25 companies. initial ticket is around€ 1.5 to3 million euros. Then of course typically this is not the only capital that the companies tend to take. At the same time they might have other investors. We often have a other deep tech funds investing together with us. They might be business Finland supporting in R&D or a local governmental agency in Sweden or or Denmark. And with the total funding the
• 20:30 - 21:00 company tends to have a runway of something like two years. And with these two years you need to reach certain milestones where we as an investors believe that the next funding round will be raised. There will be a valuation which should be like two to 3x from the start valuation. And this math sort of goes on and goes on from you know preede to seed to early A to A B C and at some point of time there's an exit. And we of course look at the market opportunity.
• 21:00 - 21:30 We look at the value ad that the company can bring the presumed business model and we start calculating let's say a little bit back like okay let's assume that this company would be worth a billion what would it require what would be the hard commercial metrics for it what kind of revenue what kind of customers what kind of market share what kind of offering what has to happen and you start to look like future back this valuation this is the way we look at it and then we think like firstly is this is it reachable with what tiny exceed what they have.
• 21:30 - 22:00 What is the ambition level of the founders? And that's one way to look at valuation. Is it too much or too little? And then of course the other way is this benchmark. Uh you have a lot of uh databases you can follow on you know the valuation developments. You talk to your peers and we of course see a lot of the valuations. So typically in the preed seed stage the valuations tend to be somewhere like between five to 20 million pre- money and pre- money is the valuation before the capital injection. So then you have the capital and all of
• 22:00 - 22:30 that and then it tends to sort of a grow from there and there you need to be very clear with the value creation because it's very different value creation journey. You mentioned ISAI they were eight years before revenue then they were suddenly 200 million in revenue. So journey of a deep tech company is very different to software company. Um on the due diligence um we do that top down and bottom up. So let's take example of um healthcare
• 22:30 - 23:00 investment what we just recently did. So uh I'm turning to 50. So I've been going through this personal journey of uh perry menopause and and menopausal sort of a uh journey during the last five years. And uh of course as a science geek and a bit of a life hacker you sort of see that there's nothing there for women in the market. So we started to work on our own investment thesis that we look at the market. We looked at the scientific innovations. We looked at the
• 23:00 - 23:30 startups out there. We started to look like what could really interest us. What could we be in the bigger scale looking for? What could really be a great unicorn opportunity? And then at the same time we started to bottom up look for companies and we found one. Uh we haven't announced it yet but they have a home test for estrogen, progesterone and FSH. And on the science part, we did a validation with experts. One of our team member is a molecular biologist. I've
• 23:30 - 24:00 developed lateral flow tests in my background. We interviewed the scientist. We looked at what kind of a scientific uh collaboration they have ongoing. And okay, it's a pretty good tick on the box if you're working with the Stanfords and Harvards and others of the world. So the scientific validation typically on the due diligence side comes from the team's ability to communicate to us what have they done? How was the research done who are the top professors involved? That that's the way to do that. Then if you're dealing with something really hard like uh CPU
• 24:00 - 24:30 architecture or something like that so really hardware ccentric or semiconductor space you need to find a specialist who helps you. But typically we agree on the high level investment terms first and then we go on with the more deeper study. We understand these domains quite a lot and hey look we have now over 40 portfolio companies in these these three funds. So we always know someone who knows the space it helps that that's really really interesting. So, so basically going back to kind what
• 24:30 - 25:00 you mentioned about valuation, you're able to reverse engineer and map out uh the entire journey from like to to very very high valuations. Um I'm guessing this is like knowledge. Sorry. So you sort of need to do that cuz typically you allocate from VC fund you allocate around 20 to 30% to initial investments. So all of that capital left like in our fund roughly like 85 million is left for followons. So you need to plan this value creation journey and how
• 25:00 - 25:30 where you going to bet and typically not all the companies get all the funding. It's like the best companies tend to get the highest amount of capital. Yeah. Which makes sense given the power law distribution of of these VC firms. So um given that you're doing this and I'm guessing if you do you get involved like really early like preede or Yeah, we do. So roughly I would say like um 10 to 15 investments from our current fund will be on this preed seed stage. We call
