Independent work on how artificial intelligence changes companies, labour, markets and knowledge work. The publication combines empirical research, economic analysis, practical tools and field notes from real agent systems. OpenClaw Chroniclesremains intact as the build-log series about Samantha, Stöbä and Hermes.
2026-09-07 · Research · EN
Member of the European Parliament and former chief of intelligence, Major General (ret.) Pekka Toveri assesses the Ukraine-Russia war from Brussels on the edge of winter. Zelenskyi has declared Russian airspace unsafe, Putin is preparing a quiet mobilisation for after the Duma elections and Russia's monthly losses now exceed its recruitment, but the Iran war has taken the Patriot missiles and ballistic missiles are getting through. Toveri explains how Ukraine is restoring movement to the battlefield under cover of the drone bubble, why glide bombs are Ukraine's worst problem, and how Flamingo, ground robots and AI weapons are changing the war. It closes on the EU's 90 billion in financing, the growth of European defence budgets and the quality of Finland's conscript army. Published 7 September 2026.
NeuvottelijaEP407Pekka ToveriUkraineRussia
2026-09-03 · Economy · EN
Fundco managing partner Saku Sairanen shows how private equity's return advantage inverted in three years: in Bain & Company's report PE funds still beat the S&P 500 across every horizon in 2023, while in this year's report the index wins on every horizon except twenty years. The episode unpacks the mechanism: deals struck in 2021 at high multiples, rates rising from zero to five, leverage turning against returns — and then the secondaries and evergreen loop in which a stake bought below NAV is marked to 100 per cent the next day and the resulting IRR becomes the sales pitch to smaller investors. Includes two fact-checked case studies from opposite extremes, Bain's Kioxia and Thoma Bravo's Medallia, plus Finland's capital shortage and an open disagreement about a named competitor's business model. Recorded 3 September 2026. Contains conflict-of-interest disclosures; not investment advice.
NeuvottelijaEP405Saku SairanenPrivate EquitySecondaries
2026-08-31 · Society · EN
Simo J. Lahtinen from Boston and Ali Omar from Hyrynsalmi join Sami Miettinen to work through the 2026 US midterms and the fracture inside the MAGA movement. The central claim is that MAGA is not one camp but two: the tech wing built around Peter Thiel and JD Vance, which wants more legal immigration and conflicts settled by diplomacy, and the groypers led by Nick Fuentes, who want the opposite. The episode covers the role of oil prices and the grocery basket in deciding the election, the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz, Thiel's network from Palantir to Anduril, Curtis Yarvin's tech cities, the erosion of dollar hegemony and five percent long rates. The second half covers humanoid robots, Grok and Cursor, Waymos on the streets of Boston and whether middle-class knowledge work disappears. The guests disagree at several points, and those disagreements are left visible in the article.
NegotiatorEP404Sami MiettinenSimo J. LahtinenAli Omar
2026-08-30 · Economy · Tools · EN
Ali Omar, Jyri Engeström and Kim Väisänen discuss the same phenomenon from three different positions: an angel investor with 29 startups, a Silicon Valley fund manager, and a serial entrepreneur who has sold his company. Together they answer a question no single episode answers alone — when angel investing is worth doing, when it is a poor route to wealth, and what separates fund mathematics from a private investor's mathematics.
2026-08-25 · Economy · Research · EN
Mikko Alasaarela opens with a claim that sounds like a conspiracy theory and turns out to be an engineering calculation: Elon Musk has acquired control of the entire technology stack, from solar panels and batteries to chips, models, robots, space and communications. The missing piece was his own fabrication, and the Terafab rising in Texas removes the dependency on ASML, TSMC and Nvidia. This article works through the episode's claims and checks the key figures against public sources: Terafab's $16.8bn initial investment, the $1.25 trillion SpaceX–xAI merger, the $60bn all-stock Cursor deal, Starlink's 65 MHz spectrum purchase and Anthropic's ownership structure. It also carries a correction to episode 132 from 2022: Musk was not trolling with the Twitter share — he succeeded there too.
NegotiatorEP403Sami MiettinenMikko AlasaarelaElon Musk
2026-08-21 · Tools · EN
Tapio Nissilä is building HAR — the Human Agent Relationship model — around a reframing: the question is not how many agents a person can supervise but what role architecture you design into the decision paths, which makes the number an outcome rather than a starting assumption. The episode takes apart why human in the loop is as naive a setup as zero agents, why removing routine work produces decision compression rather than relief, how attachment theory explains what the language of change resistance cannot, and what happens to per-seat SaaS pricing in a world where the user is an agent.
NegotiatorEP402Sami MiettinenTapio NissiläAgentic AI
2026-08-21 · Economy · EN
A guest appearance on MP Martin Paasi's Paasipodi. The conversation opens with Wille Rydman's NGO funding cuts and the trap the National Coalition Party would have walked into had it started complaining, moves through bloc politics on the Swedish and Danish models, and lands on what Miettinen argues changes election debate permanently: once anyone can run a political claim through a language model, rhetoric without analysis no longer survives the first fact-check. Along the way: Samantha's workflow on OpenClaw, Atte Harjanne's proposed superintelligence ban, open source as Europe's only sensible strategy, the zero-sum thinking behind data centre opposition — and Samantha's fact-check, on request, of the four test claims thrown at her in the episode.
NegotiatorSami MiettinenMartin PaasiPaasipodiEconomic policy
2026-08-17 · Economy · EN
Aktia chief economist Lasse Corin unpacks a forecast of 2.1 percent GDP growth for Finland. The episode separates what in that number is real growth from what is a statistical artefact, why the fighter jet procurement barely moves GDP, what rising productivity actually measures, and why Finland's public finance figures are unusually hard to read in international comparison.
NeuvottelijaEP401Lasse CorinSami MiettinenFinnish economy
2026-08-10 · Economy · Tools · EN
Topi Salin and Amos Ahola dissect structural flaws in welfare socialism, distorted economic incentives, and how high tax wedges accelerate AI substitution in the labor market.
NeuvottelijaEP400SocialismTaxationAI
2026-08-09 · Tools · Research · EN
A field report from rebuilding www.neuvottelija.com and www.neuvottelija.fi on Cloudflare while keeping www.dcmcapital.fi on WordPress: what Astro changed, why agent readiness reached 100/100 and 93/100, and how Codex, Gemini and Claude now monitor search and generative-engine findability every week.
SEOGEOCloudflareAstroWordPress
2026-08-06 · Research · Economy · EN
MP Joakim Vigelius and Sami Miettinen analyse the Ceuta border crisis in Spain, European migration policies, and Finland's emergency border security legislation.
NeuvottelijaEP399BorderSecurityMigrationJoakim Vigelius
2026-08-03 · Society · Research · EN
Recorded in English days after Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times before a Senate hearing, and weeks after journalist Jari Kuikanmäki's book on the pandemic's origins went to print. Kuikanmäki lays out the case he spent years building, and Miettinen presses on the second half of the story: how authorities, the WHO and the platforms handled dissent, why every country produced its own local truth, and what the collapse of institutional trust costs the next time an authority is right.
NegotiatorEP398Sami MiettinenJari KuikanmäkiCOVID-19
2026-07-30 · Research · Economy · EN
How Sami Miettinen used Gemini 3.6 Thinking, Codex GPT-5.6 SOL, Python and public FRED data to turn an intuition about AI, wages, tax bases and sovereign risk into a falsifiable working paper—and why the first test did not confirm the thesis.
artificial intelligenceAI deflationwagessovereign riskTIPS
2026-07-25 · OpenClaw · Research · EN
A dive in Kos became a practical lesson in underwater navigation, human judgement, AI estimation and why human-in-the-loop systems still matter.
scuba divingartificial intelligencehuman in the loopunderwater navigationKos
2026-07-14 · OpenClaw · Tools · EN
The final fourteen points of Cloudflare's Agent Readiness benchmark were harder than the first eighty-six, and they were closed by three frontier models working in parallel: Claude Fable 5 built the English episode corpus, Google Gemini signed the domain and published DNS-based agent discovery, and Codex GPT-5.6 Sol fixed the OAuth metadata, favicon and retrieval quality.
agent readinessCloudflareDNSSECDNS-AIDOAuth
2026-07-11 · OpenClaw · Tools · EN
Why a Lovable-hosted React SPA scored 57 while a Cloudflare and Astro static-first site reached 86, and why agent readiness is an architectural property rather than a feature toggle.
agent readinessCloudflareAstroLovableprerendering
2026-07-03 · Society · Economy · EN
The summer 2026 row over the allocation criteria for STEA grants opens a larger question: what is the relationship between a state-funded NGO sector and the political parties. MP Tere Sammallahti and writer Otto Juote unpack the funding loop in which taxpayers' money goes to organisations, which buy influence communications, which lobby for more funding. It includes figures rarely set side by side: Finland has roughly 100,000 registered associations, and 724 of them received STEA support. The episode also covers Statistics Finland's GDP revisions, the weakness of GDP as a welfare measure, and parliament's own use of power — including Sammallahti's observation of how often it cannot be done becomes it can once a decision is genuinely demanded. Two right-of-centre commentators who disagree with each other at several points.
NegotiatorEP393Sami MiettinenTere SammallahtiOtto Juote
2026-06-21 · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen as a guest on Rami Kurimo's Puheenaihe, in the week SpaceX listed and Elon Musk became the first trillionaire. The sharper half is financial: a hundred times revenue tells you nothing about when the price comes down, because the multiple prices optionality — Musk's companies read as a stack of long-dated options, many unexercised and several created out of nothing. The second half is about Finland: imported Marxist class hatred repurposed as identity politics, a country that fails to appreciate even its own successes, and the danger of a subsidiary economy.
2026-06-01 · OpenClaw · Tools · EN
MemoriLabs graph memory was separated from group context and re-enabled only for Sami's private DM via a plugin-level exact-session allowlist. Tool use is trust-gated. New T1–T5 trust model: no group should be able to become T1.
OpenClawSamanthaAI agent securityprompt injectiontrust model
2026-05-18 · OpenClaw · Research · EN
Four AI workers debate Pearl-style vs Friston-style agent ontology. Tapio Nissilä adds HAR as a third axis: per-path supervision (Audit / Monitor / Approve / Command), not per-agent autonomy.
OpenClawAI agentsagent ontologyPearlFriston
2026-05-14 · Economy · Tools · EN
Both men are speaking at the Tampere investment fair the following week and neither has prepared, so they rehearse live. The result is the clearest account yet of how Miettinen actually uses AI for investing — foundation model, harness, memory and curated context as four separate layers — plus the €5,000 newborn pension, the small-cap drought, and a full-throated argument for building data centres in Finland.
Sami MiettinenMartin PaasiPaasipodiInvestingIndex funds
2026-05-10 · OpenClaw · Tools · EN
Stöbä, a secondary AI worker running on an Ubuntu ThinkPad, was migrated from OpenClaw to Hermes Agent using a clean direct cutover. The migration preserved identity, memory and selected skills while restoring Telegram, WhatsApp and Discord as control channels.
OpenClawHermes AgentStöbäAI agentsagent migration
2026-05-03 · OpenClaw · Tools · EN
The Hermes agent on Sami's MacBook Pro: GPT-5.5 for thinking, a local Gemma 4:26b for light tasks and fallback. A controlled hybrid — no automatic routing.
OpenClawHermesGPT-5.5Gemma 4:26bOllama
2026-04-30 · Economy · Society · EN
Two days after the Orpo government's 2026 spending-limits session, Martin Paasi and Sami Miettinen go through what actually survived: the self-employed pension reform, the rewritten taxation of employee share options, youth employment measures, the household deduction and first-home loans — and then the €17 billion annual deficit underneath it all. Preceded by a quarter-hour on the agent architecture both men are now running.
Sami MiettinenMartin PaasiPaasipodiFiscal policyTaxation
2026-04-28 · OpenClaw · Tools · EN
Samantha gains a bounded research delegate, Hermes, on the same Mac mini M4 — separate macOS user, restricted wrapper, shared handoff folder, Exa via MCP for web research.
OpenClawSamanthaHermesresearch agentMac mini M4
2026-04-24 · OpenClaw · Economy · Tools · EN
Curated local safe memory in practice: Stöbä retrieves IPO readiness and Translink SaaS valuation material as a junior investment banker would, with sources and discipline.
StöbäOpenClawAI memoryRAGIPO readiness
2026-04-22 · OpenClaw · Economy · EN
In the AI era, added value comes from understanding and the ability to explain — not from mere output. Open documentation is the new distribution channel for expertise.
OpenClawSamanthaStöbäAI workeradded value
2026-04-19 · OpenClaw · EN
Samantha got her own git identity (samanthamiettinen) and pushed her first commit. Stöbä received four local memory layers on the ThinkPad.
SamanthaStöbäGitAI agentmemory
2026-04-18 · OpenClaw · Research · EN
Personal context is the moat, capture is cheap, curation is the work, and trust is built by retrieval. Nathan B Jones' framing applied to Samantha and Stöbä.
SamanthaStöbäsecond brainmemoryNathan B Jones
2026-04-17 · OpenClaw · Tools · EN
ClawHub is a versioned skill registry for OpenClaw agents (55,862 skills). At the morning AI Campfire we presented the OpenClaw architecture and the Watch Them Talk view.
ClawHubOpenClawSamanthaStöbäAI Campfire
2026-04-17 · OpenClaw · Tools · EN
A two-agent architecture: Samantha carries the long context while Stöbä acts as the fast executor. Two separate memories reduce errors and cost.
SamanthaStöbäagent memoryarchitectureOpenClaw
2026-04-12 · OpenClaw · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen as a guest on Roni Arvonen's Kuuntelija for two and a half hours on artificial intelligence: why AI labour is not capital in the Marxist sense but a direct substitute for human work, what that does to a pension system funded by wage-linked contributions, which jobs go first and which go last, and why the case for labour immigration weakens at the same time. The most useful stretch is an hour on how he actually built and runs his own agent — a Mac Mini, OpenClaw, a WhatsApp channel, the security posture, and never building a dependency on a single vendor.
2026-03-27 · Tools · Society · EN
Five weeks after the first storm warning, Martin Paasi has bought a laptop, installed the tools and shipped his first application. The sequel is a builder's conversation: a four-model podcast engine that argues with itself, persistent agent memory, why index funds and AI discipline are the same problem, a hard look at the Finnish media, and a live design review of an investment robot that tracks which strategy the market is currently obeying.
Sami MiettinenMartin PaasiPaasipodiArtificial intelligenceAgents
2026-03-23 · Society · Economy · EN
The Negotiation Club's original cast takes on four themes. First, a newspaper investigation into gifts given to MPs, where both guests end up defending transparency rather than the gifts. Second, the Constitutional Law Committee, whose vice-chair Onni Rostila has become and whose ex ante review he defends by comparing it with constitutional court systems. Third, inheritance tax and what incentives taxation creates for families — including Sami Miettinen's calculation of a thousand-euro birth endowment that would grow into millions over sixty years. Fourth, the Social Democrats' harassment inquiry. It closes on the members-only side with Iran and an assessment of who ultimately benefits.
NegotiatorEP377Sami MiettinenTere SammallahtiOnni Rostila
2026-03-22 · Economy · Society · EN
Topi Salin asks for a report card on the government and gets an argument that the whole left–right frame has expired. Miettinen's case: taxing human labour is a dying business model, superintelligence arrives on a timescale that makes the basic-income debate incoherent in euros, and the Marxist end state may arrive by accident — a planned economy run by free intelligence. Around it, the inheritance tax, the pension system as a negative-NPV contract for the young, and where he is actually putting money.
Sami MiettinenTopi SalinKeijon TuumaustuntiAIBasic income
2026-03-02 · Research · Economy · EN
Wolt founding team member and former Helsingin Sanomat journalist Juhani Mykkänen spent a couple of months meeting more than 60 decision-makers to find out how Finland is preparing for the AI transition — and found that nobody has the time. The episode works through Citrini Research's doomer scenario, in which AI first cuts corporate costs and then collapses wage-based purchasing power, and the question Hamilton Lane's chairman would not answer: which force is larger, companies getting more efficient or consumers getting poorer. The second half covers agentic governance as an accelerator rather than a brake, Klarna as the cautionary case, data-centric company architecture and sovereignty — closing on Tegmark's urn theory, Musk's simulation thinking, the first wave of AI-user burnout, and why your body is the only home you live in.
