My Story

A small village in northeast Finland. The post office was in our house. My mother ran it. My father had been an entrepreneur, machinery for harvesting wood, excavators, the kind of work where your hands tell you what is wrong before your head does. Then in the early seventies he had a stroke. He could not go back to the work. He stayed home.

I was born in 1969. I never went to kindergarten. I was raised by my father.

That is where everything in my career actually starts.

When something broke, we fixed it. The car did not go to a service. The car went into the garage with the two of us. Electrical work, welding, carpentry, an excavator that would not start. He showed me, then he watched me, then he let me. By the time I was a teenager I had used most of the tools a person ever uses, and I had learned the lesson underneath all of them: a problem is just a thing that has not been understood yet. You take it apart. You work it out. You put it back better than you found it.

I did not know I was being trained for a career. I thought I was just helping my dad.

When I was twelve, my best friend's older brother bought a Commodore 64. I told my father I wanted to see it. The shops were sold out, so we bought a Sinclair Spectrum instead. I started to program. That became its own thing. The same problem-solving instinct, but now in software.

When I was fifteen, my mother went on holiday and I sat in for her at the post office. It was actually the village bank. I learned bookkeeping. I learned what people's accounts look like when life is going well and what they look like when it is not. That stayed with me too.

So by the time I was eighteen I had two languages. The hands and the screen. The mechanical and the financial. I did not plan it that way. It is just what was around me.

I went to Oulu University in 1989. Information processing, with specialisations in mechatronics and medical technology. The medical part was a side door I walked through because it sounded interesting. I did not know then that thirty years later it would be the door I am still walking through.

In 1991, three friends and I started a software company. They wanted to write code. Somebody had to be the CEO and do the sales. I drew that straw. I hated it for ten years. I still remember sitting in meetings thinking: I am an engineer, why am I here. But I was from an entrepreneur family and you do not quit on the company. You learn the thing you are bad at.

A thousand sales calls later, I stopped hating it. I started to see how it worked. That is when I understood that sales is just engineering for human decisions. There is a system underneath. Inputs, outputs, a pipeline that needs the right pressure at the right point. Once I saw that, the work changed.

In parallel I was finishing my master's thesis. Neural networks for evaluating fitness from a three-minute heart rate recording. I got a patent on it. In 1995 I presented at the ICNN conference in Washington. I was twenty five. I started a doctorate. Wrote five or six articles. Never finished the dissertation. Life had other things in it.

In 1999 my father died. I divorced. A customer asked me to come and build their Stockholm office. I went. Two years there, twelve people on the ground when I left. Then back to Finland.

I have a habit, looking back, of saying yes to things that should have scared me. I do not think of it as bravery. It is more that I trust I will figure it out, the same way I trusted I could fix the car at nineteen with one book.

The years that followed were a tour of how companies actually work. Elektrobit, where I took a forty person team from four million to thirty five million euro in three years and then had to fire people in the 2008 crisis. That part was not nice. That is also part of the job. Then Danaher, which is the company that taught me how to think about operating systems for businesses. I learned more about process discipline at Danaher than in any book I have read. Then BICO, where I was hired to do turnarounds.

By 2022 I had been doing turnarounds for over twenty years. I knew the structure. Top line first. Understand what is profitable and what is not. Then delivery. Then the team. Some tasks take a day. Some take six months. Each one needs an owner. Otherwise it is just good intentions.

Then BICO, which was running out of cash, decided to sell its companies. Ginolis was one of them. Finnish company. Precision automation for diagnostics manufacturing. Microfluidics, dispensing, the machines that build the rapid tests that doctors and patients rely on. It had bled money for years. The cash was gone.

I bought it for one euro.

People ask why. The honest answer is two things at once.

The first is that I had run the company for nine months as part of the turnaround team. I knew what was wrong with it. I also knew what was right with it: fifteen years of intellectual property, a small group of engineers who genuinely cared, technology that worked when it was used properly, and a market that was about to grow five times in the next five years. Microfluidics is moving from research labs into clinics, into homes, into point of care diagnostics that will change how medicine reaches people. Somebody is going to build the manufacturing infrastructure for that decade. I thought it might as well be us.

The second reason is harder to put into a slide. A patient with sepsis used to wait three days for a diagnosis. With the right automation, the test runs in thirty minutes. Three days versus thirty minutes is the difference between life and death. That is what this technology is for. I have a hard time getting up early for things that do not matter. This one matters.

I called two investors I trusted. They said yes inside the same week.

Then I started the work I knew how to do. I took the company from one hundred and twenty five people to twenty five. I closed the office in Sweden, the office in the UK, the office in Estonia, the office in China. I outsourced manufacturing. I replaced leadership where leadership was not delivering. I called my old boss from Danaher and asked him to come back part time and run the US team. He said yes.

I did not enjoy any of that. People talk about turnarounds like they are exciting. They are not. They are quiet, precise work, where every decision affects somebody's family. You do it because the alternative is the company dying and everybody losing their job, not just the people who have to leave. You do it without drama because drama makes hard things harder.

Eighteen months later, the cost base was clean. The team that remained was the right team. The technology pipeline was investable again. I had staked my own reputation on a one euro company. I still do, every Monday morning.

I am fifty seven now. I train four or five times a week, the gym, running, cycling. I have seven children across two earlier marriages and a partner of ten years. My youngest daughter is sixteen. When I am with my family, I try to actually be there, not somewhere else in my head. They notice when I get that right and they notice when I do not.

When I retire, I want to finish the doctorate I started in the nineties. Neural networks turned into AI, AI is back in everything I do, and I have unfinished business with that work. I will get to it.

In the meantime, the order that matters to me has not changed since I was a boy in that village.

You see a problem. You take it apart. You leave it better than you found it. You do that for things that matter.

That is who I am. The rest is just companies.