personal

Today comes with a piece of personal news. Today I have agreed to a proposal about becoming a part of Wunderkraut. Wunderkraut is a great growth case and easily fullfills the criteria of a growth company: just a few years old and already at a 10M€ profitable growth mode with very high customer and employee satisfaction. Wunderkraut has also accomplished this without outside risk financing, just from organic growth and profit.

I will be investing into the company simultaneously while I join them. This time I won't disclose the details of the investment deal; sorry folks. I'll be appointed Managing Director of Wunderkraut Finland and the Baltics, part of the Wunderkraut Group. I will also become member of the Group Management Team and Board of Directors as well as one of the Group’s owners, naturally.

What is Wunderkraut then? Many people might know it by its former name: Mearra Finland Oy. Wunderkraut provides professional services for web-based publishing and content management systems. It has developed a wide range of services based on Drupal’s open source platform in different sectors for customers such as IKEA, Finnish Red Cross, German Foreign Office, Nokia Siemens Networks, National Land Survey of Finland, Suzuki Belgium, and a large number of media houses. We approach customer projects from a business perspective instead of technology first.

Wunderkraut Group operates across nine markets in Europe and employs 140 people. Wunderkraut’s customers - such as media and publishing houses, public sector authorities, and the trading sector - cater to the needs of large online user audiences. Wunderkraut’s web solutions host a broad range of rich media content including web TV and mobile video.

Wunderkraut is the largest provider of Drupal-based solutions in Europe. Drupal is a framework that offers fast time to market, extensive customisation and lower total cost of ownership. It is used to set up content management systems for all types of websites, from small sites to complex global enterprises. Drupal is supported by a global community of developers whose continual contribution ensures the platform’s robustness and innovativeness.

Since last summer I have worked with multiple startups. Namely with TLD Registry and Umbra Software, Sulava and some others. I haven't had a "main day job" for some months now. This is about to change and Wunderkraut is becoming my "day job" for years to come. I intend to continue the strong growth of the company & to accelerate it further. Open up new markets and be part of an excellent growth-hungry international team. Wunderkraut is agile, if not even "lean" (in a Lean Startup kind of way), so this is an excellent role for me to draw from my agile, lean and coaching experience. I tend to preach what I practice (and not the other way around) and this certainly offers me good chances to practice some 1st rate growth and internationalization - all while creating winning solutions for our customers to reach their business goals.

Highly motivated and soon to be "the new guy" (or FNG?) in Wunderkraut.

If you feel like there's something we should chat about, or we could do in the future, be in touch! I plan to meet a ton of people and utilize my network, as expected.

As many of you know I have spent the last 9months+ or so as the CEO of a new startup project in the field of medical software systems for genetic-based cancer treatment etc.

We got that startup "off to ground" so to speak, gathered a great very senior team, acquired potential pilot customers in the US and closed a financing round (my 11th round so far).

However, now due to a few reasons we have decided to discontinue the company alltogether. Meaning that we will dismantle the whole thing and won't in fact execute our plans any further. This is one of those "sometimes It's smart to know when to quit" -kind of moments. If setbacks like this were to never happen - then simply I would not be taking enough risk.

What it also means that I currently don't have an operative main project (otherwise known as the "day job") going on, so I'm looking around and considering different things.

Here's some posts & roles I am interested in:

- Leading a brilliant startup towards international waters (CEO post most interesting, also considering all top team posts)

- Leading a new venture of a bigger corporation into new hot space (these are rare to see - rare to find, and it has been about 4 years or so since I last worked as the president of a publicly listed bigger company, so it might be a time for a comeback into that different kind of "startup" space)

- Being an internal entrepreneur inside a bigger coporration, championing onwards a future key area of growth and competitive advantage.

- Full time, or almost full time, Chairman of the board in a superstar company. (this is often a non-operative, "back seat", role. Still however very interesting, depending on the case.)

I am currently engaged in a number of discussions. It's positively amazing how fast people react and move when they hear one is free to consider new things again. Despite of the ongoing discussions I am always willing to look at new opportunities to do something amazing together!