NeuvottelijaEP374Sami MiettinenJuhani MykkänenAI
2026-02-19 · Tools · Economy · EN
Sami Miettinen's fourth visit to Martin Paasi's Paasipodi is a practical field report from inside the tools. An investment banker who wrote Commodore 64 assembly as a teenager and then left coding for thirty years walks through what a modern AI development environment actually looks like, what it costs, how to start from zero — and ends the episode by issuing an official AI storm warning dated 19 February 2026.
Sami MiettinenMartin PaasiPaasipodiArtificial intelligenceVibe coding
2025-11-10 · Economy · Research · EN
Sami Miettinen joins Lasse Mikkonen and Harri Juntunen on AI Kanava, recorded at the Neuvottelija studio. An investment banker returns to coding through no-code tools, and the conversation moves from a security bug in a vibe-coded CRM to what happens to enterprise SaaS when AI becomes the interface, the capital allocation problem that leaves Finnish companies two-thirds foreign-owned, three regulatory models, and how far a negotiation can be delegated to a machine.
Sami MiettinenLasse MikkonenHarri JuntunenAI KanavaArtificial intelligence
2025-09-23 · Society · EN
The episode's organising concept is sumutus — Onni Rostila's proposed Finnish equivalent of gaslighting — and its separation from selective framing. The conversation starts from the Charlie Kirk killing and the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, and moves to how a media controversy is either harnessed to an agenda or managed down. Its most concrete example is domestic: a reception unit in Tampere whose cost was explained away as the cheapest bid, when the real question concerns how the tender was specified. It also covers cancel culture turning in both directions, where Sammallahti draws the line against his own side, and citizenship-based social security as a question of incentives.
NegotiatorEP352Sami MiettinenTere SammallahtiOnni Rostila
2025-08-29 · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen's first solo appearance on Puheenaihe, hosted by Leevi Leivo. The argument is arithmetic: a household with €150,000 has nothing left to invest after the flat, while a €270bn pension complex quite logically wants large foreign targets. Founding a company without capital is hard. The angriest section is the YEL mess — entrepreneurs' pensions were never funded, the state carries a €600m expense, and the fix sits with a vague working group. The second half covers rates, tariffs, the dollar and his own portfolio: cash weight, bitcoin and gold.
2025-08-21 · Tools · Society · EN
Kert Kenner asks the question a salesperson would: what does it actually take to build your own media, and does it make selling easier? Miettinen answers with five years of operating numbers — why most podcasts die at twelve episodes, why he keeps almost no backlog, what the channel earns and why he does not maximise it, why audio-only is a mistake, and why podcast transcripts are becoming the training material that decides what an AI says about your industry.
Sami MiettinenKert KennerMyynnillä on asiaaPodcastingPersonal brand
2025-08-20 · Economy · Society · EN
A solo episode, made at the Sisäpiiri audience's request that Sami work through a theory without a guest to argue with. He reflects on monetary systems, the euro and the EU by way of the Hamilton musical in London. At its centre is the ECU-2 proposal from Libera's 2014 book: twelve countries entered the euro by tying their currencies to the ECU basket first, and ECU-2 runs that backwards. A floating currency is counter-cyclical and the euro pro-cyclical — Sweden and Poland took the winning position. The Hamilton half is about what a federation actually requires: a one-off assumption of state debts and a tariff-funded tax base, neither of which the EU has.
2025-08-08 · Economy · Tools · EN
The Neuvottelija half of a twin recording made with Kert Kenner's Myynnillä on asiaa podcast the same morning. Sales trainer Kenner and Miettinen map marketing, sales and negotiation onto a single funnel — with Miettinen's magnet as the new metaphor for the moment agreement snaps shut — then work through inbound versus outbound, the parasocial relationship a podcast builds, what AI agents are already doing to sales work, and why free is the worst price of all.
NegotiatorEP345Sami MiettinenKert KennerSales
2025-07-01 · Society · Economy · EN
A late June 2025 Negotiation Club on three themes. First, the gap between the Social Democrats' fairness rhetoric and its practice: the taxation of dividends from unlisted companies that the party opposes politically, and a newly elected mayor opening redundancy talks weeks after the election. Second, the Academy of Finland's funding decisions and the question of who may challenge public research money without the discussion being turned into one about academic freedom. Third, the American strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, the doctrine of the pre-emptive strike, and why air power does not change a regime. An opinionated conversation between two right-wing MPs which also concedes the limits of its own analysis.
NegotiatorEP341Sami MiettinenTere SammallahtiOnni Rostila
2025-06-09 · Economy · EN
Kvarn Capital's Martin Wichmann interviews Sami Miettinen, and the hard core of the conversation is the breaking of the Japanese yen carry trade and what follows from it for the US debt market. For thirty years the yen has been borrowed cheaply and invested into the dollar complex — now Japan's own yield curve is rising at the long end and the money is wanted home, draining the flow that finances Treasuries precisely as 37 trillion of federal debt comes up for refinancing. At the same time something unprecedented is happening: uncertainty used to strengthen the dollar and lower rates, and now self-inflicted uncertainty weakens the dollar and raises rates at once.
NegotiatorSami MiettinenKvarn CapitalMartin WichmannCarry trade
2025-04-02 · Society · Economy · EN
Recorded on April Fools' Day 2025, this Negotiation Club opens with an EVA survey in which 40 per cent of Finns see the public broadcaster as leaning left and 5 per cent as leaning right — an eightfold asymmetry. From there it moves to inheritance tax and what the debate leaves out: what comparable countries have done, where the money to pay the tax has to come from, and the fact that average adult wealth in Finland is EUR 150,000 against Sweden's EUR 300,000. The second half is Marine Le Pen's loss of eligibility and the structural problem it creates, why cordons sanitaires do not work, Finland's withdrawal from the Ottawa Convention, Greenland, and finally the question neither side asks: what did the money actually buy?
NegotiatorEP320Sami MiettinenTere SammallahtiOnni Rostila
2025-03-19 · Economy · Society · EN
The Negotiation Club takes on a word that two professions use to mean different things. A banker's capital is the right-hand side of the balance sheet — where the money came from. An economist's capital is the left-hand side: bridges, roads and housing. The distinction turns into policy: of Finland's roughly EUR 1,000 billion in national wealth, more than half sits in real estate that produces nothing and has been falling in value, while private financial wealth is EUR 675 billion, about EUR 150,000 per adult — EUR 150,000 to 250,000 less than in the other Nordic countries. The episode works through municipal balance sheets, imputed rent, the earnings-related pension system as a second form of taxation, what inheritance tax does to firms, the arbitrariness of the self-employed pension scheme, the return of avoir fiscal to the debate, and finally Germany's suspension of its debt brake and what it does to interest rates.
NegotiatorEP316Sami MiettinenTere SammallahtiJussi Lindgren
2025-03-01 · Economy · Society · EN
Ivan Puopolo hosts Sami Miettinen and, newly elected to parliament, Martin Paasi to work through the Murto working group's growth proposals — replacing inheritance tax with capital gains tax on disposal, and letting share exchanges roll over untaxed. The conversation turns into the sharpest account of why Finland cannot cut: a first-hand description of how a coalition government's programme survives, and Miettinen's own proposal for making the public sector produce more, better, with less.
Sami MiettinenMartin PaasiIvan PuopoloViisasteluklubiInheritance tax
2025-01-12 · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen as a guest on Roni Arvonen's Kuuntelija on Finland's most hated tax. The core argument is not about revenue: inheritance and gift tax raises around €1.3bn out of an inherited pot of some €7bn, but the damage is compounding cut off at the moment it has the most time left to run. Nobody inherits a sack of cash — they inherit a flat in a place with no market, held in an undivided estate, with the bill due before anything can be sold. Also covered: Sweden's 2005 abolition, an owner economy against a Finland owned by Solidium and the pension system, the euro and the payments imbalance, Poland, and whether Finland needs its own DOGE.
2024-08-21 · Economy · EN
MP Tere Sammallahti got funded pensions into the National Coalition Party's programme, and Catherine Reilly — who designed 401(k) products at State Street Global Advisors — explains how the American defined contribution system actually works: 401(k), IRA, automatic enrolment, target date funds and annuities. Set against it is Finland's defined benefit model, in which a 24.4 percent contribution accrues not one euro of capital to the individual and nothing to inherit — while the US federal estate tax threshold is 13 million dollars and Finland's is 20,000 euros. At the centre is Miettinen's concrete proposal: 2.4 percentage points of the contribution into a personal funded pension, 22.0 into the existing system. The author regards funded pensions as excellent and holds both models himself.
NegotiatorEP267Sami MiettinenCatherine ReillyFunded pension
2024-07-01 · Society · Tools · EN
Recorded in Futucast's studio as one half of a twin episode, this is a working reading of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation with Futucast host Isak Rautio and algorithmic-influence specialist Mikko Alasaarela. The conversation traces social media's three waves — friend, follower, algorithm — explains why 85 per cent of games are now never-ending free-to-play, works through the American constitutional problem with banning TikTok, and ends on Miettinen's contrarian hope that a conversational AI interface could be addictive enough to rescue us from the short-video feed.
NegotiatorEP258Sami MiettinenIsak RautioMikko Alasaarela
2024-07-01 · Society · Tools · EN
The other half of a twin recording made in Futucast's studio the same afternoon as Negotiator 258. Isak Rautio, Sami Miettinen and Mikko Alasaarela take Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation in a different direction: the RC-car experiment that showed how fast a recommendation algorithm drifts, why boredom tolerance matters, what happened to boys, and whether the family unit that was supposed to replace all this still works.
Sami MiettinenIsak RautioMikko AlasaarelaFutucastJonathan Haidt
2024-05-22 · Research · EN
Major General (ret.) Pekka Toveri assesses what happens if Putin wins in Ukraine on his own terms. His central claim is precise: Russia cannot challenge NATO militarily except with nuclear weapons, but it can challenge the credibility of Article 5 — and the Narva scenario, with its nuclear blackmail, is exactly that test. The episode works through Europe's bleak defence-industrial bottlenecks, the best known being that the entire continent has one TNT factory, and Europe's dependence on American capabilities from intelligence to strategic airlift. Toveri also explains why the EU sustainability taxonomy files defence industry alongside tobacco, and why conscription gives Finland a recruitment advantage that professional armies cannot buy. Recorded in May 2024, just before the European elections in which Toveri was elected an MEP.
NegotiatorEP250Sami MiettinenPekka ToveriNATO
2023-11-14 · Society · Economy · EN
Speaker of the Finnish Parliament Jussi Halla-aho and Sami Miettinen discuss the Speaker's role, parliament as the core of democracy, and the Finnish party system's drift toward a bloc structure. The episode weighs the explanatory power of the left-right axis, the new cleavages replacing it, and the political mobilisation of trade unions against labour market reform. The conversation covers the Nord Stream sabotage, the future of Finnish-Russian economic relations, proposed settlements for the Middle East conflict, and the structural problems of immigration and integration. It closes on the communal value of institutions and traditions, and presidential value leadership.
2023-11-06 · Economy · Tools · EN
Henri Blomster, portfolio manager at Asilo Asset Management, and Sami Miettinen take apart why Tesla is a core position in a concentrated fund. The starting point is Bessembinder's finding that only about four per cent of stocks carry the index — which leaves two rational strategies, a cheap broad index or an active hunt for superstar companies. The episode derives Tesla's cost advantage from Wright's law, the Giga Press, the 48-volt architecture and the Texas lithium refinery, sets it against the legacy carmaker's modularity trap and its 150-plus software suppliers, and opens up the energy business that two of five large bank analyses left out entirely. Valuation is handled with EVA metrics: Future Growth Reliance stands at 80 per cent and the current price embeds five years of 25 per cent growth.
NegotiatorEP219Sami MiettinenHenri BlomsterTesla
2023-08-28 · Economy · Society · EN
A year after the Uniper negotiation, Miettinen returns to score it: what the worst case would have been, why the German state's stake was priced the way it was, and what Germany did with the gas price the moment it took control. From there to why he is unsentimental about Germany's industrial decline, why Finland managed to get poorer in nominal dollars, where the next banking crisis actually sits, and whether the BRICS bloc is anything to worry about.
Sami MiettinenJussi HeikeläArto Koskelo23 minuuttiaUniper
2023-03-13 · Research · EN
Major General retired Pekka Toveri and Sami Miettinen analyze tactical observations from the Ukraine war, armored vehicle deployment, and structural issues in the Russian military. The episode examines tank vulnerabilities, Bayraktar drones, and Western anti tank weaponry effectiveness. Toveri reflects on Russian command structures, logistical failures, and intelligence miscalculations. The discussion also evaluates NATO posture, air defense, and China strategic positioning.
2023-03-07 · Economy · EN
Gorilla Capital founding partner Petri Lehmuskoski explains camel investing: where most of venture capital prioritises growth at the cost of profitability, Gorilla looks for capital-efficient companies that are cash-flow neutral and do not need an unbroken series of funding rounds — Duunitori reached its exit on a single round. The conversation runs from the three-fits frame to the fund returns, the MVIR reporting model, and why only six percent of the world's VC funds manage even to return their own capital. Includes a disclosure: after the conversation, Sami Miettinen committed as a Limited Partner in the Gorilla Capital 3 fund.
NegotiatorEP179Sami MiettinenPetri LehmuskoskiGorilla Capital
2022-12-06 · Economy · Society · EN
Teemu Liila and Kevin van Dessel ask for the step-by-step version rather than the platitudes, and get it: use Finland's open tax records to plot your colleagues' pay against their tenure, set the promotion conversation eighteen months early, come back with the goals your boss gave you, and then stay quiet. Around it, an unusually candid tour of investment banking — Credit Suisse First Boston hours, the Nordea deal Miettinen calls his biggest win and his biggest failure at once, project code names, fee structures, and why he stopped hiring his own mirror image.
Sami MiettinenTeemu LiilaKevin van DesselSijoituskästiSalary negotiation
2022-09-08 · Economy · Society · EN
Rahapodi obtained the Uniper negotiation memos by information request and brought in Sami Miettinen to read them as a negotiator rather than a commentator. His verdict: Finland sent the wrong seniority to the wrong subject, defended a sunk seven billion instead of the eight billion still recoverable, and never used the leverage it actually held — Germany's gas dependency and the option of filing Uniper into bankruptcy.
Sami MiettinenMiikka LuukkonenMartin PaasiRahapodiNegotiation
2022-08-26 · Society · Economy · EN
Journalist Ivan Puopolo and Sami Miettinen examine Sanna Marin administration policies, media dynamics, and public discourse culture. The episode analyzes public finance trends, national debt accumulation, and the interdependence between politics and journalism. The discussion addresses freedom of speech, journalism standards, and political personalization in the social media era. Finally, the role of media as a democratic watchdog and conditions for critical debate are discussed.
2022-08-22 · Economy · Society · EN
Jussi Heikelä and Arto Koskelo put the Credit Suisse wealth report on screen and ask whether Finland is rich or poor. Miettinen's answer runs through the €600bn of Finnish net wealth of which €400bn sits in homes, why only 1.9 per cent of adults are dollar millionaires against Sweden's 7, what Iceland did differently after its banking crisis, and — the part he was really brought on for — what makes a good negotiator and why Finland does not prepare.
