Portfolio of Juho

To the reader, the following portfolio follows the KSA (knowledge, skills and attitudes) method and is written for the purpose of showcasing both the qualitative and quantitative evidence regarding those.

Down the yellow brick road…

Why I became an entrepreneur

webite for prompterai

Currently as the COO and co-founder of PrompterAI I work on a product that automates SaaS sales activities.

Few things in life have ever been as distinctly tempting to me as new ventures. I grew up around entrepreneurs, in my family my father has a business, both my older bothers own companies and my mother taught entrepreneurship. So the concept of a venture has been clear to me as long as I can remember. I worked on a company when I was at high school and I today continue to grow a company I’m proud to have co-founded.

To me entrepreneurship is the skill of the new, a mindset to acquire and filter as much applicable knowledge and insight as one can in the briefest amount of time possible, and put that knowledge in to practice as quickly as possible.

For the past 10 years I have been acquiring and putting knowledge related to new ventures in to practice. I’ve been involved in the creation of new ventures from many different angels, either looking at things form an investor, accelerator or entrepreneurs viewpoint. You can visit my profile for a more fuller picture, but here are a few “KPI’s” around my entrepreneurship activities:

This exposure to a variety of activities has helped me to navigate the entrepreneurship landscape and hone the skills of business, presentation and finance – needed in that complex landscape.

Let’s consider pitching for example, the many hours I’ve spent both pitching and listening to pitches has taught me a great deal about presenting and communications. I consider pitching and presenting to be rather similar type of activities, both center around the presenter to be able to deliver a message in a way that is interesting and simultaneously concise. At least for me, that’s not an easy task. I easily tend to stray to tangents, but with practice I’ve learned to better stay focused. Below is a picture of me on the stage of Coworking Europe conference in 2011. I was invited to be a guest speaker on innovation and, as you can see from my face, that 22-year-old is not delivering the most concise presentation. Luckily, only practice makes perfect.

me presenting

What is the growth mindset?

smartly investors

Scale, a word that’s very often used in the world of startups and growth companies as an abstraction to complexity. From my experiences I’ve acquired the skill to tackle that complexity by adapting the growth mindset.

I’ll give you an concrete example. I used to work in a very fast growing ad tech company called Smartly.io. I joined the company in 2014 when we were 15 people working in Helsinki, I left the company in 2017 when Smartly had 8 offices and a 200 people workforce. My job at Smartly as the right-hand of the COO was to find ways how the C-level could quantify and steer the company’s sales and marketing apparatus. At first I though that would be easy, just needed to pick a set of good KPI’s and report those diligently. Quickly though, I realized that the company and it’s segments were in a state of constant change, and that I needed to factor in that change to the processes and measurements I wanted to develop. This meant that every time a sales process was implemented or a marketing activity was measured I’d think about the life-span of that solution, when would I expect it to be insufficient again? By realizing that no existing solution worked indefinitely I was able to create and facilitate growth for a company that was not profitable when we started and had a turn-over of more than 30M EUR after 3 years.

What are my building blocks?

Many of my skills and attitudes have their sound basis in knowledge that I’ve acquired from my studies in chemical engineering. Processes, balances – in-puts and out-puts are extremely similar concepts in reactors and in sales or operations of a company. From my engineering studies I have the knowledge of mathematics and how I can use mathematics to represent real-world scenarios, a powerful way to comprehend and visualize complexity.

bokeh data

I’ll give you an example – above is a network graph that’s using dummy data from the famous Zachary’s karate club dataset. For rendering the graph I’ve used Bokeh, which is my favorite interactive visualization library for Python. The knowledge I’ve acquired about mathematics has greatly helped me to learn to program, and that in turned has given me a tool that helps me quickly visualize and showcase scenarios and problem settings, which has been immensely helpful in my professional life.

Also the knowledge of product development, the understanding of putting the user’s needs first and trying to walk a mile in the subjects shoes is something I’ve acquired from my university studies. It has been extremely helpful to understand product development methodologies, otherwise, I believe, as an entrepreneur I would have made many more mistakes than I’ve made otherwise.

What have I learned about myself?

When I reflect on my attitudes that have develop in the past 10 years, I’m inclined to state that I’ve grown to value actions. Actions take more effort than words, and people who take that extra step of making a prototype, giving a keynote or teaching a skill are the people I value over the day-dreamers and politicians.

Other clear preference would to value empathetical honesty, it’s not always easy to give constructive feedback but simultaneously it’s the only way we can quickly learn from the people around us. The practice of depicting subjective reality empathetically, but clearly is an idea I value – and definitely a thing I haven’t mastered yet. Well, the growth shall continue…