So: if something comes to mind, you know about an opportunity, or hear about a post, please be in touch. Contact info there in the top-tab labelled "contact".

And happy holidays to you all!

It has been a while since I last blogged anything. Seems like the "doing" part is overwhelming the "writing" part, for now at least.

Honestly one of the reasons why I have become a less active blogger lately has to do with how rewarding and motivating writing a blog really is. Sadly I have noticed that people are far less active and give far less feedback than I would have hoped. This almost directly results in declining motivation and writing less, even tho I probably would have a little "something" to say about a few things still..

Anyways here's some upcoming things for the fall:

Next Monday, on the 21st of September I will be chatting at MTV3 morning TV show "Good Morning Finland" again. This time it's going to be about a medical-genetics startup I have been working on pretty much all summer. I will be there with Tuija Takala who is a specialist/scientist in ethics. We are discussing the possibilities of genetics, pharmacogenomics, personalized medicine and ethical implications thereof. The new startup is based on patented inventions on genetic information systems and processing; the end product is system which can optimize and recommend your diet, lifestyle implications, medication and therapies. Basically it gives you deeply personalized knowledge that allows you to live healthier longer life.

The next day, on Tuesday the 22nd I will be speaking at an event organized by Sefe, the Finnish Association of Business School Graduates, or more specifically their entrepreneurship "wing".

At the turn of the month I'll be at MindTrek ( http://www.mindtrek.org/2009/ ) giving a brief talk before the startup company pitches.

On 7th of October I'll be speaking at an entrepreneurship conference in Tallin, Estonia. The attendants are mainly students and aspiring entrepreneurs. Good stuff, sounds like a great event full of positive energy.

On November the 12th I'll be in Lahti, speaking at an event by MBE about social media, recommendations, and the like. This would be all in finnish.

Later in November I'll be speaking in the invite-only CEO-only event FICTA in Levi. About social media and it's implications to strategy.

---

Besides speaking what else is there?

We'll I'm seriously considering co-writing a finnish-language book on entrepreneurship and startups. This would be the kind of "spill it all out and give advice" -typeof guide book, where I would try to highlight everything I find important and meaningful in startup building and success. Digital version of the book is a must, as probably is an International version as well. There seems to be none of these kind of books around in finnish language. Please do tell me if this is a bad idea, so I can save myself the trouble ;)

I am also working on 3 different startups, finding out about if we get them really going, funded, cast with great teams etc. Interesting times certainly!

image: from "Tekniikan Näköalat" 2/2009

Tekes the Finnish government agency for research and innovation funding is publishing their own paper called "Tekniikan Näköalat" (free translation: "technical perspectives"), they recently interviewed me for their newest issue. Unfortunately the interview is in finnish only, sorry.

You can download the full issue from here, or just my interview part from here.

In the interview I talk about www.runtoshop.com a bit, entrepreneurial risks, my own experiences of going through a bankruptcy and recovering from that (that was back in 2002). I also go into talking about entrepreneurial atmosphere in Finland and the nordics, etc..

The photoshoot for this was fun to do. We went into an old bloody (literally) boxing ring to get a few good shots. I have been training kickboxing and such for a number of years, and somehow the journalists always like the analogy of a boxer to an entrepreneur.. I guess both get regularly beaten ;)

Back in October I wrote about a cover story they ran on me in the Welcome to Finland magazine. Old blog post here:

http://tane.li/2008/taneli-covered-welcome-finland

Now the interview is available for download as a print quality PDF from this blog:

Click here to get your PDF copy

I'm placing the PDF for download with permission from the Editor-in-Chief. After all it's an old issue now, nuttin' but free promo, isn't it?

Meanwhile it's my second last day as Run's CEO. I'm currently working on a more detailed launch plan and figuring out things related to how to get the service in keen shape. Further plans still open, plenty of conversations going on and no intentions to rush into anything too soon. After this week I hope to have more time to for example blog..

Mårten Mickos is also leaving his MySQL post on the same date and is asking (through email to his contacts) an interesting question: "What's bigger than open source?".. figure that out, and I'm sure we'll see him leading the charge on that pretty soon ;)