Sami MiettinenJussi HeikeläArto Koskelo23 minuuttiaWealth
2022-08-21 · Society · EN
Matti Apunen — chair of the board of Yle, former editor-in-chief of Aamulehti and co-host of the A&M podcast — has called himself Finland's only republican. He explains what classical liberalism and republicanism in Buckley's tradition mean to him, and why every euro paid in tax is a piece of personal freedom surrendered. Sami Miettinen presses him to compare Finland's 42 per cent tax ratio with other Western countries and asks why Finnish private wealth has fallen behind Sweden's. The conversation runs from editing Aamulehti to Yle's competitive position, the decline of business journalism, and why statism is in Apunen's view the fundamental problem of the Finnish economy. Published 21 August 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP149Matti ApunenClassical LiberalismTaxation
2022-08-15 · Economy · EN
Veera Sylvius and Erkka Niemi are raising Voland Partners' 80 million euro technology fund, which invests as a minority owner in profitable Finnish technology companies. Sylvius is the former CEO of Space Systems Finland, Niemi the former CTO of Siili, and the founding four are completed by Jyrki Laune and Samuli Siljamäki. The conversation covers the fund's first close, megatrends, deal flow and value creation, and why Finland has lacked a growth investor at exactly this stage. The tension is whether responsibility, competitiveness and superior returns can hold at once. It closes on falling SaaS valuations, MedTech and cloud-based ERP systems. Published 15 August 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP148Veera SylviusErkka NiemiVoland Partners
2022-08-08 · Society · Economy · EN
William von der Pahlen, Isak Rautio and Sami Miettinen read Peter Zeihan's The End of the World Is Just the Beginning against Ray Dalio's changing world order — depopulation and deglobalisation on one side, debt and hegemonic cycles on the other. Miettinen takes Zeihan's demographics seriously and his deglobalisation absolutism much less so, and the argument turns on whether markets and automation can outrun a shrinking workforce.
Sami MiettinenWilliam von der PahlenIsak RautioFutucastPeter Zeihan
2022-08-06 · Society · EN
Alpo Rusi — doctor of political science, career diplomat and former adviser to Martti Ahtisaari — discusses his book The Kremlin Card: the KGB's political war in Finland and how deeply the Soviet Union came to steer Finnish foreign and domestic policy. The episode covers the shelving of the Tiitinen list, Kalevi Sorsa's CPSU contacts, Mauno Koivisto's direct channel to the Kremlin, and Esko Aho's EU opening in September 1991. Rusi recounts first-hand the phone call that saved Finland's accession negotiations at Maastricht. It closes on the NATO windows missed after the Georgian war and Crimea, and on a multipolar world order. Published 6 August 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP147Alpo RusiFinlandisationForeign Policy
2022-07-26 · Economy · EN
Viewers voted, and Sami Miettinen analyses the Uniper rescue package negotiated between Fortum, the Finnish government and the German state through a negotiator's eyes. Fortum's share fell twenty per cent in a couple of days, so the question is why a company majority-owned by the Finnish state lost so much value and whether another outcome was possible. The episode goes through whose side the clock was ticking on, what hidden cards Fortum had, and why KfW's nine billion in loans rank ahead of Fortum's eight billion in receivables. Published 26 July 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP146Sami MiettinenFortumUniper
2022-07-10 · Society · EN
Has peak woke already been reached, or are both extremes strengthening at once? Freelance journalist Matti H. Virtanen, author of the book Ääripäät, and Onni Rostila, Master of Laws, consider the US Supreme Court's abortion ruling, the rise of ultra-conservatism, and the role of identity politics in Russian war propaganda. The discussion covers the mechanisms of polarisation from schismogenesis to the Overton window, and the independence of Finland's prosecution service and courts. It closes by asking whether a heterodox sensible centre can save public debate. Published 10 July 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP145Matti H. VirtanenOnni RostilaPolarisation
2022-07-03 · Economy · EN
Crypto markets have fallen 60 to 90 per cent from their peaks, Bitcoin has slid from 70 thousand towards 20 thousand and Ethereum has lost around 80 per cent of its value. Lohkoketjupodi hosts Martin Wichmann and Rami Kurimo dissect the anatomy of the spring 2022 crash: why the algorithmic stablecoin Terra UST went literally to zero, why Celsius froze its customers' withdrawals, and how veterans like Three Arrows Capital burned through billions. The discussion also considers why decentralised protocols such as Aave withstood the stress test. Published 3 July 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP144Martin WichmannRami KurimoCrypto
2022-06-28 · Society · EN
Petri Kajander — serial entrepreneur living in Estonia, founder of the Libera think tank and host of the Talks with Petri podcast — considers why freedom is so hard to talk about in Finland. The conversation covers Libera's founding and the absurdity of the fundraising permit, the Austrian school, and how the crypto scene and the early internet carry the same idea of decentralisation. Kajander also opens up his own sweat equity model, in which he takes a stake and builds the company alongside the founders. It closes on a quiet mind and vipassana meditation. Published 28 June 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP143Petri KajanderLiberaFreedom
2022-06-19 · Society · Economy · EN
Antero Vartia returns to Neuvottelija two years after the first conversation, and the subject is the same as it was then: principle. The episode covers why flexibility can itself be a principle and staying in the truth its bedrock, what Ray Dalio's three cycles say about a changing world order, and what the book did not live to see of the war in Ukraine and China's Covid policy. It also runs through the link between the inflation spiral and populism, Acemoglu and Robinson's narrow corridor, the two classic market failures, and Compensate's three-and-a-half-year money-collection-law process, during which the company was effectively barred from trading without the matter ever reaching a district court. It closes on meditation, ego, and why executives practise it quietly.
NegotiatorEP142Sami MiettinenAntero VartiaCompensate
2022-06-12 · Tools · EN
How do the ice hockey World Championships, harness racing and an IPO investor event get onto a screen, when the fibre network can be cut by hybrid interference and more than 90 per cent of productions are made remotely? Jenny Cederqvist, head of Flik, owned by Inderes, and Juha Koskela, founder of a production company that grew from harness racing into Liiga television, open up the backstage of professional filming. They weigh whether 4K is really needed or whether HDR, colour reproduction and frame rate are what matter, and why 5.1 audio had to be bent closer to mono. Published 12 June 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP141Juha KoskelaJenny CederqvistVideo Production
2022-06-04 · Tools · EN
Lean expert Juha Ketola promised on New Year's Eve to make as many lean memes as his Facebook post got likes, and by morning the count was 185. The episode goes through the memes and uses them to open up the pillars of the Toyota house, continuous improvement, standards, the removal of variation, kanban and one-piece flow. The discussion considers why lean sounds like common sense but few succeed at it, why waste does not show up in the financial statements, and why incentive bonuses can break the whole system. Published 4 June 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP140Juha KetolaLeanToyota
2022-05-27 · Society · EN
Can you laugh at anything, and who decides what may be joked about? Sami Miettinen's guests are Tuomas Peltomäki, host of the Uutisraportti podcast and for years a writer of political satire, and Isak Rautio, who runs Futucast and has done stand-up himself. The conversation unpacks the punching-down rule, offence as a weapon, and whether a joke's morality is decided by the teller's intention or by its effect. It also opens up the mechanics of a joke: what makes a punchline work and why repetition and callbacks make people laugh. Published 27 May 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP139Tuomas PeltomäkiIsak RautioHumour
2022-05-21 · Tools · EN
Security researcher Mikko Hyppönen talks about his book Internet, published in English as If It's Smart, It's Vulnerable. By Hyppönen's law, every smart networked device is always also hackable, and the episode explains why surveillance cameras and home routers are the most important tool in denial-of-service attacks. The conversation runs through the history of malware from the first PC virus to state cyber weapons such as NotPetya, Stuxnet and WannaCry, and how a power cut in Ghana saved Maersk. It closes on the logic of China's firewall and whether Russia could detach itself from the internet. Published 21 May 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP138Mikko HyppönenCyber SecurityCyber Attacks
2022-05-15 · Economy · EN
How much of senior management's time is worth spending on investor relations, and what changed in IR work when covid ended flying overnight? Nokia's former CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and Stora Enso's long-serving investor relations director Ulla Paajanen open up the annual cycle of investor communication, the role of Capital Markets Days, and the use of guidance in steering a company. Kallasvuo argues that a Finnish CEO spends many times more time on investor meetings than an American one. Paajanen recalls the day a competitor's cartel disclosure caught her at an airport in an analyst's company. Published 15 May 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP137Olli-Pekka KallasvuoUlla PaajanenInvestor Relations
2022-05-07 · Economy · EN
Two recently listed companies from northern Finland at the same table: Norrhydro's CEO and principal owner Yrjö Trög and LapWall's CEO and principal owner Jarmo Pekkarinen describe what six months on the stock exchange has been like. The episode unpacks both IPOs from anchor investors to oversubscription and retail investor numbers, and considers what the companies would do differently. It also covers acquisitions, lessons from the Swedish export venture, the Korean market, and why construction is 50 years behind other industries. Published 7 May 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP136Yrjö TrögJarmo PekkarinenNorrhydro
2022-05-06 · Economy · Research · EN
Sauli Vilén sets out to pull back the curtain on what actually happens behind an IPO, and Miettinen answers in unusual operational detail: how a lead manager is chosen, why the anchor negotiation is the single most important phase, who is allowed to see the order book, what a cut-back mechanism does, why retail allocation ends up at one per cent, and when a banker should blow the whistle rather than drag a company to market. Then M&A — share consideration versus cash, synergy numbers pulled from thin air — and finally fiscal dominance and the euro.
Sami MiettinenSauli ViléninderesPodiIPOAnchor investors
2022-04-30 · Society · EN
Psychologist and podcaster Sinnu Savola goes through the televised defamation trial in the United States with Sami Miettinen, in which Johnny Depp sued Amber Heard over a Washington Post piece. They unpack why a side thread became the most interesting part of the case, and why social media sided almost unanimously with Depp before Heard had even testified. Savola opens up the forensic psychologist's testimony and how the surface level and the clinical depth level of personality tests differ. It closes on whether the trial is becoming a counter-movement to MeToo. Published 30 April 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP135Sinnu SavolaPsychologyTrial
2022-04-25 · Economy · EN
Oskari Lehtonen of Redstone VC and Claes Mikko Nilsen of Nordic Ninja VC explain how venture capital models differ when the money behind them comes from a German family business or a Japanese industrial giant. Nilsen explains why Panasonic, Honda, Omron and Japan's state bank decided to channel a hundred million euros into the Nordics and the Baltics, and why the fund's complete independence was a condition of the whole undertaking. The discussion covers LP and GP structures, exit channels, and why European funds nearly always include public money while American ones never do. Published 25 April 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP134Oskari LehtonenClaes Mikko NilsenVenture Capital
2022-04-19 · Society · EN
Major General retired Pekka Toveri and Sami Miettinen assess what Russia is trying to achieve by Victory Day on 9 May and why Mariupol is both a symbolic and a strategic necessity. The episode unpacks the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, the targeting behind the Neptune missiles, and the role of Bayraktar drones as a distraction. The discussion covers the structure of the battalion tactical group, Russia's manpower shortage and recruitment from its poorest regions, and the effect of sanctions on arms production. It closes on the risks around the Finnish and Swedish NATO applications, nuclear rhetoric, and the value of a domestic defence industry.
2022-04-15 · Economy · EN
Recorded in April 2022, days after Elon Musk's $54.20 public offer for Twitter. Sami Miettinen assesses the bid through an investment banker's eyes and condemns its execution: the board was not approached beforehand, shareholders were not committed under NDA, the disclosure obligation on a nine per cent stake was missed, and the decimals of the price were a joke. Ivan Puopolo and Mikael Vuorinen work through platform free speech and how far a private company's right to set its own rules extends. The point of this article, however, is hindsight: the episode's conclusion about trolling was wrong, and Miettinen says so out loud in episode 403.
NegotiatorEP132Sami MiettinenIvan PuopoloMikael Vuorinen
2022-04-10 · Society · EN
The people behind the map project, Emil Kastehelmi and John Helin, go through the state of the war in Ukraine region by region with Sami Miettinen after the Russian withdrawal from around Kyiv. They explain why the famous 60-kilometre column was never marked on their map and why the vast encirclement rumoured around Irpin never existed. The episode also shows how open source intelligence is really done and why the team always digs down to the original source. It closes on Finland's defence and evacuation planning. Published 10 April 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP131Emil KastehelmiJohn HelinUkraine
2022-04-07 · Society · EN
Pertti Torstila, former state secretary at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and a career diplomat, has known Hungary for almost five decades and still grows wine there. With Sami Miettinen he unpacks Viktor Orbán's election victory: why the war in Ukraine became Orbán's trump card and why people voted with their wallets. Torstila also explains the trauma of Trianon and the significance of voting rights for Hungarians beyond the borders. The episode covers his own role in Martti Ahtisaari's team in the Kosovo peace process and an assessment of whether Sweden will apply at all after Finland. Published 7 April 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP130Pertti TorstilaHungaryOrbán
2022-04-02 · Economy · EN
Economist Tuomas Malinen returns to the studio on April Fool's Day, but the subject is anything but a joke: Russia and Ukraine together produce a third of the world's exported wheat, sowing will not happen in Ukraine, and Malinen estimates that Finland's entire agricultural production could collapse. The cost spike in fertiliser and diesel hits farms, many already indebted. He calls for the agriculture minister to be replaced and for producer prices to rise. On energy the discussion covers peat and the taxonomy decision, and it closes on accelerating inflation and the ECB's rate rises. Published 2 April 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP129Tuomas MalinenFood CrisisSecurity of Supply
2022-03-31 · Tools · EN
Screenwriter and author Mike Pohjola discusses the difficulty of adaptation, with Jeff Bezos's billion-dollar bet as the main subject: Amazon's The Rings of Power, which builds a series out of Tolkien's Second Age on the strength of the appendices alone. Pohjola and Sami Miettinen go through the trailer and speculate about what is coming. They also unpack the fan row about dark-skinned elves and dwarves, and Pohjola points out that Tolkien barely describes anyone's appearance. Earlier on he explains how he localised The Office into the Finnish Konttori, and why the last two seasons of Game of Thrones failed. Published 31 March 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP128Mike PohjolaTolkienScreenwriting
2022-03-26 · Economy · EN
Project Lakka combined three Turku life science companies — Labrox, Kaivogen and Abacus Diagnostica — into the new Uniogen, and Sami Miettinen goes through the transaction with the people who did it. The guests are lawyer Jarkko Ruohola, Labrox's former CEO Henrik Sora, and Translink's Liina-Johanna Leeve, who sets out three valuation methods. The core of the episode is why an exchange ratio between three companies is a problem of an entirely different order than between two, and why a share exchange behaves completely differently from a cash deal. Ruohola explains how Abacus's more than 400 small shareholders had to be brought along voluntarily. Published 26 March 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP127Jarkko RuoholaHenrik SoraLiina-Johanna Leeve
2022-03-19 · Society · Research · EN
Colonel (ret.) and intelligence researcher Martti J. Kari takes Russia's strategic culture apart layer by layer on the Neuvottelija channel: the cruelty inherited from Mongol rule, the lost proto-democracy of Kievan Rus, the idea of God-given autocracy that moved to Moscow after Constantinople fell, and why the infallible tsar's mistakes always land on the boyars. Featuring Ukraine as buffer zone and invasion route, intelligence failure on the Yom Kippur model, confirmation bias in Putin's inner circle, the rivalry between the FSB, SVR and GRU, the Lubyanka raid and Beseda's house arrest, oligarchs holding possession without ownership, the palace-coup culture, Kari's two years drafting Finland's intelligence laws, tactical truth and gibridnaja pravda, the unbroken line of influence operations from the Cheka in 1923, and NATO as a question of generations. Recorded 19 March 2022, three weeks into the invasion. Kari died on 30 August 2023.
NeuvottelijaEP126RussiaUkraineMartti J. Kari
2022-03-12 · Society · Economy · EN
Major General (ret.) Pekka Toveri analyzes the first 2.5 weeks of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the Neuvottelija channel: why armored columns drove into a clump and were shot up, why the famous 60-kilometer column got stuck, what the T-72, T-64 and the Armata 'wonder-weapon' reveal about the fleet, why the Russian air force cannot mount an air operation, how railway-based logistics failed, and why a false political situation picture collapsed the whole plan. Featuring Bayraktar drones, Javelin and NLAW top-attacks, Iskander missile stocks, the 'learned victory' of Chechnya and Syria, Putin's siloviki machine and corruption, nuclear escalation, China and Taiwan, and Finland's road to NATO. The assessments are Toveri's, made in the situation of March 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP125UkraineRussiaPekka Toveri
2022-03-06 · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen answers viewer requests with a solo episode on Russia's war of aggression, Finland's road to NATO and the resilience of the monetary system. In the war's second week the Russian advance is stalling, the 40-kilometre column approaching Kyiv is stuck in mud, and the air force in particular has been exposed as weak — a significant observation for Finland. Miettinen's view is that Finland and Sweden will apply for NATO membership in spring 2022 and will get in, and that the risk is at its lowest right now. The second half unpacks the sanctions: what Swift actually is and how central bank money moves. Published 6 March 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP124Sami MiettinenUkraineNATO
2022-02-27 · Economy · EN
Petri Niemi has run seven listings and chaired the boards of most of those companies. In this episode he opens up why Siili Solutions was the case that opened Finland's First North, how Bilot dared to list in March 2020 into the teeth of the Covid crash, and what an anchor investor's thumbs-up actually buys you. The conversation moves on to the Bilot–Vincit merger, still pending shareholder approval at the time of recording, and to why listing is worth it: owners in different cycles, a liquid share as acquisition currency, and easier banking. It closes with the most common trap in software consultancies — products built by consultants on the bench — the one rule of board work, and the company he is proudest of.