• 25:30 - 26:00 that sort of a initial phase. So we would invest roughly million to 1.5 and then the remaining 10ish are between 3 to 5 million as initial tickets. Yeah. So I'm guessing like the teams that you're meeting then at the early stages, they may be like really deep into tech, but they don't necessarily understand the market and the the value creation, all that. So I'm guessing you're kind of as you're doing the due diligence and valuation yourselves, you're also helping them. So So what kind of role
• 26:00 - 26:30 are you as a VC playing with these these startups? Are you actively helping them with recruitment, with strategy? Do you have board seats in each portfolio company or like what does that look like or does it depend from case to case? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That was quick. So, uh you come to meet with us obviously the we last year we saw more than thousand cases uh fitting our investment thesis. So three three core domains our geographic region and as
• 26:30 - 27:00 well as the stage and you know we can't meet all of them face to face but that's what we accumulate to our database but you know you would come to meet us uh the best way would be to come through a warm introduction so maybe a business angel who knows me very well calls me and say like look Inca you definitely need to meet this team they're super good in this one we would meet you and most likely you would have a really good idea or or great evidence with your lab-based you know pilot or something like that but there would be also something wrong totally wrong in the
• 27:00 - 27:30 plan. So this is what the job where it really comes interesting. So it's a way to learn to know the team that you might potentially invest into and you might have to stick with them for the next 7 to 10 years. So you definitely want to learn learn uh the team but you would start improving. So you would take one topic at a time you know looking at the tech uh the added value the uniqueness the competition the tech road map what is needed who is needed all of that or
• 27:30 - 28:00 like the market the sub segments of the customer markets the initial pilots the people that they're already talking to and all of that we're currently investing into one alter university startup and they have a very unique uh um innovation in the area of optics and photonics and um we have for example spoken with many of their customers already who are very interested on their solution and supported the team a lot with their go to market strategy for
• 28:00 - 28:30 example not necessarily going to I'll just give an example to automotive route because automotive market is so long it takes a long time you might want to go for example defense currently because dual use tech has a high momentum and the customers pay high premium and all of that it's very slow moving so you might even even need a third customer segment. So this is the sort of a workshoping we do. At the same time we map out that okay is this really a good founder team. Initially when they came to us around a year ago we sort of like
• 28:30 - 29:00 the tech but we didn't we felt that the team was missing a serial entrepreneur really solid CEO. Now they have it. So also always the best teams sort of come back and they say like okay we heard you this is what we have now and that's a great way to test the test the team as well. And then of course you go through the commercial plan like okay this is how much you have funding where it's going to take you where are you going to be how are you really going to be there what are the things that you're going to do and all of that. So it's a learning
• 29:00 - 29:30 learning journey for for both parties and the biggest added value of course is that we bring a lot of credibility. Yes. So it typically helps the teams to raise more money from really good solid investors. uh we introduce them to board members to potential team members to potential customers and we sort of I try to this network obviously effect is something that you try to bring to the teams I'm guessing now given your kind of track record and and position you probably have the best network in doing deep tech in this region so like you're the obvious go-to investor that some
• 29:30 - 30:00 kind of deep tech startup would be looking for. Absolutely. We want to be the go-to partner when a deep tech founder is thinking of raising the seed the first round where they bring in a VC. We want to be that. We might not always be the one who comes but we might come on the next round. And the big added value of course is the size of the fund. We're very well positioned. A lot of uh players out there. They might do a little bit of deep tech. And sometimes people ask us like you know what's your
• 30:00 - 30:30 difference to this and this fund? and I say like look we don't do dog food so we so we okay that's a bit nasty way but we we like to work with everyone um and then we often work very closely with some very close friends like you know we have many investments with lifeline but we also have a many investments with Navara the Wenberg family in in in um in Sweden but many others as well uh so you of course establish these networks Um
