Branded water with a square meter of art

June 28, 2020

Tomi Grönfors – TALKS WITH PETRI

Tomi Grönfors talks about challenges in building a consumer brand, how to price your products and wrestle with your personal issues without shame. He also reveals why a road trip may last only a few kilometres with empty bottles.

Bio

Tomi Grönfors is the CEO and co-founder of Sniffie, a pricing automation growth company. He has founded several companies such as VEEN, a luxury water brand, and a marketing agency Malja BTL. He has also acted as an interim manager for SSH and Unmonday. Tomi is a passionate wrestler in his free time and enjoys family life in Finland.

Transcript

(NOTE: The text may contain errors, misconceptions and even comical unintended contexts. Please use it only as a reference to the actual audio conversation from where it has been transcribed.)

Petri: Hey Tomi, how are you doing? How’s the Flying Finn?

Tomi: Good! I presume you’re referring to Paavo Nurmi, the Olympic winner. Just sitting in a building, he built here in Pitäjänmäki, Helsinki.

Petri: What are you doing there?

Tomi: Sniffie’s office is located here and we have new people who we just hired and they are on the onboarding phase. I’m helping to onboard our new employees.

Petri: What kind of name is Sniffie because I only know that Sniffer and that’s a TV-series from Ukraine?

Tomi: Yeah, that has nothing to do with it. It has more to do with sniffing. This is a funny story, I met Risto Lähdesmäki who’s the CEO of Idean. We met in Silicon Valley and I had a bit of flu at that time. And I started my pitch to him by sniffing up my snore.

And he started laughing immediately. He said later that he understood immediately what the whole idea of the brand Sniffie was: it’s about sniffing data. That was more an unlucky unfortunate mishappening, but I really got the idea that we should maybe be using that more in our pitches.

Petri: You are really into marketing. Is that actually after the fact type of justification for the name, you’ve just made up a good story or was that actually the real story behind the name?

Tomi: No, if we are really honest. The story behind the name was we started back in 2015 with the other co-founder Niko Naakka. And we just decided one evening that today we need to come up with a name. There were plenty of different names. And at that time Sniffie just sounded good to us.

Petri: And the domain was free?

Tomi: Not even the .com. We were so hung on to that Sniffie is a good name. We started with .fi. Nowadays it’s sniffie.io like every self-respecting startup seems to have, but I think someone still owns the .com.

Petri: How’s the pricing? That’s what you’re doing. And what have you learned? How has it changed from the very beginning to where you are now? Because you’ve been growing, having 12-15 people now?

Tomi: Something like that. Close to 20 if you take all the part-time, freelancers and students who help us as well. We started with three people three years ago. I was doing interim management. Niko was still in school studying to become a medical doctor.

Once he graduated, I ended up one of my interim projects. We started and we were three people. It’s been growing quite fast. Although maybe not as, as fast as many of the hot and buzzy startups but still a significant growth for three years. And what we really do is pricing automation.

We started the whole idea from search engine optimisation. I thought that that will be a brilliant idea. And we did SAAS-software that could have helped you in the search engine optimisation. But we understood quite quickly, quite bluntly that our solution would be just one of the ones that are going to be dropped off fairly soon.

But at that time we noticed that we had a small technical innovation later on, something we could have left at that. But we started studying more and more, and then we’ve pivoted a couple of times to really find the edge. And now, there are companies that use our service for automating all of their pricing. That’s the vertical that we are to be in.

Petri: Are you doing retailers or what’s the segment you’re focusing on?

Tomi: Retailers, but more importantly, e-commerce players. Because e-commerce as such, it’s something today where the power is really on the consumer. It’s about mobile phones. By 2022 there’re estimates that 73% of all the shopping is done on mobile phones. And if you think how you, for example, as a person, how you buy online, so you do compare. You spend a lot of time comparing and there’s a significant difference earlier on when we only had brick and mortar stores, so you chose a retailer and then you chose the product and bought it.