NegotiatorEP123Sami MiettinenPetri NiemiIPO
2022-02-25 · Society · Economy · EN
Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and host Ivan Puopolo recorded on 25 February 2022, the day after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. A contemporaneous record rather than a retrospective: what the balance of forces looked like, why Russia advanced without air supremacy, whether SWIFT exclusion or targeted bank sanctions bite harder, and the Finnish NATO question at the moment it stopped being theoretical. The last third covers the information war, the Russian-speaking minority in Finland, a market crash as a buying opportunity, and Jokerit in the KHL.
2022-02-23 · Tools · EN
Puheenaihe hosts Rami Kurimo and Leevi Leivo tell Sami Miettinen how a podcast with two guests grew into one of Finland's most followed channels for public debate. At the start there was an ambitious website with three writers for every topic, and six months after launch they had sixteen subscribers. The pair walk through three eras: the nomad phase, when episodes were recorded in the back rooms of pubs and in a glass box out on the water, Rami's home studio, which saved the channel through the pandemic lockdowns, and the current studio in Pasila. Along the way they discuss why two guests at a time is an underrated format, how the Jussi Halla-aho and Elina Lepomäki episode turned growth around, and why they deliberately make episodes they know will draw downvotes. It closes with the sister channels, the dilemma of commercialisation, the goal of four episodes a day and live broadcasts, and why growing a podcast takes years of unpaid work. Published 23 February 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP122Rami KurimoLeevi LeivoPuheenaihe
2022-02-13 · Economy · EN
Enfuce founder and co-CEO Monika Liikamaa and finance-sector all-rounder Kirsi Larkiala explain to Sami Miettinen what actually happens behind a card payment. Liikamaa sets out why debit and credit are entirely different products, how a payment travels from the terminal through the acquirer and the card scheme to the issuer, and why a closed ecosystem such as the S Group is the cheapest way to pay. Larkiala argues the Nordic P27 is mostly a soft landing for banks that failed to make strategic decisions in time, and both unpack why payment traffic has never made money in Finland. The episode also covers the risk a central bank digital currency poses to commercial banks, the security of supply of telecom connections, the public-cloud breakthrough achieved with the financial supervisor, and Enfuce's road from bootstrapping to a 45 million growth round and a listing target. Published 13 February 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP121Monika LiikamaaKirsi LarkialaEnfuce
2022-02-05 · Economy · EN
Okmetic CEO Kai Seikku runs a Finnish silicon wafer maker owned by the Shanghai-listed NSIG — and serves as deputy CEO of the owner as well. The episode opens up what surprised an investment banker: why the Chinese buyer did not replace management but treated it as an asset rather than a cost line, and why plans to move the plant to China were buried. Seikku also explains how the global component shortage began with the car industry slamming on the brakes in spring 2020, and why building new capacity takes years. The sharpest section is China's negotiating culture: a letter of intent is not a deal, an NDA spreads information more effectively than anything else, the real decision-maker does not sit in the middle of the table, and a ganbei contest can only be won with a Finnish counter-move. It closes with the Finnish technology industry's new two-track bargaining model, board work, private equity, and how to land a first board seat. Recorded 5 February 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP120Kai SeikkuOkmeticChina
2022-01-23 · Economy · EN
Inderes financial sector analyst Sauli Vilén walks Sami Miettinen through the entire Finnish listed financial field, company by company. Why a zero-rate world made non-life insurance an unexpectedly attractive business, and why most of Sampo's value is still If, whose 2004 acquisition was one of the best deals in Finnish financial history. Why the Nordics became the world's best insurance market, and whether this could turn into the decade of Nordic banks. The sharpest passage concerns Handelsbanken's withdrawal from Finland: Vilén calls a public announcement of a sale the worst possible opening in a negotiation, because it puts the seller in a fire sale position from the moment of the announcement. Also: Taaleri's structure and Garantia's fate, CapMan's turnaround and the Norvestia deal, Titanium's exceptional efficiency, Alexandria's stake-building in EAB, Evli's rise from underperformer, and eQ, which Vilén rates among the best-run listed companies of the decade. Recorded 23 January 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP119Sauli VilénInderesAsset Management
2022-01-21 · Economy · Research · EN
Leevi Leivo puts a listener's question about the price of pasta to Sami Miettinen and Inderes analyst Sauli Vilén, and the answer runs from supply bottlenecks to why the ECB cannot raise rates at all. The episode explains fiscal dominance, the asset price inflation nobody measures, why the risk-free rate has become a guaranteed loss, and who actually pays when inflation runs at five per cent.
Sami MiettinenSauli VilénLeevi LeivoPuheenaiheInflation
2022-01-19 · Tools · EN
Sonja Hällfors, who had just won Helsingin Sanomat's rhetoric contest, delivers her winning speech again in the studio, and it is taken apart structure by structure. The task was tight: one minute, a position both for and against a county tax, and a quotation from the band Eppu Normaali. Hällfors says openly that she considered this her worst speech of the contest and that the decisive move was breaking the rules at the end. The most interesting part concerns stage nerves: she makes an explicit point that nervousness should not be equated with weakness, and that it is good for a winner to say so out loud. Published 19 January 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP118Sonja HällforsRhetoricPublic Speaking
2022-01-16 · Society · EN
Tere Sammallahti is a candidate in the West Uusimaa county elections and begins by admitting he does not like the reform at all: his first campaign theme would have been to cancel it, but since that is no longer politically possible, the question is how to make a catastrophe tolerable. He calls his position hostage-taking — if those who want less administration do not stand, the counties go to those who want more. His example of the wrong metric is the nurse staffing ratio, and he opposes a county tax on empirical grounds. The most uncomfortable section comes at the end: if services cannot be produced efficiently, something must be cut. Published 16 January 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP117Tere SammallahtiWellbeing Services CountyCounty Elections
2022-01-13 · Economy · Society · EN
Nordnet's Rahapodi frames Finland as a hostage and asks whether the markka could actually be brought back. Sami Miettinen walks through the two legal doctrines that decide it, why the 2015 Greek near-exit closed the loophole, what the €67bn Target 2 surplus is worth in a divorce, and the parallel-currency design he would propose instead — before concluding that a euro nobody can raise rates in may be a gift rather than a trap.
Sami MiettinenMartin PaasiMiikka LuukkonenRahapodiEuro
2022-01-09 · Economy · EN
Stefan Törnqvist returns to the channel and holds to the most provocative claim of his previous appearance: everyone benefits from the euro except the Finnish national economy. The sharpest economic policy observation concerns timing: because pay movements in Finland run one way and there is no downward flexibility in a downturn, large increases could never really be granted in a boom either — and he sees the same signs now as in 2007–2008. On monetary policy he holds that the Fed is tightening and the ECB cannot, because a market rate cannot be imposed on Italian debt without a banking crisis that Basel regulation has built into the balance sheets. Published 9 January 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP116Stefan TörnqvistEuroMonetary Policy
2022-01-02 · Tools · EN
Arto Koskelo spent ten years in the wine trade, became Iltalehti's wine writer, then announced he was giving up making media altogether — and six months later founded the 23 Minuuttia channel with Jussi Heikelä, which grew past 20,000 subscribers in eighteen months. The episode takes the format's logic apart: five episodes a week is a deliberate choice that makes the programme part of a listener's morning routine, and the name is a deliberately odd number matching the length of a commute. Koskelo describes his motive as clearing the Overton window, and Miettinen admits his own approach is more cautious: he does not say difficult things himself but asks them of his guests. Published 2 January 2022.
NeuvottelijaEP115Arto Koskelo23 MinuuttiaPodcast
2021-12-23 · Society · EN
A sequel to last year's episode, watched more than 120,000 times, in which Tuomas Malinen reviews which of his forecasts came true. The frame is the same: Acemoglu and Robinson's narrow corridor, in which democracy emerges from a balance between a despotic state and civil society. The carrying argument is constitutional rather than medical: if a level can be placed above the constitution by decree, on which the population is sorted, it will in Malinen's view be used again in another context. Miettinen says openly that he changed his own position two weeks earlier and sets out where he disagrees with his guest. Published 23 December 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP114Tuomas MalinenGreat ResetNarrow Corridor
2021-12-19 · Economy · EN
Two initiatives, one shared observation: financial matters are not learned in theory. Mikko Nurminen's Little Entrepreneurs brings a programme into primary schools where ten- and eleven-year-olds found a real company and end up selling their products to a real customer — and the decisive moment is when money changes hands. Timo Holmström's Investor School aims not to tell pupils about investing but to get a sixteen-year-old actually to open a securities account; the essential ingredient is community, because for young people social incentives do the work. The episode also covers a charity portfolio for low-income young people, why an entrepreneur needs investor education most, and the entrepreneur's social security. Published 19 December 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP113Mikko NurminenTimo HolmströmFinancial Literacy
2021-12-15 · Society · EN
Communications trainer Katleena Kortesuo and Ivan Puopolo consider when an apology is called for and when it is a mistake. Kortesuo's rule is precise and runs through the whole episode: you apologise when you have offended your own audience, not when the offended party was never your customer. The Africa Star row is her example of the wrong situation and Telia's response to social media pressure an example of the right one. In Sanna Marin's case the distinction produces two different conclusions. The episode also covers why a prime minister is under a magnifying glass of an entirely different order, the Jäätteenmäki case as a matter of procedural form, and Kulmuni and responsibility. Published 15 December 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP112Katleena KortesuoIvan PuopoloCommunications
2021-12-11 · Economy · EN
Vesa Vihriälä, professor of practice at the University of Helsinki, and doctoral researcher Antti Ronkainen go through what is left of the euro area's fiscal rules. The starting point is bleak: the 60 per cent debt limit has not kept member states in check for a long time, and the three per cent deficit rule failed on both sides — the preventive arm did not stop over-indebtedness, and the corrective arm led during the euro crisis to excessively tight fiscal policy and a self-inflicted recession in 2011–2012. The sharpest thread concerns the ECB, which through creative reinterpretation became a lender of last resort to states. Published 11 December 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP111Vesa VihriäläAntti RonkainenECB
2021-12-04 · Tools · EN
Jani Penttinen started at Bloodhouse sleeping in a sleeping bag on the office floor, made Supreme Snowboarding at Housemarque — one of the first games to use 3D cards and apparently the first Finnish game to sell over a million copies — and ended up in Las Vegas at Westwood Studios via a story worth hearing in full. The episode covers the arc of graphics processors and Nvidia's rise, why user-generated content is the future of games, what Supercell understood about the community of core players, and why the new generation plays block graphics. Published 4 December 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP110Jani PenttinenGamesGames Industry
2021-11-28 · Economy · EN
Juho Romakkaniemi, CEO of the Finland Chamber of Commerce, first explains what the chamber system actually is: companies organising themselves, born in the 1500s against pirates, in Finland since 1917 and with statutory duties. The episode's strongest single figure is the tax footprint: company activity generates a 69 billion euro flow into public finances, against a Finnish GDP of 275 billion and a state budget of 65 billion. Romakkaniemi's point is that the debate stares at corporation tax even though a company generates an enormous tax yield even when it makes no profit at all. He reports a recent survey on the shortage of skilled people, and the episode closes on the Laffer curve and two Finnish empirical examples of it. Published 28 November 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP109Juho RomakkaniemiChamber of CommerceTaxation
2021-11-19 · Economy · EN
Minna Helle, deputy CEO of Technology Industries of Finland, has seen the labour market from three sides: as chief negotiator for the nurses' union Tehy, as National Conciliator, and now on the employer side. The episode opens with what taught her most — the 2007 bargaining round, which she calls a collective delusion. The discussion covers the difference between an employment contract and a collective agreement, universal applicability and its design flaw, and the technology industry's autumn 2021 settlement and how it differed from the forest industry's line. The last part is about negotiation: a professional would have to choose reason, but nobody manages that in their own affairs — and people quarrel, issues do not. Published 19 November 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP108Minna HelleLabour MarketCollective Agreement
2021-11-14 · Economy · EN
Elias Rantapuska, head of the department of finance at Aalto University, defines meritocracy as an order in which you rise through innate talent, hard work, or a combination, and reminds us that it is historically young and, compared with a hierarchy based on birth, a good system in principle. The episode's sharpest argument concerns the asymmetry between financial and human capital: with a million-euro portfolio you get by on ten hours of advice, but turning talent into world class takes the ten thousand hours. That is why Piketty is, in his view, only partly right. The conversation widens into invisible meritocracies and into meta-work, which in an organisation is called management. Published 14 November 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP107Elias RantapuskaMeritocracyHuman Capital
2021-11-13 · Economy · EN
Gautam Basu and Mikko Järvinen present Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition concept and Search Funds operational model. The episode explores the four stages of acquisition entrepreneurship, target screening criteria, and buyer seller negotiation dynamics. Sami Miettinen lectures on deal valuation, EBITDA multiples, and the negotiation matrix. The discussion reveals how to identify ideal targets and structure win win transactions.
2021-11-13 · Economy · Tools · EN
Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition, or ETA, is a career path where you become an entrepreneur by buying an existing, profitable and boring company instead of founding a new one. This article assembles the whole model: the jockey–horse–trainer structure, the four stages of search, acquire, operate and exit, the three funding routes, target criteria of €2–20 million in revenue at roughly ten per cent EBITDA, the screening funnel from hundreds of targets to a single deal, and the sobering US base rates. It also covers deal valuation on EV/EBITDA multiples, the discounts that push the entry price down, the financing stack, and the full negotiation lesson: the win-win versus No Deal quadrant, the four levers of negotiation, signalling, and the Columbo tactic for gathering information.
ETAEntrepreneurship Through Acquisitionsearch fundacquisitionentrepreneurship
2021-11-07 · Society · EN
Mikael Vuorinen, an industrial engineering student at Aalto who runs a YouTube channel, unpacks contested questions in public debate through statistics, and the episode covers three of them. On the pay gap he draws a distinction often left undrawn in public: the ratio of total earnings is a different thing from a comparison of the same field, the same hours and the same weekend work, where the gap shrinks to a few cents. The second topic is the Africa Star row at the University of Helsinki, where his criticism targets the student union's role. The third is Extinction Rebellion Finland, which he opposes on two grounds. Miettinen offers his own emissions compensation as a counterweight and asks why market-based mechanisms are used so little relative to bans and taxes. Published 7 November 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP106Mikael VuorinenPay GapEquality
2021-10-31 · Economy · EN
Henri Liimatainen and Mikko Hiltunen, final-stage finance students at Aalto who make the Momentum podcast, reverse the roles: they had just interviewed Sami Miettinen for their own series, and here they reflect on the four careers they have covered — the rapper Spekti, professor Elias Rantapuska, Inderes founder Mikael Rautanen, and Miettinen. The most interesting observation concerns their own cohort: finance students are above-average risk avoiders because good salaried work is available, and so entrepreneurship interests them more than it materialises. The episode also covers when your own firm is a credibility risk, investing the student loan, the index base, and why the thesis and the first job set a career vector. Published 31 October 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP105Henri LiimatainenMikko HiltunenMomentum
2021-10-23 · Economy · EN
GnS Economics CEO Tuomas Malinen builds the episode on three levers whose combination he considers dangerous: growth in the money supply, production bottlenecks, and state control over individual behaviour. On inflation he sets out a mechanism the indicators failed to see: while the service sector was shut, its contribution to the consumer price index was zero or negative at the same time as goods ordered with stimulus cheques were congesting freight markets. He names two historical conditions for hyperinflation. The Fed's balance sheet doubled from four to eight trillion in two years, and in Malinen's view central banks are now trapped. The second half deals with freedoms and the covid pass, and Miettinen states his own position openly. Published 23 October 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP104Tuomas MalinenInflationHyperinflation
2021-10-20 · Economy · Tools · EN
Host and guest worked opposite ends of the same billion-dollar transaction. In 1998 Miettinen was a Credit Suisse First Boston associate on Project Autumn, the $1,050 million three-way carve-up of Ohmeda between Instrumentarium's Datex, Baxter and Becton Dickinson; Erkkilä was inside Datex dividing units and people before signing, and then ran the integration that took the company from 1,200 to 3,500 employees. Twenty-three years later she is co-founder and largest individual owner of Midaxo, the SaaS platform built precisely because the knowledge from an integration like that one stays trapped on individual laptops.