• 30:30 - 31:00 and you need to build them constantly. Yeah. So it's big job of mine nowadays after I've done this uh never ending fundraising for the fund itself. I' I got some air for a couple of months. I'm like and then I start again and then I need to go to the series A and B investors and and meet them and talk about our portfolio and what do we do and how do we create value because these are the global investors who then are looking into Scandinavia and want to find the best companies. So you
• 31:00 - 31:30 mentioned that that we have a lack of a a growth fund. So after you know a company maybe has been commercialized like they've gone to market product market fit exists you need a fund that comes in and gives them lots more I'm guessing yeah like 10 million the investment ticket. So why couldn't venture started like a growth fund? I mean you see that I'm guessing in the US quite a lot earlier funds start doing these growth funds to like you said they have the best companies in the portfolio. Why not double down? Couldn't uh yeah absolutely we could and and
• 31:30 - 32:00 probably 400 million. Yeah, exactly. So, had we started VMA ventures like 2008 when I started my seed investment company, I think we would be already with the growth fund. But it's also like you need to stick to your knittings. You need to show that you can deliver what you promise to your LPS. These are very long-lasting uh uh relationships that you bring and build. But nothing hinders us within couple of years to do that. I think we missed the one unicorn, you know, should we have that on the track record? Let's see. Should it come? We
• 32:00 - 32:30 would be very well positioned to raise a growth fund. Of course, it takes a bit of different team talent as well. So, you need to build a bit of this platform that you can run on multiple funds, but also as appealing could be to raise a specialist fund like a quantum fund or or something else. So, you really need to time that right. And I think our timing for our third fund was excellent. Uh nobody else had a track record from deep tech investing like us. And then we
• 32:30 - 33:00 had this Nordic Baltic momentum around it. We've done dual use for from the day one. So there's like all of these small ingredients. And then most important thing what our LPS told us when they joined along and with this new fund you know we have uh KRR and and Tessi and Swedish some invest and European investment fund but also big institutional players like Nord Life and Elo major Finnish family offices and all of that they all said that you've been very consistent on delivering what you
• 33:00 - 33:30 say that you will deliver and at the and it's not only about storytelling you need to have a financial performance and our sort of numbers are starting to be really promising. So, yeah, I'm guessing that's like one of the key things I want is that consistency and clarity because then you as soon as there's like a bit of clarity, investors get scared. Um, but I think I mean I'm super impressed by what you've accomplished in a short period of time. So, I'm no doubt what you said. It's just give it a few more years and then you'll go. So, this is a long journey. So, this new fund follow
• 33:30 - 34:00 this new fund when it's at the end of its lifetime, I will be like 61. I remember talking about these investment terms you sort of these uh fund legal terms are pretty tough when for the people like ourselves who put our their ass on the line and I remember these keman clause condition and there was at some point of time there was a requirement that it should be 10 years and only for me and I was like hey look I'll be like 60 are you sure you want to and then eventually it went different way but it's so funny you think like
• 34:00 - 34:30 okay should I really know what I'm doing in 10 years because I've never known but uh I I think it's a journey. You need to believe that, you know, there's a vision and you stick to the vision. Yeah. That's one thing that people maybe don't realize about, you know, of course when you started a company yourself, there's a big commitment, but but with a fund, there's really a long time horizon that you're kind of signing up for. Yeah. And it uh you know, that's that's a really long way to go and it takes a long time to build this team that really works. So
• 34:30 - 35:00 when we started we were just uh two partners, myself and our former CFO. Um and uh nowadays we're 13. And then of course you need to show for your LPS that this team that I'm building, we're building can deliver. We can do great investments. They grow in value. They deliver results. The fund one is performing. The one fund two is growing in value. We're starting to return the capital and the fund three has the best most highest potential deep tech company investments. So you have to
• 35:00 - 35:30 stay quite focused and you need to work with people who share the same passion but then at the same time the whole structure of your operation has to be such that the younger team feels that they can grow in that journey that it's not the classical VC model where you where you have this partner pyramid and nobody's getting through. I've always hated that myself so I didn't want to build that. M yeah I don't think people realize how difficult capital allocation is like it's not a matter when I've seen various statistics of like the performance of different PE and VC funds
