Heya, it's been a minute, huh?
By "a minute" I mean the better part of two years :3
I recall the last like actual post here was back in September 2023, when I was this fresh-off-the-plane immigrant in Lahti, jetlagged and confused and wondering where the fuck all the people were on a Sunday morning (spoilers: I missed my fucking orientation y'all :sob:). A bit before that, in another one of my rants, I signed off going fuck formal cybersecurity, I'm just gonna chase whatever's fun and worry about staying relevant later.
It's too much for one post tho, so we gon split this shit into two posts.
Alr, so here I go... I reached Lahti on 1st of September 2023 and I kid you not this shit was the funniest thing looking back at it. Landed in Helsinki around 22:00 and made my way to Lahti, I had like 4 different bigass pieces of luggage with me at the time, so I booked a cab and reached my student apartment late night. On my arrival, I had the pleasure of witnessing like 4 guys dragging some drunk asf friend into a van so they could head home, and one of the students (which also turned out to be the head of our then student guild) says to me: "Welcome to Lahti!" and zooms off. I made myself at home and started university from the next day.
Welp, now some time passes on and summer 2024 I got approached by one of my friends: Jazen Cordero who was then trying to start LahtiES (Lahti Entrepreneurship Society) with a couple of people and they needed ideas and people for one of the hackathons they were planning called Synergy. So... one thing lead to another and I somehow ended up becoming the corporate relations management person for that event. (This was a whole can of worms but like tldr not a fun time).
Before this I also tried to make ties with LahtiSec (oh boy the fucking lahti prefix naming really is original huh?) but that didn't work. Apparently I wasn't a "cultural fit" for that crowd. This was back when I still wanted to like do cybersec even a tiny bit. But then i kinda dropped that. I tried a bunch of shit but during all this, Jazen noticed something about me that I didn't quite know, which was that I'm quite good at people stuff. Like not necessarily sales but weaseling my way into circles or corporate relations kinda stuff. Synergy happened and for the next term Jazen pulled me onto his team. Just like that I'd become LahtiES' Corporate Relations lead, board seat and everything (Remember Jazen btw, because he drags me into the best rooms of my life more than once in this story, and one of those times is the whole reason there's a part-two me around to write this at all.)
When I started, "us" was like 5 people, and by the end of my term we were 300+, and I want to be crystal clear that I take basically zero credit for that number, because that growth was Jazen, Chaska and Maggie, full stop, they did all the actual work and I just helped out wherever I could, spreading the word where it was needed and handling the corporate side and volunteering at events and all that kind of thing, which did mean dragging our name into rooms it had no business being in yet, like Business Finland and Aalto and a bunch of orgs that a year prior wouldn't have given me a meeting if I'd shown up in person holding a cake.
And I'm not gonna pretend it came for free, because it came at the direct expense of my actual studies, which I quietly let fall off a cliff, and look, I know how that sounds, but I'll be real with you the way I'm real with myself: like 90% of what we were being taught I already knew, and sitting in a lecture re-learning something I could teach felt like a genuinely worse use of my one finite life than going and building the thing the lecture was theoretically prepping me for. Fight me on that, or don't I can't give 2 shits about it ngl.
While all this was going on another opportunity landed in my lap, B2B sales for a startup I'm gonna call [ REDACTED ], because the more I sit with this the less I wanna hand them free SEO, and the pitch was genuinely sick, mycelium, mushroom-based materials, thinking way past packaging, with one idea being to literally send the stuff up for lunar regolith structures, and with my best friend already involved and me trusting her being there, I jumped in. Tbh it was a great place to learn, and boy did I learn.
Here's what B2B sales at [ REDACTED ] actually looked like from where I was sitting: we got led in circles with fucking endless motion and zero destination. There were students (some friends even) who got used as free interns with nothing ever on paper except the NDAs and some dogshit promises. Heck we weren't even told who was on the team(s) (which tells you exactly which direction the founder was worried about value flowing), and the personal and professional got blended into this weird slurry where meetings turned into trauma-dumps and boundaries were nowhere to be found. And then we also found out that there was basically no actual chemical or materials-science knowledge behind the whole thing, which obv makes selling the "solution" flat-out impossible. So when we had a regional waste-management company dangling a potential 250k contract there was no way on earth to close it, because closing it needed someone who actually knew wtf they were talking about and were capable of making shit. Oh, and the founder started rolling into meetings straight-up reeking of alcohol so that's that (ofc there was a lot more but I think I've shared enough).
So we stuck it out for about a week before my friend and I looked at each other and quit. It was quite shit but atleast now I know what kinda founder I do not wanna turn into or work with. Good lesson overall 10/10 would recommend. :D
Anyways I then doubled down on LahtiES, pouring the energy back into outreach and the network and being genuinely useful to people who were actually building, and it worked pretty well, because my network went from "some classmates" to this whole web of founders and operators and investors, people playing a game I badly wanted to get good at.
For the first time since landing in this quiet, empty, weirdly wonderful country, things felt... good, like I had a role and a network and people were starting to know my name before I walked in the room, and there was this stretch in early-to-mid 2025 where I genuinely caught myself thinking okay, I've cracked it, from here it's just execution.
Turns out, no, I had not cracked it. It wanted to crack me apparently.
More soon.
~ A.