NegotiatorEP103Sami MiettinenKaija Katariina ErkkiläM&A
2021-10-12 · Economy · EN
Richard Nordström built a career at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and BCG until his mother fell ill and, at 34, he found himself organising an elderly parent's daily life alongside his job. Helppy grew out of that, with the mission that the family carer is not left alone. The hard core of the episode is a diagnosis of what is broken in Finnish home care: carers rotate so nobody knows who is visiting, the family member has to integrate five separate services and pay five separate invoices, and reporting is still done in a paper notebook. Nordström also opens up the business turn from the Dutch Buurtzorg neighbourhood model to a platform-like hybrid, and the funding round that brought in Icebreaker and two unicorn founders. Published 12 October 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP102Richard NordströmHelppyHome Care
2021-10-01 · Society · EN
A debrief recorded after the third episode of the Weekly Wisecrack Club, in which Sami Miettinen asks his guests how you actually live with free speech when your own livelihood is at stake. Miettinen admits that after more than a hundred episodes he still has a small amount of self-censorship running, and Sammallahti replies that the feeling is entirely natural but you get rid of it by building tolerance. Ivan Puopolo draws a distinction about his own position: he can protect himself, but not his business partners, through whom the pressure reaches his livelihood. The sharpest observation is the perspective illusion: Sammallahti's most widely shared tweet reached around a hundred thousand impressions, which means the vast majority of Finns never saw it. For a CEO they offer a concrete course of action when an employee is targeted, and the episode closes with why Finnish corporate communications are so cautious. Published 1 October 2021.
NeuvottelijaEP101Tere SammallahtiIvan PuopoloFree Speech
2021-09-22 · Economy · Society · EN
The second season of the Neuvottelija channel opens with the same guest as the first, but in a new role: Petri Roininen was elected leader of Sininen tulevaisuus (Blue Reform) the previous day, and the episode is recorded the following morning. The first question is one of governance — can the head of two listed companies also lead a party — and Roininen's own observation is that the criticism came from the right rather than the left. His programme compresses into the claim that the National Coalition Party has, across thirty years in government, been the chief architect of the social democratic tax state; his alternative is a family-centred welfare state. On economic policy he brings three numbers: 322,000 unemployed, a total tax rate higher than in 98 percent of the world's countries, and a gap to the OECD average worth 14,000 euros a year to a family of four. The most original passages are the five-tax wedge — two thirds of a customer's euro can go in tax before it reaches the entrepreneur — and the observation that debate on public finances stays stuck on income and expenditure when it should be looking at the balance sheet. The episode also covers the self-censorship that keeps business leaders out of politics.
NegotiatorEP100Sami MiettinenPetri RoininenBlue Reform
2021-09-18 · Economy · Tools · EN
Mika Sutinen and Antti Haapakorva have written a book with an uncomfortable thesis: strategy is not spoiled because it is hard, but because we ourselves made it too complicated and less inspiring. In their interview material only one company in four considers its own strategy execution adequate, and the diagnosis has two parts: focus is missing, and many organisations lack even the idea that execution ought to have a system. The remedy is a four-stage model running from understanding through vision and choices to execution, and its load-bearing principle is that modern people commit only to what they helped make. The most interesting passage is a disagreement left unresolved: Miettinen wants a meatier role for the board, Sutinen opposes it and grounds that in a question — can you as management be critical of your own superior if he works for you? The connecting thread is Musti ja Mirri's transformation from a loss-making company with 20 million in revenue to a market value of over a billion, and at the end the place of acquisitions in growth strategy: Sweden by buying, Norway greenfield.
NegotiatorEP99Sami MiettinenMika SutinenAntti Haapakorva
2021-09-10 · Tools · Economy · EN
Tuomas Rasila, founder of Stealth Black, builds assistive intelligence on top of GPT-3 that prepares sales and negotiation openings — but never sends anything itself. The episode's load-bearing claim is not efficiency but honesty: humans in a negotiation are prone to overselling, whereas a machine is not, because its opening is built from demonstrable facts. Rasila's most original concept is sales pollution. A badly prepared approach is not merely wasted time but a shared loss: the caller feels rejected, the recipient feels harassed, and both end up in a worse mood than before the conversation — and because only the deal won gets recorded, never the number of people bothered, the cost stays invisible. He likens it to emissions: polluting ought to cost something. The concrete cases are commercial property brokerage and corporate car sales, and the discussion connects to Timo Honkela's meaning negotiation and Martti Ahtisaari's principled negotiation, from which Miettinen derives a definition: a value is a useless word unless it is tied to behaviour you could call an algorithm — at which point it becomes a principle.
NegotiatorEP98Sami MiettinenTuomas RasilaStealth Black
2021-09-03 · Economy · EN
Ernst Grönblom, a portfolio manager at United Bankers, builds portfolios of fewer than 20 stocks — and the episode's premise makes that look hopeless from the start: Hendrik Bessembinder's dataset of 26,000 companies shows that about four percent produced all of the return above the risk-free rate over 90 years, and under half a percent produced half of it. Grönblom's answer begins with what he does not do: closet indexing can only be avoided with a sufficiently concentrated portfolio. The factors — network effects, a founder-led enlightened dictator, a strong brand, America — are not separate criteria but components of Charlie Munger's Lollapalooza effect, and it is their combination that he argues the market misprices. The most analytical stretch unpacks the decade-long growth-versus-value anomaly: he offers rising investor sophistication, real-time information, the structuredness of valuation, and quantitative investing — and finally the point that growth stocks cannot be treated as a monolith, because the same superstar phenomenon explains this gap too. Grönblom makes the counter-argument himself: a concentrated portfolio's good track record is precisely the kind a statistician cannot distinguish from luck.
NegotiatorEP97Sami MiettinenErnst GrönblomStock picking
2021-08-27 · Economy · Society · EN
Toni Heiskanen and Janne Piiroinen wrote the first original Finnish-language book on Bitcoin and published it free online. The longest and most analytical part of the episode is a point-by-point dismantling of Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Bitcoin critique: the zero-value claim rests on miners eventually stopping, yet addresses only the block reward and not transaction fees, while the slowness claim overlooks the Lightning Network entirely — never once mentioned in the six-page paper. In Heiskanen's view the critique matches what 2017-era critics argued before Lightning became common. The conversation covers Tether's stablecoin risk and the lesson of Mt. Gox, the energy use of proof of work and why a 30 percent fall in hash rate after China's mining ban did not bring the network down, and the market psychology of the halving cycle. The guests are openly pro-Bitcoin, but Heiskanen explicitly distances himself from maximalism as an identity and explains why he keeps an open mind about other protocols.
NegotiatorEP96Sami MiettinenToni HeiskanenJanne Piiroinen
2021-08-20 · Tools · Economy · EN
Nitor's Rami Sirkiä has been taking large companies into agile operating models since the Nokia Mobile Phones era, without ever having written a line of code. The episode's load-bearing observation is counter-intuitive: the hardest part of agility is not in the teams but in management, because management no longer gets to launch large programmes and is instead asked what matters today. Sirkiä describes SAFe as a nautical chart rather than a recipe, and stresses repeatedly that it takes no position on release cadence, feedback channels or who does the work — you could in principle run waterfall with SAFe. The conversation covers the limits of the pizza team, the Agile Release Train as a team of teams, the quarterly rhythm of PI planning, DevOps as a shared culture, and flow efficiency in place of utilisation. It closes with advice that runs against his own firm's sales pitch: hire the developers yourselves, because you are building your own future competitiveness.
NegotiatorEP95Sami MiettinenRami SirkiäNitor
2021-08-14 · Economy · EN
Pia Santavirta, CEO of the Finnish Venture Capital Association, sets out the structure of Finland's private capital market and its rapid professionalisation: 16 new venture capital funds in five years, a record year of nearly a billion euros in startup investment during the pandemic, and roughly half of the new companies on the Helsinki exchange coming from private equity ownership. The episode's most concrete passage is an anatomy of advocacy: the double taxation of funds-of-funds prevented foreign investors from putting money into Finnish funds, and the fix was initially limited to European players until a single phone call extended it worldwide. Santavirta also explains why private-equity-backed listings have outperformed the market, what ESG requirements mean for access to financing, and why she published the industry's diversity figures even though they were poor. Miettinen concedes twice in the episode that he had been wrong: about private equity listings, and about impact investing.
NegotiatorEP94Sami MiettinenPia SantavirtaPrivate equity
2021-08-07 · Society · EN
Installation artist Panu Ruotsalo comes in from Billnäs to describe how the four glass-embedded works commissioned from him by Sami Miettinen — Power, Principle, Sociability and Analytical Thinking — came into being. The subjects are the four core themes of Neuvotteluvalta, the book by Miettinen and Juhana Torkki, and the question the episode turns on is whether an abstract concept can be depicted abstractly at all. Ruotsalo opens up the materials and symbolism of each piece: goat willow as the root of growth, 22-carat gold as the plane where everything is refined into something higher, glass as the sphere of the human psyche where anything is possible — and the colours, from whisky-toned Power to the endless deep blue of Analytical Thinking. The episode also covers Ruotsalo's move from photorealism to abstraction inspired by Reidar Särestöniemi, a work for Sisu Partners whose auction proceeds went undiminished to the New Children's Hospital, Aalto EE's art collection, and the revival of the Billnäs ironworks. The most unusual passage is Ruotsalo's account of why he deliberately avoids seeing other artists' work — and Miettinen's observation that this is the same phenomenon negotiators call rapport.
NegotiatorEP93Sami MiettinenPanu RuotsaloArt
2021-07-30 · Economy · Society · EN
Alex af Heurlin, a journalist at Helsingin Sanomat's HS Vision, describes what it is like to write about investing in a year when SPACs, the IPO boom, modern monetary theory and the EU's pandemic stimulus were all in the headlines at once. The episode is a conversation between two market watchers in which the journalist criticises Finland's first SPAC bluntly — 'why would you want to buy a pig in a poke' — and in which two readings of MMT are set against each other: for af Heurlin it is a creditable description of what is already happening, for Miettinen an accurate description of the system but branded from the left. Miettinen adds that MMT does not work in the euro area at all, because its mechanisms require your own currency and your own taxation. The discussion turns to Finns' weak financial wealth, a tax rate near the OECD top, and the zero-sum culture described by Juha Hurme. It closes on Roger Wessman's critique of equity saving, Bessembinder's research on the few winning stocks, and the power of the tech giants. Also included: a frank exchange on why journalists should appear as individuals.
NegotiatorEP92Sami MiettinenAlex af HeurlinHS Vision
2021-07-23 · Economy · Society · EN
Aalto University researcher Thomas Taussi argues that Milton Friedman's classic 1970 essay has been widely misread. Friedman did not dispute the importance of stakeholders and did not condemn all corporate social responsibility — he criticised one particular doctrine, in which a company's resources are spent on activities with no purpose of supporting the business. The episode's load-bearing observation is conceptual: responsibility sets itself no limits and does not explain itself, with the consequence that almost anything can be pursued under its cover. Taussi locates the source of his own scepticism precisely — the question is not whether the goals are good, but whether limits can be set at all on things that depart from the core business. The examples include Neste Oil's biofuel turn, Stora Enso's China venture, the Kemijärvi pulp mill, the Finnair deportation controversy and Finnwatch's position, the Google and Apple dismissals, and Basecamp's depoliticisation. Taussi finally explains woke excesses through Thorstein Veblen and costly-signalling theory. Miettinen offers a counter-reading that Taussi accepts as an addition but does not share.
NegotiatorEP91Sami MiettinenThomas TaussiCorporate responsibility
2021-07-15 · Economy · Tools · EN
Upper-secondary students Niklas Snäll, Waltteri Helisalo and Luka Mansikka from the international business programme at Lauttasaari secondary school won an entrepreneurship competition with their health app Nudvi. The idea came out of a school course, and the trio realised it was too good to leave as coursework. The episode's core is a product insight that recurs in several forms: existing health apps demand too much manual entry from the user, so only the most enthusiastic keep using them. Nudvi's premise is to collect data from elsewhere — the phone and connected devices — rather than requiring a separate smart ring. Miettinen brings his own Oura data, the pricing of intermittent fasting apps and the history of gym programmes, and the conversation closes on the freemium model, the role of community in a premium service, and why a mobile app displaces browser services. The channel's first three-guest episode.
NegotiatorEP90Sami MiettinenNiklas SnällWaltteri Helisalo
2021-07-09 · Economy · Society · EN
The Negotiator channel's first multi-guest episode: journalist Sami Metelinen, author of Libera's euro report, and economic analyst Toni Vuorinen ask what the EU's €750 billion recovery package is really about. Vuorinen advances the hypothesis that the package is an empirical experiment: the ECB buys the joint debt and converts it into a zero-coupon perpetual, and if nothing follows, the same is done to member states' debts. The end point of his scenario is a return to national currencies via Sami Miettinen's ECU-2 basket model. Metelinen considers it possible but unlikely: he sees a federal objective running back to the 1970s, and the over-indebted countries have no interest in returning to their own currencies. Both reject the claim that the package is an Italian rescue — ECB purchases keep Italy funded regardless. Also covered: the EU's power to tax, the 2012 Greek haircut as an example of bluffing, German ordoliberalism bending, and the Swiss model as a template for a workable federation.
NegotiatorEP89Sami MiettinenSami MetelinenToni Vuorinen
2021-07-02 · Economy · EN
Nasdaq Helsinki CEO Henrik Husman opens up Finland's third listing wave in spring 2021. More than a hundred companies have left the Helsinki exchange since 2000, but around 130 have joined — the net change is positive, though without the arrivals the list would be short. The episode covers what a First North listing demands of a company, what a Certified Adviser adds, and what the SPAC structure then being trialled in Finland actually is: Husman stresses it is not a back door to the exchange, because the combined entity must meet the same listing criteria. Also discussed: the reversal in reputation of private-equity-backed listings, whose returns have beaten the market; anchor investors and Puuilo's 30,000 subscribers; retail allocation cuts; high-frequency trading and volume internalised by banks. Husman also names a Finnish deterrent — dividend taxation that keeps well-capitalised family companies off the exchange.
NegotiatorEP88Sami MiettinenHenrik HusmanStock exchange
2021-06-24 · Economy · EN
Compensation specialist and investment banker Yrjö Kopra has built Finnish option and share incentive schemes since the 1980s, and he calls the tax reform on employee share issues in unlisted companies, effective January 2021, the most significant tax incentive of his career. Shares can now be sold to staff at net asset value with no tax consequences — a 50 to 90 percent discount to fair value — and the reform covers roughly 99 percent of Finnish companies. Kopra's central claim is that this is not about pay but about an ownership ethos: a holding worth €10,000 changes what an employee talks about. The episode covers the strike-price problem with options and the shift to free share awards, the two sides of dilution, Marimekko's employee share issue, the politically motivated option ban in state-interest companies, and how long-term incentives drove the strategic turns at Neste and the media companies.
NegotiatorEP87Sami MiettinenYrjö KopraCompensation
2021-06-20 · Economy · EN
Fredman Group's owner Peter Fredman has made an 'outrageous promise' in the Kasvuryhmä growth network to take his group from €30m to €100m in revenue in a little over three years. The episode examines why Finland lacks a German-style Mittelstand and opens up three communities — the Family Business Association, Kasvuryhmä and the entrepreneurs' delegation of the Confederation of Finnish Industries — which Miettinen describes bluntly as closed circles. Fredman concedes the criticism and says he has challenged all three to open up. The substantive core is the division of ownership roles: he has served simultaneously as CEO, board chair and owner, and argues that blurring those roles is one of the most common reasons growth strategies stall. Also covered: the switch from the Eskimo brand to the Fredman brand ahead of the public controversy, Board-as-a-Service thinking, the claim that an unlisted company is the best owner's interface for building wealth, and the IoT-sensor service business meant to deliver half the targeted growth.