• 35:30 - 36:00 and uh a lot of them don't perform that well compared to like the the market like it's not a it's not easy just to gather a lot of money and then just invest it like it's a very difficult Yeah thing to do well exactly and different funds have different strategies and of course like when you're established player when you've done couple of unicorns or one or two like If you would be in atomico or like not zone or some obviously you have a or eqt you your referral network of that
• 36:00 - 36:30 inbound deal flow is so strong and that's something that you need to build on so you know that you you get more quality cases and you can pick and choose and you can you don't have to compete because your added value is so high. Um but then in the early stages is it this quantum team or this quantum team very tough thing to say and that's where it comes to this gut feeling. M I think like 30 years of work life experience you know I can stare person to the eye and I can turn away I think my master skill here is is to
• 36:30 - 37:00 understanding what drives people what's their motivation and also I can see the dark side in all of the cases and that's where my co-founders and and people I work with always let's say hate me because I'm always like this is a great company but and then I'm like there's a problem with this one of the founders and and then people are like h she's always so negative and then afterwards they're like you were totally right. I'm like yeah I have this six sense that I hate but it's been really helpful when you learn to trust it because you can also see a lot of potential and and you
• 37:00 - 37:30 can discover a lot of hidden hidden potential and and nurturing that potential is super important as well. How much of of the potential or how much of success or failure comes down to the founding team and their interpersonal relationships or problems or potential versus like the technology or versus the market like how much of it is just down to the team. M I would say like probably 70% is the
• 37:30 - 38:00 timing, 30% is the theme. Okay. So if the timing is right then of course you tend to get this positive spiral. There's always like these moments that you feel that the company's going to bankrupt and and and the founders are going to kill each other. That will come evidently. But if the timing is right, you will have this positive frog leaves that you get a big customer or you succeed for example delivering the technology. But also that the market momentum around that domain grows like
• 38:00 - 38:30 everyone understands now that there's huge momentum around AI. Nobrainer. But who had that vision before the momentum was there? So you need to believe as an investor that you sort of foresee these opportunities and you roll the dice. But then on these founders, I think it boils down to diversity. If they're all from the same research group with the same
• 38:30 - 39:00 gender, with the same skin color, it's very unlikely that they will succeed. But if it's a founder team who has multi-disiplinary scientical background and a commercial talent, strong values and a really high ambition level, they tend to figure it out. Um this ambition level is tricky. You ask a founder that you know what's your ambition? They always say like yeah, I want to grow this brilliant value company. And then the first acquisition offer comes along and they're like let's so I can pay my
• 39:00 - 39:30 mortgage. So that's why also second time entrepreneurs are better. hopefully they've made a bit of money so they have the patience and they want to show that they can really grow a big company. Um, but also some first- time founders are really ambitious. So, you just have to find these people who who are willing who really want to make a change. It's really the money that the best founders are looking after. They're typically looking to fix some sort of a problem that really nags them. It's like the
• 39:30 - 40:00 intellectual challenges the or part of the Yeah. And also part of personality often with the best founders that they're never sort of satisfied. There's like they fix something and they're like okay but the next thing has to be fixed and they they have this like builtin drive to show the world that this thing what they're building can can solve a major problem while not being so stubborn that they never pivot. Best founders of course pivot along the way. Even deep tech companies they pivot. Yes. uh so so these people changing
• 40:00 - 40:30 their direction or offering or market focus or something like that is is really critical for deep tech companies as well. Is there anything you find that is kind of underrated or overrated when it comes to like founder or founding team character characteristics or skill sets when you think about how you know what's talked about in like a kind of like the startup community? anything you kind of disagree with that is Yeah, massively this uh Silicon Valley classic
• 40:30 - 41:00 um uh school book example of a founder never exists in Norix and and what we have here is as good as well. So I'm saying like we should build our own serial entrepreneur uh culture and I think for example Finnish startup community is doing a great job there you know getting the founders together getting the CTOs together CMOs together and sharing this peer example how to build really ambitious companies u but same in the