But now it’s the other way around that you actually choose the first product and then you start to find out who of the e-commerce players, the retailers in a way, who is going to be the optimal one for you.

Petri: How can I do that more cleverly because you’re on the retailer’s side? Tell me all the secrets, how can I find the best deals and what should I do?

Tomi: It depends a lot on the verticals. One of the critical aspects is to really understand the market pricing. In many industries, you have players who say that they are always the cheapest. But it means that they’ve narrowed down their market to a few players that they always want to be the cheapest from.

And then they fight with 20 cent price drops. It doesn’t make any difference. If you find it, you can still find the product cheaper on Amazon, for example, but they won’t match it to that. Local players still justify their own market. It’s better as a consumer to really understand what are your options to buy from?

It doesn’t have to be a local anymore. With mobile phones, the local has become global.

Petri: If you’re a small business owner or you’re doing e-commerce, what have you learned from the pricing and has the dynamic pricing, we know from the airlines and these other industries, is it coming to the regular T-shirt shops soon? What can we expect?

Tomi: To some extent, yes. For example, we are already starting with our first pilot customers to run our reinforced learning algorithms to test what’s the optimal price for a product. But dynamic such as airlines is hard to say. For example, for airlines, it’s a lot to do, first of all, with the demand, but at the same time also with the supply and there’re huge systems that the whole travel agencies and airlines share similar systems like booking systems and others. That kind of sharing systems you don’t have in other industries that well. For that sense, maybe not very similar. But are T-shirt shops going to change their prices dynamically against market prices? Yes, they absolutely will. But how common it will be in, let’s say the, next 12 months, maybe the biggest one starts, but the smaller ones probably follow a bit later.

Petri: You mentioned, this is your fifth company and you were already doing many things before, but still you need to pivot. Why’s that happening? Don’t you already know what you’re doing?

Tomi: No, if you ask, do I know what I’m doing? No. In most cases, no. What I’ve learned is that being an entrepreneur is really hard. And it could be very well that it’s me, my skills, my concentration, my intelligence. Could be, but I do think it’s as hard for everyone else.

Let me give you an example. I have a lot of friends who say that they could they could start a company if they had a good idea. And then in most cases, I have to be blunt and tell them that, okay, then you’re not going to start a business ever. Because the thing is that none of the ideas. Okay, let’s be honest, one. There was VEEN, the water brand, that actually became an independent water brand. But other businesses are such that you start, and I feel that it’s healthy, that you start from somewhere, start testing.

And then when you notice that people aren’t interested in my idea, but they are actually interested in a couple of the sub-ideas. Then you start to pivot. You pivot a bit or you pivot a lot. It depends. For example, in Sniffie’s case, we did search engine optimisation first, then we did market intelligence.

It sounded sexy. It was really cool. Something that everyone thought that, hey, that’s really cool to work on. But then, in the end, everyone wanted to try and no one bought it. Simple as that. And then when I read again one consultancy report we had bought. There were different verticals that they recommended to us and also recommended against.

So I took one, I thought, okay. Yes, price monitoring. That sounds like a vertical we could do. That’s standardised. At least there’s a name and they’re surprised. It was something that they explicitly recommended where we shouldn’t go. But I thought that, hey, if we don’t do anything, we’re anyway, going to be in bankruptcy in a couple of months. We did a pivot and for two months coded night and day a new product. And by the time we got finished, we got our first customer who still uses our service. And I remember they paid 84,90 a month, but I felt that okay, someone actually bought the service. Now we are onto something.

And then we started developing it with customers. And every month we got more and more customers and in six months we had a five-figure a month recurring revenue. I I believe that many of the entrepreneurs who start businesses are either too self-confident in their idea, which is of course understandable.

But you should be be aware that your logic is your logic. You might be romantically in love with your idea. If you watch a bit as an outsider, you notice that that’s not maybe what people want to buy. Listening to customers and then being really ready to make a change.

That’s something that makes entrepreneurs successful. I truly believe it.

