$250k SDE Acquisition: Limited Downside, Big Upside

Well, that's what we're here for, Ville. So music to my ears that acquiring minds and our guests influenced you that way. Tell me a little bit about the culture of entrepreneurship and the culture of risk.

Maybe in Finland. There of course is the stereotype that in the US there it's sort of risk forward pro entrepreneurship and that may be in the Nordics. Certainly Germany has the reputation of being much more conservative. I hesitate to indulge in stereotypes, but humor me.

It had a lot to do with several things happening at the same time, but basically we were doing a lot of business with the former Soviet Union and then there was a collapse or devaluation of our own currency at that time, combined with opening up of kind of the economy and allowing entrepreneurs to take loans in foreign currencies at the, I think it was end of the 80s. So that kind of combination…

That was part reason for the bankruptcy in my family as well. So I think in the 90s it created a sort of very, very even more kind of conservative mindset. And a lot of people that saw that, I think felt that entrepreneurship is not for them, it's too risky.

But then I'd say Since sort of mid 2000 it has started to change a lot with the kind of startup startups phenomenon. And we actually have one of the, I think it is even on a global scale a fairly popular startup event called Sluss, which is organized every November in Finland.

And that has, I think led to a lot of young people getting excited about startups and entrepreneurship in general after the sort of negative experience that a lot of people had in the 90s. So now I think it's a lot more common again. But compared to us, I would still say it's fairly conservative.

The influence of Nokia, did that give any the entrepreneurs of a generation inspiration?

Probably not. I think Nokia was one of the best sort of, if you wanted a corporate career at certain time, I think that was kind of the best place you could work for. But in terms of entrepreneurship, I think it's companies like let's say supercell which is very popular. They vetted Clash of Clans and a couple of other fairly popular games.

Angry Birds is from Finland. We have Walt, which is a delivery company acquired by a US based company. So we have a couple of these type of companies that I think are the main sort of inspiration for people interested in entrepreneurship.

So you hear acquiring minds, you start hearing stories of people buying businesses. What does that lead you to do?

Well at first it led me to sort of looking into kind of yeah, what, what's out in the market in Finland. So there's a couple of sort of sites that are equivalent to Biz Buy and Sell. Not as mature but, but still sort of sites that list businesses on, on sell.