• 41:00 - 41:30 Nordic scale so my experience that the best founders are never the easiest ones easiest in what way? Yeah. Sort of a, you know, it's not that smooth. Yes. Yeah. It's tough. Yeah. Yeah. It's tough choices. But the best founders are open. They share. Uh they listen, but they also draw their own conclusions. They come back to you by saying like, "Hey, we're having a problem with this and this topic. This is how we're planning to solve it. What's your take on it?" So, they very quickly they don't wait
• 41:30 - 42:00 for a month for for a good board meeting. So they're they're constantly on it. So clock speed definitely. And then this what I like about Silicon Valley entrepreneurship is it's of course very opportunity driven. So people are very positive and they see the growth opportunities whereas the Nordic might be a bit more skeptical and and pessimistic and all of that. You need that optimism as as as well. But many of the dete companies they work with specific industries whether that's
• 42:00 - 42:30 energy or automotive or like pharma. You also need to understand that industry. You can of course sometimes change the whole industry, but sometimes you need to play with the ecosystem. So understanding that is really critical as well. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, when you're working with those types of people, they um there's a reason why it takes a level of brilliance and it takes a level of self-confidence to go out and like approach take on this big problem with a novel solution to believe that
• 42:30 - 43:00 you can do that. I mean, it takes a certain person to do that. So they're not going to necessarily I'm guessing always be the most agreeable um people to work with and they're going to be probably quite independent um first principles thinkers and all that. So probably makes for some you probably have a quite interesting interesting job. I mean not just from the tech side but just dealing with people who are like I at least find it like when people are are are very strong in their beliefs and good at articulating them you get like
• 43:00 - 43:30 these you know debates and discussions it's very interesting. Best part in my work is to work with the CEOs. I've been a CEO myself. I know what a lonely job it is. You need to have this trust relationship with your investors and best CEOs can can really exploit that. M m. But this extrovert part is interesting cuz it might be that you're good on stage and you're good in telling a story but you're not at all good in building a company. Yes. So
• 43:30 - 44:00 actually I sort of like this introvert CEOs as well. They tend to be a bit better listener listeners and we need to remember that it's actually introverts who have eventually changed the world not the extroverts. Yeah. There's just, you know, so many of us who blah blah blah. But then eventually you need to have a bit of both probably and and best introverts can sort of learn to become good social uh extroverts I guess is the right word but just saying that of course you need
• 44:00 - 44:30 to be inspiring and good in storytelling and uh but also there's so many other things as well in leadership in my opinion for sure and I think people maybe underestimate how what a big factor credibility track record and just that kind of like belief plays a role in in storytelling and charisma like even if you're not the most you know rhetorically like the best the best but I mean there's tons of examples of these entrepreneur CEO leaders um who have
• 44:30 - 45:00 been extraordinarily effective at attracting talent attracting capital even just by being like they have that focus they have that like determination and that belief and it just it it's very kind of magnetic But I I guess it all boils down to values. What do you have as a as a you know as a founder? What kind of company you're building? Yeah. And typically in the beginning when you do the things right that doing right carries you through also the hurdles. But if you
• 45:00 - 45:30 start fixing the values only at the point of time when the problems will arrive, it's it's a bit too late. Yes. Um, we're almost we kind of coming up on on our um running out running out on time here. So, I I want to ask you a couple of kind of quick fire questions and then we have a surprise there at D. Okay. Yeah, you're ready. Um, okay. So, number one, what's been the most rewarding and most challenging moment for you so far at uh at your kind of
• 45:30 - 46:00 venture VMA ventures or you can pick either one of those. Yeah, I think my rewarding most rewarding uh uh moment has been when I and is when I'm working with my team. I'm so proud of the whole team that you know where they've grown into and now instead of you know being a sort of a venture fund with a tiny team and and all of that where we've grown into whole Scandinavia and and we all drive our particular field. So I'm really proud of
• 46:00 - 46:30 what we've accomplished. So this is, you know, my proud moment isn't an exit or like, you know, this is how much money we have, but it's really that we have this group of people within our ventures team who really wants to uh be on this journey and they're super committed and and uh we have a fantastic trust in the team. So that's my proud moment. That's a great answer. Yeah. And then my most challenging struggle I think it relates to one of
• 46:30 - 47:00 our portfolio companies which has been like you know this huge um promise from the start and I just can't disclose it here but it's been a sort of something that we've seen you know had couple of major exits on the way and we I spent a lot of time work on on that company And um still this hard times of war and inflation and