NegotiatorEP86Sami MiettinenPeter FredmanFamily business
2021-06-16 · Society · Economy · EN
A quick reflection on Finland's June 2021 municipal elections, in which Ivan Puopolo and Sami Miettinen ask whether Finland has an economic right at all. The National Coalition Party took Helsinki, Turku and Tampere, but in Puopolo's view no party campaigns on shrinking the public sector — even the Coalition's right flank talks only about balancing it, and Petteri Orpo's 'growing the common cake' means in practice a larger tax take. On Iltalehti's values map Finland's most right-wing party sits on the centre line, with both main US parties clearly to its right. Miettinen offers a tax-rebel counterpoint: Finland's richest percentile is poor by international standards, the total tax rate is 42–43 percent against the OECD's 34, and by Laffer-curve logic a tax cut could raise revenue. The episode ends on the observation that nobody in Finland proposes lowering the tax rate.
NegotiatorEP85Sami MiettinenIvan PuopoloMunicipal elections
2021-06-10 · Tools · Economy · EN
Jan Ollila, partner at Dittmar & Indrenius, opens up the lawyer's real world, where a contract is not a shared understanding but a question of what the other side can ultimately be compelled to do. The sharpest observation concerns education: a law degree contains no negotiation training at all, even though negotiation is the core of the profession — and among top international lawyers it is 'shocking how little they understand of the human mind'. Two cases are offered in evidence, both of them dead deals.
2021-06-04 · Economy · Society · EN
Stefan Törnqvist opposes neither the euro nor a federation — he opposes Finland drifting into them like driftwood, without a strategy. The core of the argument is a municipal-merger analogy: before a merger a municipality puts its own house in order on borrowed money, because the infrastructure stays put either way. Finland does the opposite. He closes by sketching three end points for the world record in stimulus: a crash, hyperinflation or political conflict.
2021-05-29 · Economy · Tools · EN
DLA Piper's Jonathan Andersin walks through the paperwork of a funding round: the term sheet, the investment agreement and — most important — the shareholders' agreement you live with until exit. One fact frames everything: a VC invests other people's money, and the protective terms follow from that. In an EIF study of some 2,000 exits, only a fifth returned the capital. Miettinen supplies a live example from the bottom bin: his own EUR 4,320 loss.
2021-05-26 · Society · Tools · EN
Psychologist Sinnu Savola interviews Sami Miettinen on the social and psychological side of negotiation. Along the way: Martti Ahtisaari's fifteen-person negotiating team and the realisation that almost nobody knows how to negotiate as a team, emotional regulation as a stress function running from eustress to the amygdala hijack, why personality models remain useful even when crude, the alpha–beta–gamma roles in a negotiating team, why the seemingly weak role gathers the most information, and where negotiation ends and manipulation begins.
Sami MiettinenSinnu SavolaNegotiationPsychologyEmotional regulation
2021-05-25 · Research · Tools · EN
Psychologist Sinnu Savola says plainly that DISC and Myers-Briggs are not used in professional psychology, and explains why: a weak scientific basis, forced choices between items that are not opposites, and a model that pushes very different people into the same box. Big Five is statistically sounder but still needs a representative sample. The core claim: psychometric properties, IQ included, work statistically but poorly at the level of one individual.
2021-05-21 · Economy · EN
Kimmo Eloranta raises capital for unlisted funds from professional investors and explains how the money actually moves: a commitment to the fund, a capital call only at the moment of investment, add-on acquisitions, and the exit proceeds returning to the investor. The core argument is why the unlisted market has outgrown the exchange — majority ownership, crisis playbooks and operational teams. Miettinen challenges him on the information advantage and on ordinary savers being locked out.
2021-05-16 · Economy · Society · EN
Aalto University's special adviser on sustainable development corrects a widespread misunderstanding: the EU taxonomy is not merely a climate instrument but rests on six criteria. She describes how it swelled from an investor's tool into a political instrument, and warns against national over-implementation. Miettinen presses her on the treatment of hydro and nuclear power. In the background, a shared student-politics victory and the birth of Aalto University as a merger of three egos.
2021-05-12 · Economy · Tools · EN
Juho Lipsanen has never had a Finnish-speaking boss. In this episode he applies a Swedish and Swiss toolkit to three companies that have created, or could create, more than a billion euros of value from almost nothing: Coronaria, Ilmatar Windpower and Aico. Along the way: Barnevik's charm offensive, Harvard's definition of strategy, peat in three different sciences, and the argument that Finnish companies are sold far too early.
2021-05-08 · Economy · Society · EN
Tuomas Malinen returns to the channel just before the decisive vote on the EU recovery instrument and calls on Parliament to vote it down. The core argument sits in Articles 310 and 125: once they are set aside, no treaty article can be relied on again — security guarantees included. Two consolations are taken apart, the claim of an investment programme and the claim that the ECB will monetise it away, alongside the question of who bears responsibility if 'one-off' does not hold.
2021-05-06 · Society · Economy · EN
Marjo Miettinen, chair of Ensto Group and of Technology Industries of Finland, opens up a concept she found in her father's diaries: the owner's tripartite, in which the owner takes the risk, the employee brings the competence, and society's task is to create the operating environment. The episode also covers her doctoral thesis on shop stewards, where grounded theory produced 59 competence areas in six categories — showing the role to be far more demanding than the employer-side stereotype allows. It continues into Technology Industries' dual-membership solution, the merits and drawbacks of universally applicable collective agreements, industrial peace seen through an international owner's eyes, and trust as a property of institutions. Recorded in May 2021, months before anyone knew how many companies would choose national bargaining.
NegotiatorEP76Sami MiettinenMarjo MiettinenTrust
2021-04-28 · Economy · Society · EN
Ville Valkonen, who heads advocacy at the Finnish Landlord Association, explains why the rental market is local down to the city block and why the largest centres have pulled away from mid-sized cities. The core of the episode is the tension between debt and regulation: leverage is all but compulsory, yet a buyer should be able to see how many layers of debt hide inside a flat's price. Also: the financing-charge tax tightening, the 450 per cent debt cap proposal, the limits of Airbnb, and three pressures on construction.
2021-04-25 · Economy · EN
Lamor CEO Mika Pirneskoski describes how a Porvoo maker of oil spill response equipment became a global environmental services company that supplied two thirds of the equipment used in the Deepwater Horizon operation. The episode also covers the negotiating position of a small family firm across the table from oil states' ministries, the waste plastic ecosystem, Kuwait's three-billion clean-up, and, along the way, Brazilian business and the asset price inflation created by stimulus.
2021-04-18 · Society · Research · EN
Doctor of philosophy and 15-year MEP Eija-Riitta Korhola explains what makes a problem wicked: a one-dimensional solution creates further problems. The practical cases are blocking the waste incineration directive as a first-term MEP, the swinging regulation of biofuels, and Germany's Energiewende. The episode closes on why labelling people's motives poisons decision-making, and why one must be able to change one's mind.
2021-04-11 · Economy · EN
Juhani Huopainen dismantles, one by one, the usual arguments for the euro's benefits to Finland — low interest rates, exchange-rate stability and vanished conversion costs — and shows they are explained by other factors. Behind it lies his standing public wager on proving the euro's net benefits. The conversation moves on to the recovery fund, Target 2 balances, the IMF's Greek assessments, and why the federation debate is systematically avoided in Finland.
2021-03-27 · Society · Economy · EN
Sami Kuusela unpacks the term he coined — business socialism: many entrepreneurs love business but do not find their values on the right. The core claim is that safety nets are precisely what make Finns free to take risk — met by Sami Miettinen's counter-figures on the total tax rate, the subsidiary economy and the shortage of capital. Also: Kuusela's own journey from 'hoodie guy' to humbled clarifier, the municipal campaign, and a bolder Helsinki.
2021-03-21 · Research · Economy · EN
Unikie CTO Erkka Niemi sets out where autonomous driving actually stands: from the DARPA challenges to Waymo, why lidar is the field's number-one technology and why Tesla's camera-only line puzzles the industry, and the five levels of autonomy. Includes the liability question in a fatal accident, Unikie's approach of moving sensors from the car into the car park's walls, and the surprisingly large business case in automating a car factory's internal logistics.
2021-03-14 · Society · Economy · EN
Heikki Pursiainen revisits the arguments of his book Paska Suomi five years on: which he still stands behind and where he has softened. At the centre is the state-centredness of Finnish civil society and culture, the question of where the line for public support runs, and what digitalisation does to the justifications for public broadcasting and library compensation.
2021-03-07 · Society · EN
Journalist and author Matti Virtanen discusses his forthcoming book on political extremes and identity politics. The episode traces identity politics to 1970s America, sets out Eric Hobsbawm's defence of universalism against fragmentation, and works through the Finnish version: the National Coalition's mayoral race, Atte Kaleva's communist joke, the trans law and the fight over word choices, and reporting trips to Sápmi and to nationalist circles.
2021-02-28 · Society · EN
Leevi Leivo of the Puheenaihe podcast opens up Benedict Anderson's classic Imagined Communities: how a shared language, media and capitalism built the nation state. The episode separates community from network, weighs the climate movement, sports clubs and online platforms as transnational communities, and argues that the central problem of our time is communitylessness.
2021-02-23 · Economy · EN
A recording of the closing presentation at the Finnish Bar Association's Bond Day: the four segments of Finland's bond market, the role of the bondholders' representative, and the written procedure that amends terms in 15 banking days. The cases are Kojamo, Containerships, Stockmann and Elematic, where creditors cut their own claim from 35 million to 15 million to save the company's value without bankruptcy. It closes on direct lending and the tokenisation of commercial real estate debt.
2021-02-16 · Economy · Research · EN
The opening episode of a crypto series. Martin Wichmann, one of Aave's founders, explains what decentralised finance means and why Ethereum's smart contracts set it apart from the Bitcoin protocol. Covers proof of work against proof of stake, the collateral behind stablecoins and Tether's audit problem, the ICO boom and the SEC's Howey test, and Lagarde's digital euro and its risk to the deposit base of banks.
2021-02-11 · Economy · EN
The roles are reversed: Ville Tolvanen interviews the channel's founder about ownership. The episode works through the structure of Finnish wealth — around 700 billion euros of private wealth, mostly in property, with two thirds of the stock market's value in foreign hands — and why entrepreneurs sell too early: too little domestic capital, too few follow-on financiers, and a tax system that penalises listing.
2021-02-05 · Economy · Society · EN
Tuomas Malinen, CEO of GnS Economics, argues that the EU recovery fund is not a one-off but the end point of a transfer union, and that currency unions historically have only two directions: they break up, or they become political unions. The episode covers the two functions of an exchange rate, Esko Aho's 1998 warning, and why Finland's longest recession came during a period without a currency of its own.
2021-02-01 · Economy · Society · EN
Chief economist Mauri Kotamäki unpacks the concept of elasticity and its link to the Laffer curve, explains why micro and macro elasticities lead to different policy conclusions, and takes apart the structural unfairness of Finnish earnings-related unemployment insurance: every employee pays the contribution, but only fund members receive the earnings-related part.
2021-01-27 · Economy · EN
Inderes chief analyst Sauli Vilén explains why Finnish equity research shrank from 150 analysts to barely 50, and how Inderes built a model in its place where the companies under coverage pay for the research and investors get it free. The episode examines independence through the incentive risks of both models, and closes on Sampo as an example of how capital allocation decides an investment case.
2021-01-22 · Tools · Economy · EN
Ville Tolvanen argues that a board should be a value-adding service the owner orders, not a supervisory organ inherited from the manufacturing era. The episode covers why owners and CEOs regard board meetings as wasted time, how the roles should be grouped like a Formula One team, and why supply and demand for board seats in Finland are badly out of balance.
2021-01-17 · Tools · Economy · EN
Henri Sora, co-author of a Finnish book on running strategy with OKRs, explains the mechanism that travelled from Andy Grove's Intel through John Doerr to Google: a short text objective, numeric key results beneath it, a maximum of five per level, weekly confidence tracking, and — critically — no money attached. The episode covers why tying a bonus to a key result turns goal-setting into the budget game, why OKRs are not KPIs, how a quarter boundary should be run, and where the model gets awkward: sales, and individual performance review.
NegotiatorEP58Sami MiettinenHenri SoraOKR
2021-01-17 · Tools · Economy · EN
OKR - objectives and key results - is a short-horizon change management method that travelled from Andy Grove's Intel with John Doerr into Google and from there into the world. This article assembles the model whole: the division of labour between a textual objective and numeric key results, at most five objectives per level, weekly confidence tracking, the retrospective at the turn of the quarter, and the two conditions whose breach destroys the model - no money attached to a key result, and no punishment for falling short. It also covers the difference from KPIs, where OKR sits between strategy and everyday work, radical transparency and its limits, and the two areas where the model is known to get hard: sales and individual appraisal. The source is Negotiator episode 58 with Henri Sora, co-author of a Finnish book on the model.
OKRobjectives and key resultsgoal settingchange managementKPI
2021-01-12 · Society · EN
Recorded six days after the storming of the Capitol and a week before the inauguration, researcher Antti Ronkainen reads the event as a chain of security failures with an unresolved question of intent at its centre. The episode covers why Trump was never capable of a conventional coup, the split between Republican 'gamers' and 'breakers', why holding the Senate would have served the party better than Trump did, and what the coordinated deplatforming of a sitting president means for the relationship between Big Tech and power.
NegotiatorEP57Sami MiettinenAntti RonkainenDonald Trump
2021-01-07 · Society · Economy · EN
Compensate CEO Elina Kajosaari explains why the carbon sequestration market is the Wild West and what verifying quality compensation actually takes: of roughly a hundred projects drawn from the best of the two best-known standards, only about ten per cent passed Compensate's own criteria. The episode covers the design flaw in capitalism that leaves climate harm out of prices, the correct order of reduction and compensation, over-compensation through quality multipliers, and the Finnish legal ambiguity that froze the whole sector — is sequestering carbon a service or a money collection?
NegotiatorEP56Sami MiettinenElina KajosaariCompensate
2021-01-01 · Society · Tools · EN
Kaisa Mäkelä, founder of the startup Awareness Recreated, discusses consciousness, cognitive distortions and how non-verbal feedback exposes your own biases. This is an informal feedback episode that also covers the non-verbal synchronisation broken by remote work, the channel dependency of online communities, and trolls as a psychological phenomenon. Towards the end Miettinen challenges the standing of Freud and Jung, and Mäkelä explains why the old theories have survived — even though they are details within an extremely broad science.
NegotiatorEP55Sami MiettinenKaisa MäkeläPsychology
2020-12-23 · Society · Economy · EN
The channel's audience voted for the year's closing episode and chose Tuomas Malinen on the Great Reset. He argues the V-shaped recovery is artificial — built on record global debt and debt moratoria that suspend normal bankruptcy law — and reads the World Economic Forum's programme as a path towards greater state control sold on attractive language. The episode covers central bank digital currency, Acemoglu and Robinson's narrow corridor, and Malinen's own recipe: take the economic hit, keep the freedoms.
NegotiatorEP54Sami MiettinenTuomas MalinenGreat Reset
2020-12-17 · Economy · Society · EN
Elina Valtonen (still Lepomäki at the time of recording), deputy chair of the National Coalition Party, works through the themes of her book Vapauden voitto and answers the question the channel's viewers sent in: has she become a defender of the euro and a federal Europe? The answer is no — the monetary union has, on her account, stood on clay feet almost from the start. The episode opens up the basic account she designed in 2013, universalism as a principle for allocating public goods, the 95/5 split in earnings-related unemployment funding, the spending automaton built into the health and social services reform, and why federalism means the opposite in Germany to what it means in Finland. It closes on whether the ECB's digital euro could deliver a basic account — and on Miettinen's ECU-2 model.