Petri: A few notions. One of them is that, do you always do exactly the opposite, what they recommend to do in those reports? And the other thing is that when is the right time to do a pivot? Okay, things are not working, when you just have to double down and have some sisu, grit, and just keep on doing until it works.

Or when it’s the time to realise that this is a fool’s game, this is not going anywhere? And it’s a fine line. And it’s easier to see afterwards, but not when you went to the middle of it.

 Tomi: I’ve always somehow felt it in my stomach. It’s a gut-wrenching feeling that somehow you notice that this isn’t going anywhere. I can tell myself maybe a couple of weeks still that it’s not working, but somehow it’s like when you really get it or when you find someone that you’re in love.

How do you explain that? Are you in love or not? You know it, and it’s the same with unsuccessful ideas. You pretty much know it if you are open enough for yourself. it’s more than if you’re in denial that no people aren’t just getting what we do. But if you’re honestly open to that maybe I’m not right in this that it’s better to change.

Then you definitely feel it. But somehow in this case, for example, if everyone wants to try and no one’s gonna buy. And then there’s cashflow for two months. So that’s probably a point where you need to pivot. It’s as simple as that.

Petri: Have you learned to become better in that over time?

Tomi: Yes, and that’s maybe one of the things I think if someone would ask what you’re good at. I’m really good at doing things or changing my plans. That’s often something that really even annoys people that they don’t feel that I’m in the line with my thoughts and plans.

But the thing is that I believe that if I try five times and I find that right answer, it’s better to do that quicker than you do it once with superior planning. Because the likelihood that in a very chaotic world, you could do planning that actually in the end works, it’s more unlikely event than me, for example, doing very rapid tests with the market.

Do something, show it to the customer and ask if they’re going to buy it. If no one’s going to buy it then you know you aren’t doing the right thing. I personally think that it’s better to do things five times and quicker than someone do it for the one time and very well planned.

Petri: You mentioned that was one thing from an idea that really worked for you. And that was VEEN. If I paraphrase you were selling tap water to prestigious places in the world, how did that come about?

Tomi: Yes, that was That was the company that probably turned me to be 20 years older, at at least from the physical look and feel. It was was really a learning curve. When we started, I had just sold one company that I had, a marketing agency. At that time, we were moving to Australia with my girlfriend and we already got the visas. At that time, somehow I started talking with my friend that we had both been in different restaurants and had ordered a bottle of wine and we got a plastic bottle of water to the table. We both felt it was wrong in Finland. It was somehow something that didn’t belong to that setting. And then we started developing the idea. And a week later we had a business going and luckily or not we built a brand that even became the house water of Harrods. of Harrods If I remember right it was named one of the most prestigious water brands by Forbes.

We did sponsoring. And should we say politely an erotic photo exhibition in an upscale sex shop in London. We were the main water sponsor of Nightwish on their world tour. We did a lot of different crazy ideas, and we never did leave for Australia.

That was really interesting time as such.

Petri: Can you describe a bit, how did you manage to get into Harrods? What are the steps from starting the company just with you and your friends and a laptop and having a premium product in the market? How did you pull that up?

Tomi: To be honest, I’m not even sure anymore. It feels like we tried everything. If we sum it up, we decided early on that everything we do must be something we as persons, the founders, find meaningful, fun and worth doing. That was also the reason why we had different unbelievably obscure marketing ideas? For example, we were standing outside Hotel Klaus K in Finland and one of the founders at that time had painted paintings. Because we got fame quite early on, all the telesales people called me and offered media space. And I said to my founders that the only thing we could afford was to paint our own adverts and sell them to someone. We were at that hard times. That sounded so funny, so meaningful and somehow odd to us that we started painting those pictures. And then we talked to Marc Skvorc, who was the general manager at Klaus K at that time.