• 47:00 - 47:30 difficulties of raising capital and delays in various industries and all of that you know have taken their toll and and you know it's not I just see the hardship of the founder. Yeah. And and uh entrepreneurship is really hard. Yeah. and and uh I've been thinking about this entrepreneur a lot uh during the couple of couple of weeks and I've been there myself uh before founding even my seed investments and everything. So I've
• 47:30 - 48:00 done, you know, one backrupy myself and it's it's really tough. This company is not doing bankruptcy, but there's been a massive toll on the founder and that's of course something that I wouldn't want to see to happen. Yeah, that's very very understandable. Um, do you have any favorite kind of contrarian beliefs about business or startups or investing? like things you believe that most of your peers would kind of disagree with. Ah would disagree with. Yeah, I don't
• 48:00 - 48:30 know whether they would disagree with but uh um I I'll give you my my my two cents. Um first one is that you work with people who have really high ambition level but that's not enough. They have to have right values. If they don't have the right values, it will go to at the end of the day. You know, they'll do something wrong. They'll choose wrong on the way and wrong person to work to run the sales or
• 48:30 - 49:00 they take money from the wrong investors or they uh uh make a compromise on the value generation for the company. Wrong values is a red flag. And then of course like having right values of course like with employ as an employee for for employees and all of that is important. Other thing is that u you know I I I have you know the luxury that I've you know worked for such a long time I don't have to anymore
• 49:00 - 49:30 work with So there are a lot of jerks in this business as well like in any business. So um if you know the only thing what you have in this business is your reputation. Sometimes you have to make compromises for for the sake of that you sort of a uh not to retain you never compromise on integrity but you might have to compromise on other things even though it would feel feel tough but
• 49:30 - 50:00 reputation is all you have and that always applies to you as an entrepreneur or a founder or investor or whomever partner and sometimes maybe younger people forget that that you know we've been here for a long time and we're going to be here still for a very long time. So, it's it's worthy to take a note. I don't Did I answer the question? Yes, it was perfect. Um values and and reputation, I think those are really good. And I think when you're younger especially, you don't realize how small
• 50:00 - 50:30 the c circles are. Like if whatever industry, you know, if it's marketing or like deep tech or or whatever area of industrial manufacturing, like very small circles. So, the people that you come across, you're probably going to meet them again and again and they're going to talk. And now with LinkedIn is like even more connected and so reputation like travels really quickly. And then my third uh is something what I actually learned from Haramaki. Uh actually we're going to talk about him a bit later. That's part of the surprise. But he always said that if nothing else
• 50:30 - 51:00 works, how about brutal honesty? And that's like a very Finnish thing, have you? And and uh my caveat from that is that you can use brutal honesty but in a very friendly way. Yes. So if you're not going to invest, if you think there is a problem, if the CEO has to be changed, if if if there are things that have to be fixed, how about delivering the news very directly, openly, honestly, but also in a humble way, in a way that you
• 51:00 - 51:30 would like to hear them from someone else. Yeah, that's like kind and honest feedback is a is a gift. It's a great gift and faster than later. So I think the Finnish and and Nordic way sometimes a bit like not saying the things and that's where I like Americans. Americans actually they say things very straightforward and that's good. Yeah. Um given that you're involved with deep tech and you're seeing companies from like you know very preede until you know
• 51:30 - 52:00 series A and B and you know uh getting ready to kind of bring bring products to market. Is there any kind of technology that you're super excited about? may be something that will come, you know, maybe be launched in the next couple of years and really going to have a concrete measurable impact on on kind of day-to-day because I'm thinking like a, you know, service like ISI and a lot of these things like they're they're happening in the background. We don't really understand what it's doing and how it's, you know, but is there something that is going to be like wow
• 52:00 - 52:30 are we going to get some what basically what I'm asking is like is there kind of some sci-fi projects that are going to materialize in the next couple years? I have so many, but I'll I'll say this one thing. So, uh, we've been talking about quantum for a long time. Yes. And one of our portfolio companies, Semicon, it's a VT spin-off actually. And and they develop a quantum chip and it's a small tiny chip with, you know, tens and hundreds of cubits of capability. And they're aiming for million cubits with the tiny chip. Today, the quantum