NegotiatorEP53Sami MiettinenElina ValtonenElina Lepomäki
2020-12-12 · Economy · Society · EN
Tiina Landau, co-author of a book on earning excess returns through responsibility, unpacks the mechanics of responsible investing from a practitioner's standpoint. The episode opens by correcting Milton Friedman — he never said profit should be made at any cost — and moves on to Maersk's Indian shipbreaking beaches, where Norway's KLP did not sell but stayed to engage. It covers the three letters of ESG and how their order came about, the toolkit of influence from exclusion to activist funds, Stora Enso's Chinese pulp mill as a genuinely contested case, green bonds and the EU taxonomy — and Landau's daily question: is responsibility risk management or impact?
NegotiatorEP52Sami MiettinenTiina LandauResponsible investing
2020-12-08 · Society · EN
Journalist Ivan Puopolo argues that free speech is a relationship between a citizen and the state and nothing else — which is why a broadcaster, an employer or a platform declining to publish you restricts nothing. The episode opens with a live free speech test on Puopolo's own identities and moves through the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, what the word 'structural' adds to 'racism', why Macron's Enlightenment defence found so few supporters, the problem of judging intent in hate speech law, and the Nordic gender equality paradox. Miettinen pushes back throughout on bias in hiring and on whether the market really corrects it.
NegotiatorEP51Sami MiettinenIvan PuopoloFree speech
2020-12-03 · Society · Economy · EN
Christian Democrat leader and former MEP Sari Essayah answers the claim Sami Miettinen heard on a visit to the European Parliament: there is no opposition in the EU. Her answer is partly yes and more interesting than a yes — there is no government-versus-opposition structure, and what takes its place is a triangle in which the Commission and Parliament form a pair and the Council is the body that watches the money. The episode covers the Commission's monopoly on initiative, the division of labour between rapporteur and shadow rapporteur, the drift from directives to regulations, the failure of the lead-candidate system, and the passage of the recovery fund, in which treaty articles were, in her words, interpreted very creatively. She closes with a concrete reform: give the Council a right of initiative.
NegotiatorEP50Sami MiettinenSari EssayahEU
2020-11-29 · Economy · Tools · EN
Matias Mäenpää, co-author of the EXIT book series, explains why the core message is that an exit is a consequence rather than a cause — and how Finnish media covered company sales as lottery wins until a second angle was introduced. The episode covers the finding across 31 cases that partial private equity acquisitions satisfied founders less often than industrial buyers did, the psychological contract as the real determinant of a deal's success, unfair advantage as an investment philosophy, and why none of the 31 retired. Plus Mäenpää's move to Luxembourg and why remote negotiation smokes out the incompetent.
NegotiatorEP49Sami MiettinenMatias MäenpääEXIT
2020-11-25 · Economy · Society · EN
Kim Väisänen and Sami Miettinen work through how a person actually moves between wealth classes in Finland — and why most imagined shortcuts are not shortcuts. The episode dismantles the myth that income classes are permanent, notes that Finland's poorest postcode is almost always Otaniemi, and works out what the 1:10 ratio between earned and capital income means for the tax debate. Startup investing turns out to be a poor route to wealth, leaving one: building and selling a company. Väisänen sets out the five things that have to be right for a good exit, and why preparation takes two years rather than two quarters.
NegotiatorEP48Sami MiettinenKim VäisänenExit
2020-11-24 · Economy · Society · EN
The episode where Sami Miettinen's ECU-2 proposal meets a serious opponent. Puheenaihe put him opposite MP and economist Juhana Vartiainen, who does not buy it. The proposal is to reverse the euro's own construction: reintroduce national currencies as parallel money and define the euro juridically as their weighted sum. Vartiainen's objection is direct — if the willingness to tax German surpluses does not exist, no currency architecture creates it, and Finland's adjustment problem is domestic. Also covered: Target2, federation without transfers, fiscal dominance and Greece in 2015.
2020-11-18 · Economy · Tools · EN
Sparkmind.vc managing director Marko Kyyrönen describes what it takes to raise a €60 million specialist fund in Finland and invest it in education technology. The episode covers Kahoot's path from a $350 million valuation to $2.5 billion, Fuzu's model in East African labour markets, Aino Saarinen's research on how long the effects of early childhood education actually last, the principle that education comes before tech, and the shift in credentialing from university brands to demonstrated evidence. Kyyrönen closes on what separates an interesting pitch from the other 300 — and why a market of a few hundred million is not enough.
NegotiatorEP47Sami MiettinenMarko KyyrönenSparkmind
2020-11-15 · Economy · Research · EN
Juhana Vartiainen traces the development of macroeconomics from Adam Smith to the present: the division of labour, Ricardo's comparative advantage and Dani Rodrik's argument that the losers explain Trumpism, Marx as valid analysis of a transient historical phase, Marshall's marginalism, Keynes as the founder of macroeconomics and Hayek as the counterweight. The closing section covers Friedman's critique of inflation expectations, central bank independence that succeeded rather too well, and why Vartiainen does not consider Modern Monetary Theory new — along with where its real risk lies.
NegotiatorEP46Sami MiettinenJuhana VartiainenHistory of economics
2020-11-10 · Economy · Research · EN
Lauri Holappa, who wrote his doctoral thesis on the mechanics of Modern Monetary Theory and served as economic policy adviser to Li Andersson through the coronavirus spring, works through MMT's foundations with Sami Miettinen. Both treat it as a description of the system rather than a policy recommendation. The episode runs from chartalism — taxation as the basis of a currency's value — through the demolition of the money multiplier, the mechanics of endogenous money, Holappa's bond market power fallacy, and why the real constraint is not credit markets but inflation. It closes on the actual causes of hyperinflation, Miettinen's ECU-2 proposal, and what a functioning euro would require.
NegotiatorEP45Sami MiettinenLauri HolappaMMT
2020-11-06 · Economy · Tools · EN
Round2 Capital founder Christian Czernich explains revenue-based funding: capital advanced against a two-to-six per cent share of revenue, fully non-dilutive, with no conversion right and no argument over valuation. He walks through the metrics he underwrites on — ARR growth, the ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost, net churn against upselling, and a fourth that is routinely ignored: engagement. The episode also covers what bootstrapping meant for Vainu, why B2B SaaS scales far slower than people assume, and why a company transforming from licences to subscriptions looks worse in the numbers precisely while it is getting better.
NegotiatorEP44Sami MiettinenChristian CzernichRound2 Capital
2020-10-29 · Economy · Society · EN
GNS Economics' Tuomas Malinen and Sami Miettinen work through the economic consequences of the coronavirus second wave and arrive at the episode's central worry: every solution being offered to the crisis is a centralised one. The economy already collapsed in the second quarter, and that collapse has been prevented from realising through bankruptcy moratoria — a carpet pulled over the chasm. The core of the discussion is central bank digital currency and the Chinese model, in which private payment systems are forced to settle in central bank money, opening a path where the commercial banking system becomes unnecessary. Malinen closes on the question the episode keeps returning to: will we let fear take away freedoms bought with tens of millions of lives?
NegotiatorEP43Sami MiettinenTuomas MalinenGNS Economics
2020-10-26 · Society · Tools · EN
Second Nature Security CTO Juho Ranta unpacks the Vastaamo data breach and extortion while it was still unfolding: what white hat and black hat actually mean, why Tor and bitcoin are double-edged in the same way, and why you should neither pay the extortionist nor read the leaked files. The episode also covers common misunderstandings about GDPR, password practice and two-factor authentication, the three identifiers of which only two can be changed, and why security has to be run on the business's terms rather than by staring at a single system.
NegotiatorEP42Sami MiettinenJuho Ranta2NS
2020-10-21 · Economy · Tools · EN
IPR VC managing director Timo Argillander explains how a venture capital business is built on intangible rights — in practice film and television content. The premise is that manufacturing faces Asian price competition while intangible content cannot be copied the same way, so value can be created in Finland and sold worldwide. The episode covers Disney's strategy of buying rights while competitors bought distribution, portfolio logic for when you cannot trust your own taste, an off-balance-sheet debt instrument that avoids diluting the partner, and the pricing problem a small language area faces in the market streaming opened up.
NegotiatorEP41Sami MiettinenTimo ArgillanderIPR VC
2020-10-17 · Society · Economy · EN
Huuki Show host and political history student Manolis Huuki walks through the birth of the American federation: taxation without representation, the Articles of Confederation, the quarrel between federalists and anti-federalists, the three-fifths compromise and the federal debt that took off after the Civil War. The second half applies all of it to the European Union. The sharpest observation is numerical: US federal and state government together run at around 30 per cent of GDP, while Finland alone is at 42 — so copying a Hamiltonian moment would mean moving taxes to Brussels and cutting the rate, not building a new layer on top.
NegotiatorEP40Sami MiettinenManolis HuukiFederalism
2020-10-10 · Tools · Society · EN
Aaro Huttunen, host of the Saavutus podcast, appears in a twin episode covering individual goal-setting and the self-improvement literature behind it. Along the way: Risto Siilasmaa's paranoid optimism as corporate scenario analysis, the success laws of Brian Tracy and Jari Sarasvuo, Tony Robbins's pain-and-pleasure anchoring, NLP's eye-movement theory and how much to trust it, Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad, and biohacking in Finnish conditions. Running through it is Huttunen's principle: every episode has to leave the listener something concrete they can actually use.
NegotiatorEP39Sami MiettinenAaro HuttunenSaavutus
2020-10-01 · Economy · Society · EN
GNS Economics CEO Tuomas Malinen explains why the firm's latest Q-review contained no positive scenario at all for the first time: the options are collapse, reset and great inflation. A European banking crisis has become the baseline. Malinen unpicks why record-low junk bond yields cannot coexist with record-high large corporate bankruptcies unless a central bank has broken the pricing mechanism, and why debt-financed stimulus in an over-indebted economy creates the conditions for a debt crisis. The second half covers the public clash between the Finnish government and business leaders, what corporate social responsibility actually means, and the quality of the debate over the EU recovery fund.
NegotiatorEP38Sami MiettinenTuomas MalinenGNS Economics
2020-09-18 · Economy · Tools · EN
Videoly CEO Nora Huovila explains how the company pulls product videos for an entire e-commerce catalogue out of YouTube and attaches them automatically to product pages — tens of thousands of products from a single script implementation. The episode covers the psychology that makes video move purchase decisions, the curation process, the different maturity of the brand side and the retailer side, internationalising one vertical at a time with an office in Toronto next to Shopify, and why Huovila treats company culture as the competitive edge in the fight for top talent. It closes with advice for founders: Finns shoulder the entrepreneur's responsibility but forget to use the entrepreneur's freedom.
NegotiatorEP37Sami MiettinenNora HuovilaVideoly
2020-09-09 · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen's former Royal Bank of Scotland colleague Sanjeev Kumar, based in Singapore, traces his path from running RBS's global corporate advisory business through MUFG to a new chapter — and explains why he joined the global advisory board of pinBox Solutions. pinBox builds digital micro-pension systems for low-income workers, especially women and the non-salaried: live in Rwanda and Kenya, just launched in India. The conversation compares Finland's collective pension system with Singapore's personal-account model, works through the allocation problem in defined-contribution schemes, and lands on why longevity, financial inclusion and impact investing make finance more interesting after the global financial crisis than it was before it.
NegotiatorEP36Sami MiettinenSanjeev KumarpinBox Solutions
2020-09-04 · Economy · Tools · EN
Ali Omar — doctor, co-founder of Med Group and angel investor with a portfolio of 29 startups — sets out when a career change is worth making and when it is an enormous risk. The episode covers the definition of SaaS scalability as the mathematical predictability of growth, the metrics from gross margin to CAC and churn, the three rules of internationalisation, and the statistical nature of angel investing: a portfolio needs 20 to 40 companies and a decade of patience.
2020-08-29 · Tools · EN
Helena Åhman has trained under five hostage negotiators, from George Kohlrieser to Chris Voss. In this episode she classifies which of those lessons transfer to the executive team and to difficult conversations at work: the three-factor definition of a pressure situation, regulating your own state from breathing to tone of voice, the alpha–beta–gamma roles inside a negotiating team, and separating observation from interpretation as the foundation of situational awareness.
2020-08-24 · Society · Economy · EN
Vesa Kanniainen, emeritus professor of economics, examines Finland's permanent security deficit and why he considers EU membership one of the most significant post-war security decisions the country has made — even though he is best known as a euro critic. The episode covers a game-theoretic reading of the YYA treaty, the NATO option and the price of exercising it as shared responsibility for the Baltics, the costs of the common currency and the parallel-currency idea, and Kanniainen's work at the boundary of morality and economics from Adam Smith to Vernon Smith.
2020-08-20 · Economy · Society · EN
Tere Sammallahti of the think tank Libera asks why Finnish tax debate always aims at the peak of the Laffer curve and never at collecting as little tax as possible. The conversation covers the problem of cherry-picked comparison periods in economic argument, the scale of transfers and Gini figures, a three-dimensional political coordinate system, universally binding collective agreements and the position of the non-unionised worker, and taxing externalities as a way to fund lower taxes on work.
2020-08-12 · Economy · Society · EN
An English-language episode in which Tuomas Malinen sets out the mechanics of the recovery fund for an international audience. A EUR 750 billion package split into EUR 390 billion of grants and EUR 360 billion of loans, allocated on population, GDP per capita and unemployment from 2015-2019 - variables with nothing to do with the pandemic. Malinen names two treaty articles he considers broken, sorts the euro countries into beneficiaries and losers by GDP per capita, and walks through GnS Economics' synthetic markka simulation, which suggests Finnish exports would have been some 40 per cent higher with an own currency. He closes with one concrete demand: a referendum on the recovery fund in every member state.
NegotiatorEP31Sami MiettinenTuomas MalinenRecovery fund
2020-08-06 · Economy · Society · EN
Tuomas Malinen of GnS Economics walks through the structure of the EU recovery fund and argues it is a permanent transfer mechanism rather than a one-off crisis measure: the allocation criteria do not correlate with Covid, the EU borrows directly into member-state budgets for the first time, and the balanced-budget requirement of Article 310 is bypassed. The conversation covers the German constitutional court's ultra vires ruling, the scale of Italy's debt, the arithmetic of Finland's negotiated outcome, and the case for a referendum.
2020-08-03 · Economy · Society · EN
Mika Maliranta, research professor at the Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority, explains why firms exist at all (the Coase theorem), where the line runs between vertical and horizontal integration, and how natural monopolies are regulated. The second half takes up Acemoğlu and Robinson's institutional theory, The Narrow Corridor and Hayek: why good institutions are not adopted even when they are well known, why some institution always fills the gap — the mafia included — and why the Nordic model and earnings-related unemployment insurance actually encourage risk-taking.
2020-07-29 · Tools · Economy · EN
Rami Kurimo of the Puheenaihe podcast unpacks why corporate video content fails so often: companies port landing-page logic onto platforms that reward regularity, native format and a recognisable human being. The conversation covers the role of guests, radio-style jingles as an anti-pattern, host-read ads versus pre-rolls, platform-native content from TikTok to LinkedIn, thumbnails and titles, running episode numbers, and why hiding comments is a beginner's mistake.
2020-07-29 · Tools · Economy · EN
Rami Kurimo, founder of the Finnish channel Puheenaihe, sets out the playbook for growing a channel on a zero-euro marketing budget - the one Negotiator applied on its way to becoming one of Finland's largest economics podcasts. The article assembles the model whole: why you go where the audience already is instead of driving traffic to your own website, why a company is structurally weak on social media and what Ronald Coase's theory of the firm says about it, how guests create network effects, why radio format should not be carried into podcasting, what organic reach means on different platforms, and the roles of publishing cadence, audio quality, thumbnails and sequential numbering. The source is Negotiator episode 28, in which Kurimo is Sami Miettinen's guest - an episode Miettinen himself describes as mentoring.
media visibilitypodcastingYouTubecontent strategyorganic reach
2020-07-05 · Economy · Tools · EN
Jyri Engeström — who sold Jaiku to Google and now runs Yes VC — explains how venture capital actually works in Silicon Valley: why fund maths forces investors to hunt for a handful of enormous winners, why the best founders are in fact risk-averse, and why demand should be tested before a product exists. He also covers what the Finnish ecosystem still lacks: financing infrastructure, a normalised relationship with failure, and the special insight that comes from working the structural holes in a network.
