Hey, it's been a minute.
By "a minute" I mean the better part of two years, and by "hey" I mean holy shit where do I even begin.
The last 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 hell all the people were on a Sunday morning, and 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. Past me, if you somehow scrolled forward to read this, you had NO idea what you were signing up for, because it worked out and it also nearly killed me, both of those true at the same time, and I'm gonna tell you the whole thing.
It's too much for one post though, so we're splitting it into two, and this one's the good part, the part where the line goes up and to the right and I feel like I've got it all figured out, so enjoy it while it lasts, because part two is where the floor drops out.
Let me rewind to where the good part actually starts, which is somehow 2024, and it began as a favor if I'm honest, because there was this hackathon with the City of Lahti called Synergy and my friend Jazen dragged me into it as a fun weekend thing, so I showed up thinking I was there to build something cool and go home, and what I did NOT realize is that I'd quietly signed myself up to run corporate relations for an entire entrepreneurship society. Jazen had clocked something about me before I'd clocked it myself, that I'm weirdly good with people and companies, so he pulled me onto his team, and somewhere between "come do this cool hackathon" and "wait, am I on a board now??" I'd become LahtiES' Corporate Relations lead, board seat and everything, which is a fancy way of saying I was now the guy responsible for making people who weren't in the room actually give a shit about us. (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 250+, 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, my grades already did.
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, which is wild build-on-the-moon energy, and with my best friend already involved and me trusting her being there, I jumped in, and it was a great place to learn, and boy did I learn, just not the lessons printed on the brochure.
Here's what B2B sales at [ REDACTED ] actually looked like from where I was sitting: we got led in circles with endless motion and zero destination, students got used as free interns with nothing ever on paper except the NDAs (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 the real killer, there was basically no actual chemical or materials-science knowledge behind the whole thing, which makes selling it 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 we were selling. Oh, and the founder started rolling into meetings straight-up reeking of alcohol.
So we stuck it out for about a week before my friend and I looked at each other and quit, and I wanna be fair here, this is only my experience, one dude's view from one seat, but it's the honest truth of what I saw, and that lesson stuck harder than any class I ever skipped, because I now know exactly the kind of founder I refuse to turn into, and turns out that's a pretty damn valuable thing to learn even if you learn it the ugly way.
So I 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, 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.
And for the first time since landing in this quiet, empty, weirdly wonderful country, things felt stable, like I had a role and a network and people were starting to know my name before I walked in the room, in a good way for once, 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.
Everything I just told you is real and I'm proud of it and it mattered, but it's also, in hindsight, the exact kind of moment where the universe leans in and goes "oh, you think you've made it? cute. watch this," because summer was coming, and summer 2025 had plans for me I could not have seen coming if I tried.
But that's part two, and it's a harder one to write and probably a harder one to read, but it's the part that actually turned me into whoever the hell I am now, so it's the one that matters most.
More soon, and sooner than two years this time, I promise.
~ A.