• 52:30 - 53:00 computers are sized bigger than this room here. Extremely hard to maintain. and they require cold temperatures and all of that. So, um I'm super excited on companies like this that can sort of a revolutionize the whole industry. It's a bit like what happened with PCs before the you know after the main frames and all of that. So, a bit of a same analogy open quantum based computing world that would change everything right if you if they were to
• 53:00 - 53:30 able to get that that kind of computing power into like a small chip. Exactly. And that's what we need in Europe. That would be amazing. That's good. It's it's you you've given a lot of reasons to stay positive, not just about like the the the general development, but specifically what's happening here in in the Nordics because um what we read and what I've had from so many of these conversations is like all the problems, you know, the lack of growth, the demographic problems, but you know, it seems like we have this really really unique and strong researchbased
• 53:30 - 54:00 technical like knowledge um knowledge base here in um in Finland and the Nordics that that we're Now, thanks to you and like your team and people like you, we're we're learning how to commercialize them and hopefully bring it to market um or you know internationally and now we just need that growth fund and like even more money and even more talent. Don't thank me, thank the entrepreneurs. You know, being a VC is hard but being an entrepreneur is really hard. So, let's thank all the scientific founders
• 54:00 - 54:30 founder founders in this ecosystem for sure. Credit credit to them. Um before we wrap up here, we have the surprise. Like I mentioned, we're going to hear uh a poem. Yes. From your upcoming book. Yes. Can you tell us about what it is? How did it come about? I'm dying to. So, uh this book is called Kvata. So, on a spring ice and as we know, spring ice can be, you know, very tempting. Uh sun
• 54:30 - 55:00 is shining, you want to go walk on the spring ice, but it can be also a bit dangerous. So there's a bit of a sides to and story goes like this that my co-founder and myself Haramaki with whom we founded the first seed investment company in 2008 and we co-ounded seven companies together with Haru and Oscar our third partner and Har has been my my uh colleague for now for 15 years. So we decided to celebrate a bit. So he's been always uh taking photographs these
• 55:00 - 55:30 fantastic black and white photographs. I think this uh book cover is even beautiful. It's from Unisari from Helsinki. People are looking at the sea in the spring. Uh the snow has started to melt. The the light is back. We're back from our caves in after the Nordic Nordic winter. And um um we got an idea that I would write poems to all of his um photos and he has tens of thousands of photos. So he started to send me one by one on a on a WhatsApp. And then I
• 55:30 - 56:00 started to write these poems typically like in the middle of the night that I was going through some sort of a thinking myself and I started to look at the photographs and then the poems just came and it's been a wonderful journey uh to write this and I'll I promise to read you one and and this uh relates to a picture where there are two people on on a on a thin ice uh you can see two shadows. That's an LC. Yeah, exactly. out on the sea. Might be difficult to see see the picture here, but we can
• 56:00 - 56:30 probably share it on on social media or something. And uh I translated the poem cuz all the poems are in Finnish. So can you do the English and then also the Finnish? Absolutely. Absolutely. Maybe I'll do the Finnish one first. Or which one would you prefer? Finish first. That's good. Okay. Fore! Foreign! Foreign!
• 56:30 - 57:00 And the English version goes like this. I would be her that would be me. The second shadow of two figures, the biggest surely dancing strides with him thoughtless unknowing when to turn back
• 57:00 - 57:30 to gaze at the sea. a crackly frost flower beneath the shoe. It was beautiful. So, thank you. Thank you for uh for bringing that. Uh when is it uh when is it published and where can you get it? Yeah, so this is available at book on demand. Uh if you Google like my name inro uh poem book or something you can find it but we can probably share the link on on on the on the podcast story. Absolutely. And uh we'll we're having a book publishing party uh next
• 57:30 - 58:00 month on on May at VMA Ventures offices. So hopefully you'll be able to join us. Hopefully. Um Inca, thank you so much for coming on um and sharing sharing your experiences and and sharing the the poem. Um really excited about to follow kind of what you guys are doing um with, you know, potential future funds, but also with the current portfolio. I think it's really exciting and it's really good. It's good for the world. It's good for Finland. It's good for the planet. Um, so best of luck to you, to the team,
• 58:00 - 58:30 your portfolio companies, and uh hopefully we'll be able to do like a follow-up second follow-up uh conversation and and talk about all the exciting tech and the the small quantum quantum chip and uh how it's changed everything. So, yeah, thank you so much. Thank you and thanks for having me here. It was true fun and super interesting discussions. Thank you for listening. You can find all episodes of The Growth Pod on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.
• 58:30 - 59:00 [Music]