2020-06-28 · Economy · Tools · EN
Tero Nummenpää, chairman of Translink International, and Sami Miettinen open up how a founder-owned company worth between ten and fifty million euros actually gets sold. The episode contrasts the heavy two-stage auction with a lighter model that nails the main terms already at the letter-of-intent stage, and explains why the depth of the sales material determines how high a buyer will bid. The discussion covers the difference between industrial and financial buyers, the role of the shareholders' agreement, the kickoff workshop question about hidden problems, and a fee model weighted to success. It closes on the pandemic's effect on cross-border processes, virtual due diligence rooms and complex consideration structures.
2020-06-19 · Economy · Society · EN
Tuomas Malinen of GnS Economics and Sami Miettinen revisit the three scenarios they set out in their book on the euro's future six years earlier: zombification through the ECB's balance sheet, a move to federation, and fragmentation of the euro area. Malinen reads the pandemic as a classic asymmetric shock being explained away as a symmetric one, and argues the EU has moved onto a path that breaches its own treaties in both the recovery fund and the ECB's pandemic programme. The episode covers the Karlsruhe court's deadline for the Bundesbank, Finland's hidden contingent liabilities, and why a floating currency works as a countercyclical safety valve. It closes with Malinen's pointed promise about leaving the euro and a scenario in which the recovery package fails in national parliaments.
2020-06-18 · Economy · Society · EN
Tuomas Malinen of GnS Economics and Sami Miettinen work slide by slide through the most common misconceptions about an independent currency and an EU federation. The episode shows that Finnish interest rates were not exceptionally high during the markka era once the currency floated, and that the rate spike came from defending a fixed exchange rate rather than from having one's own money. The discussion presents the GnS simulation of how the markka would have moved during the euro years and its countercyclical effect, and compares US federal tax levels with the EU equivalent. It closes on Puerto Rico's debt restructuring, the broken no-bailout principle, and where a federation's ten-point tax increase would come from.
2020-06-07 · Research · Tools · EN
Author and translator Juhana Torkki and his co-author Sami Miettinen trace, in Turku, the arc from a doctoral thesis on the rhetoric of the apostle Paul through the books Puhevalta and Uusi neuvotteluvalta to Finnish translations of Seneca and Plutarch. The episode explains why an ancient letter required the whole thought to be finished before writing began and how slowness deepens thinking. The discussion contrasts Plutarch's practical techniques for governing the mind with Stoic determinism and the doctrine of the perfect sage, and asks what the patron-client relationship and etymological discoveries reveal about our own time. It closes on Quintilian's claim that a good speaker must first be a good person, and why workplace communication is needlessly abstract.
2020-06-01 · Society · Tools · EN
Sami Miettinen is a guest on Futucast, hosted by William von der Pahlen and Isak Rautio, in a conversation about what unedited long-form talk does to public debate. The episode opens up the Overton window and the risk that a society's consensus drifts badly out of line with reality when the range of the discussable is never widened. The discussion sets identity politics — judging a claim by which box the speaker fits — against Ray Dalio's believability weighting, where a track record on that specific subject earns the hearing. The sharpest observation concerns institutions: inside a bank, a party or an agency every sentence is read as the institution's position, leaving only entrepreneurs and the not-yet-hired free to speak.
2020-05-29 · Tools · Research · EN
Futucast hosts William von der Pahlen and Isak Rautio tell Sami Miettinen how a podcast started as a by-product of content marketing grew into radio, the Slush stage and Finlandia Hall. The episode considers Elon Musk's neural link vision and the world of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels as a precursor to conversation moving onto an interface faster than a keyboard. The discussion compares the Finnish podcast scene with the early years of stand-up comedy and asks why Finland lacks the American culture of cross-channel guest appearances when podcasters have no shared meeting place. It closes on the role of improvisation and intuition in long form conversation and why video deserves investment.
2020-05-19 · Economy · Tools · EN
A nine-minute channel update from May 2020 with a compact euro analysis inside it. Miettinen recaps the discussion about a euro break-up he had just had on the Puheenaihe channel, the scale of Italy's financing need, and the German Constitutional Court's Karlsruhe ruling on the ECB's purchase programmes. He also sets out what he recommended to the Finnish parliament's Commerce Committee in April 2020: get the national wholesale payment system finished, and prepare for connecting a central-bank financing channel to domestic consumption if other euro countries do the same. The rest is channel news — microphones, upcoming guests and Discord.
NeuvottelijaEP20Sami MiettinenEuroItaly
2020-05-17 · Tools · EN
Audiovisual specialist Pete Lipponen and Sami Miettinen dissect why podcast audio fails and what can be fixed without major investment. The episode covers the difference between dynamic and condenser microphones, polar patterns, mic distance, and controlling reverberation in an ordinary room. The discussion explains phantom power, XLR cabling, manual level setting, and why audio is left roughly six decibels of headroom. It closes on live streaming tools from Blackmagic switchers to OBS, and the realities of post production in a one person operation.
2020-05-06 · Economy · Research · EN
Tuomas Malinen of GnS Economics and Sami Miettinen continue their analysis of the pandemic economy and clarify why its economic impact meets the criteria of a black swan. The episode identifies the two conditions required for hyperinflation, the role of central bank financing of governments, and how the interbank market can force rates up despite central bank policy. The discussion covers ECB conduct, the German constitutional court ruling on PSPP, the zombification of the banking sector, and security of supply and food as national questions. It closes on the lag before the real economy is hit, the changing role of the Fed, and creative destruction visible in M&A.
2020-04-29 · Tools · Economy · EN
Jussi Liimatainen, author of the book Digitrippi, and Sami Miettinen break down the division of labour between marketing and sales across the funnel, and the difference between outbound and inbound thinking. The episode covers online lead marketing, the role of search visibility, and the mechanics of content and lead capture. The discussion compares B2B and B2C selling through customer counts, deal sizes, and decision processes, and reviews HubSpot's hub structure against Dynamics and Salesforce. It closes on the digital leap triggered by the pandemic and how remote work reshaped meeting practices.
2020-04-26 · Economy · Tools · EN
Sami Miettinen walks the SaaS Club through the metrics professional investors use to evaluate software businesses: annual recurring revenue, churn, customer acquisition cost, and lifetime value. The episode unpacks the Rule of 40, revenue and EBITDA multiples, and why the income statement must be split between new customer acquisition and recurring business. The discussion also covers SaaS funding options from venture debt to private equity, and when a company should start shaping itself for a sale. Finally, it examines the sales model and cost load involved in moving from a home market to international expansion.
2020-04-19 · Tools · EN
Antti Pietilä and Sami Miettinen analyze the key differences between Consumer Subscription Software and B2B Enterprise SaaS models, pricing structures, and usage frequency. The episode explores value chain shifts, customer acquisition costs, and expansion revenue dynamics. The conversation also evaluates software churn under economic pressure and complex enterprise integration requirements.
2020-04-08 · Tools · Economy · EN
Sales expert Mika D. Rubanovitsch explains how B2B selling shifts to the remote era: what the dialogue plan is and why the game is decided long before the negotiation table, why you should 'hook' the customer with references before the first 15-minute connect call, how sales meetings are staggered into a 15- and 45-minute rhythm, why a virtual negotiation never opens with a company presentation, what insight-led selling and the four-quadrant model mean, and why expanding the participant group decides the close. Featuring the book Don't Be a Boss, self-direction, and remote leadership.
NeuvottelijaEPSami MiettinenMika D. RubanovitschB2B Sales
2020-04-03 · Tools · Economy · EN
Two authors of the book Digitalisaatio, lawyers Jaakko Lindgren (Dottir) and Antti Toponen (Sulapak), reflect on the digital leap forced by the March 2020 coronavirus crisis: why remote-work tools had been ready for over ten years but management culture had not, how quickly wet signatures and physical shareholder meetings collapsed, how value chains reverse their sign for globalization and the sharing economy, where big-data surveillance and location tracking lead, and why creative destruction and global cooperation decide the direction after the crisis.
NeuvottelijaEPSami MiettinenJaakko LindgrenAntti Toponen
2020-03-28 · Economy · Tools · EN
Journalist Henri Alakylä and Sami Miettinen examine Eurozone payment systems, ECB balance sheet expansion, and Target 2 structural imbalances. The episode analyzes liquidity shocks, stimulus scale, and the imperative for national backup payment systems. The discussion also covers financial crisis lessons, hyperinflation risks, and sovereign debt restructuring constraints.
2020-03-24 · Economy · Research · EN
Mikko Särelä and Sami Miettinen discuss urban planning, high-density housing advantages, and how the coronavirus pandemic impacts mobility and city structures. The episode analyzes remote work adoption, urban density trends, and mobile location data in city planning. The discussion also covers Eurozone economic challenges and public sector adaptability.
2020-03-13 · Economy · Research · EN
Macroeconomist Tuomas Malinen (GNS Economics) analyzes the coronavirus in March 2020 as a 'black swan': why the pandemic itself would only be a trigger, when the world economy has been driven into a state of fragility. In Malinen's view, three weak points — China's mountain of debt, Europe's banking sector, and the US capital-market bubble — threaten to unravel at once. Featuring Taleb's antifragility, the September 2019 repo market, central-bank balance sheets, helicopter money, Finland's fight for survival, and a defense of the market mechanism.
NeuvottelijaEPSami MiettinenTuomas MalinenCorona
2020-03-11 · Tools · Research · EN
Work and organizational psychologist Juho Toivola explains what personality science actually tells us in recruitment: why Big Five beats DISC-style quadrants, how tests can be 'gamed', what the socially desirable ideal profile is, whether extroversion predicts sales success, how executive search works as a networking business, and why everyone must manage their own market value before they need it. Featuring the platform economy, the disruption of expert work, and LinkedIn visibility.
NeuvottelijaEPSami MiettinenJuho ToivolaWork Psychology
2020-03-06 · Economy · Tools · EN
Gautam Basu introduces Sami Miettinen to Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition, the model where you become an entrepreneur by buying an established company rather than founding a new one. The episode covers the three routes into the model, the True North Search accelerator concept, and the demographics behind it: 30 per cent of Finnish entrepreneurs are 55 or over and up to 40 000 companies are looking for a new owner. Basu opens up the search criteria, the funnel from 300-500 targets down to one acquisition, and why the market at 2-20 million euros of enterprise value is inefficient and opaque - and therefore priced at three to five times EBITDA. Also included are the US figures on how many searches fail, the psychometric assessment of candidates, and the question of who a seller actually wants to hand their life's work to.
NegotiatorEP7Sami MiettinenGautam BasuETA
2020-02-25 · Economy · Tools · EN
Sami Miettinen is the guest on Antti Pietilä's Finding Success podcast, working through the four-part framework from Uusi neuvotteluvalta — power, analysis, sociability and principle — and applying it to inbound sales and to company sales. Along the way: how situational power is misread in recruitment, a company sale as service design with Lyyti's SaaS metrics, negotiating team roles from the quiet decision-maker to the scribe, the dialogue plan before the table, package offers instead of sequential bargaining, and the moment the buyer's other departments wake up with agendas of their own.
Sami MiettinenAntti PietiläLoyalisticNegotiationUusi neuvotteluvalta
2020-02-21 · Society · Economy · EN
Doctoral researcher Antti Ronkainen unpacks the mechanics of identity politics as the megatrend of political influence: why Boris Johnson won with a single identity while Corbyn's Labour leaked in every direction, how Fukuyama's thymos and the white worker explain Trump's rise, what Krastev and Piketty reveal about imitation and the left's gentrification, and why identity politics is a 'cage of democracy.' Featuring the Overton window, the 'Frankfurt School' myth, Bloomberg's micro-targeting, and the crisis of Finland's and Kokoomus's center-right.
NeuvottelijaEPSami MiettinenAntti RonkainenIdentity Politics
2020-02-14 · Economy · Research · EN
Rahapodi's Martin Paasi unpacks the core of portfolio theory: why 'nobody knows anything', what alpha, beta, and CAPM mean, how Warren Buffett and Bridgewater generate excess returns by leveraging boring quality companies, and why the low-cost index investor statistically ends up in the top quartile. Finally, salary as a return vector and the mathematics of long-term saving.
NeuvottelijaEPSami MiettinenMartin PaasiRahapodi
2020-02-09 · Economy · Research · EN
How does a millionaire negotiate? Sami Miettinen guested on the Puheenaihe podcast (host Rami Kurimo) to discuss ownership and negotiation with investor and board professional Tero Luoma. The four levers of negotiation — power, analytical skill, sociability, and principle — sit differently for the wealthy, and power rises above the rest. Featuring anchoring and the role of emotion in M&A.
NeuvottelijaEPSami MiettinenTero LuomaRami Kurimo
2020-02-04 · Economy · Tools · EN
Finance-sector change leader Kirsi Larkiala unpacks the mechanics of banking and fintech negotiation: why transaction banking ties a client to its 'house bank' and earns many times more, why Sweden beat Finland in fintech, why the end customer is the best lever against a bank, and why the size of a funding round buys credibility (Enfuce vs. Tink). Featuring Davos, Jamie Dimon, open banking, and the power of networking.
NeuvottelijaEPSami MiettinenKirsi LarkialaFintech
2020-02-03 · Economy · Society · EN
Rami Kurimo puts a negotiation author and an ownership author in the same room and asks whether you can negotiate your way to a million. What comes out is a two-part conversation: the four levers of negotiation and the team roles nobody bothers to agree before walking into the room, and then the distinction Luoma draws between an owner and an investor — the owner is the one who has to negotiate. Underneath both sits the same Finnish problem: too little private capital and too few owners.
Sami MiettinenTero LuomaRami KurimoPuheenaiheNegotiation
2020-01-23 · Economy · Tools · EN
Investors House CEO Petri Roininen unpacks the mechanics of real-estate and M&A negotiation: why a deal happens when buyer and seller agree on price but disagree on value, how time and residual value are central negotiating dimensions, why the Finnish real-estate market internationalized in 2002 and trades at a NAV discount, and how listing, insider rules, and negotiation-team roles work.
NeuvottelijaEPSami MiettinenPetri RoininenInvestors House
2020-01-18 · Tools · Economy · EN
A concrete negotiation tool in action: Sami Miettinen sells his own apartment and demonstrates anchoring. Anchor first, anchor credibly, anchor using a reference price, and don't round — backed by public price data, buyer-specific synergies, and a credible walk-away (flagging).
NeuvottelijaEPSami MiettinenAnchoringNegotiation
2020-01-16 · OpenClaw · EN
The opening episode of the Neuvottelija channel: Sami Miettinen introduces himself — partner at Translink Corporate Finance, M&A negotiator, and author of the book Uusi neuvotteluvalta (New Negotiation Power, WSOY 2019) — and explains why the channel will interview Finland's most interesting negotiators and experts.
NeuvottelijaEPSami MiettinenNegotiationTranslink
2020-01-11 · Economy · Tools · EN
M&A case study on the cross-border acquisition of Finnish agtech pioneer Pro Farm Technologies — whose space-derived biostimulant turns pulp-industry side streams into billions of kilos of additional food — by Nasdaq-listed Marrone Bio Innovations, advised by Translink Corporate Finance.
NeuvottelijaSPM&AProFarmMarrone Bio Innovations
2019-12-27 · Economy · Tools · EN
Expert analysis of Finnish event-management SaaS company Lyyti's international expansion and its private equity transaction: why a growing software company sought expertise alongside capital, how its advisor structured a shapeless starting point into a process, and why Vaaka Partners — with an expert board — became the chosen investor.
NeuvottelijaSPSaaSLyytiVaaka Partners
2019-10-31 · Economy · Society · EN
Sami Miettinen and Sam Laakso on Puheenaihe in October 2019, at the tail of what was then the longest expansion in American history and one of the weakest by average growth. The argument that carries the episode is about pegs: a gold standard rebalances itself, but the mechanism breaks when a local currency is tied one-to-one to an international settlement currency while labour markets stay rigid — which is precisely the euro's defect. Also covered: the policy rate as a deliberate choice, Russia's digital gold-backed currency, Libra as an SDR-like basket, the scale of crypto, and housing.