I said to Mark that, hey, can you give me for free the hotel venue and maybe even offer champagne if we do an exhibition of paintings here and we sell those paintings for charity? And he loved the idea and said immediately, yes, you can do that. And we painted pictures and we took the price because it was in Helsinki city centre…

There’s a street called Boulevard and it’s one of the most expensive streets. We took the one square meter price of Boulevard and took the same equation of price to the paintings. The size of the painting was in exact proportion to the Boulevard price of a square meter.

And we sold to total strangers, some friends as well, but we sold those paintings in one evening for 10 000 euros to people having dinner in Klaus K. We gave that sum to charity.

How we did it? It’s impossible to say but that really gives you the idea that we were just so passionate to do fun, meaningful things that we all felt that it was nice to do that it really started to pick up and at some stage, it turned into a brand.

Petri: Then you were ramping up, you had some demand piling up and then you realised that this is not the software business. You need to actually do something in order to provide what you already sold. What were the pain points there?

Tomi: Anyone who has done manufacturing knows that nothing is easy. Those are concrete things and if you have a problem, it’s never a small problem. It’s as simple as that. One of the main decisions we later on could have done differently was that we chose to go with a bottling plant that was up north.

And it was fairly small. The people were genuine. They did everything they could to make it happen. There’s nothing on that but what we could have done differently is that may be going with a bit bigger choice we could have gone a bit further. Because we ended up fixing a lot of everyday problems instead of building a brand, building international sales channels and such. The biggest hurdle was that the equipment we used was too slow. We produced something like 1 600 bottles an hour early on in the best case. The real level we should have had was like 30 000 bottles an hour. What we ended up doing is we went through different bottling plants, all the breweries in Finland and called everyone.

And by the end of it, I managed to buy some used equipment from a person I knew. It was a bigger bottling plant. We bought it from their trash that they had already promised for someone who bought it for the scrap value. We bought different kinds of equipment and built it by ourselves and by the end of it, it really was fast.

I already felt that it had been such a struggle. At that stage, we thought with the investor that was in the business that they wanted to go a different way so they bought my part of it. But that was probably the hardest part of building the production. And that’s something that I’ve always said to everyone who starts anything concrete that the production needs to be top-notch. Otherwise, it won’t fly.

Petri: At one point, you were a bit eager to sell something and you didn’t have it done and then you needed to go to Germany and there were also some colourful happenings happening there.

Tomi: I remember it very well. It was before the launch in May 2007. I got a phone call from a very well-known business and political person, Risto E. J. Penttilä, who was organizing the European Business Leaders Convention. He was eager to buy our water for that event.

And at that stage, I was somehow so eager to sell the water that I really forgot even what I was doing. I sold him a pallet of water, something like 600 bottles. When I ended the phone call, I noticed that the date of the actual convention was up to a month before I even was promised to get the first empty bottles. And I became a bit panicky because I understood that there was a bit of a problem. I called the director who was running the Owens-Illinois factories in Europe and explained to him that we have a serious issue. I’ve sold the products already and I’m getting the empty bottles from you a month later. Is there anything we can do to make it happen?

And I still remember how he was shouting to me and he lost his temper totally. He said to me that who do you think you are? I probably tried to explain that a small boy from Helsinki. In the end, he managed to get it either from Pepsi or Coca-Cola. One of these big brands that had a production time slot. And they gave us an hour before their shift started. When they were heating up the ovens, it was a glass bottle, they started producing our bottles first and we got some 1200 bottles.

We knew that there was no other way to really get them in time because it was roughly a week before the event. So, me and my co-founder at that time, we took a van and drove through Sweden, Denmark and Germany. The plant was in Germany and then we took the bottles and started heading back immediately to Helsinki.

And I still remember there was a guy who didn’t speak any English. And he was loading the van. He raised the first pallet and I noticed my van’s springs were lowering a bit. I was so greedy I thought that, okay, hey, throw in the other pallet as well, because there were two pallets.

He lifted it in the van and the springs went totally bottom and he jumped off from the truck. And came to me and said, no Helsinki, maybe Hannover. And I still remember my face was totally red. And I said to him that, okay, take the other pallet away. And we left immediately, drove back to Helsinki and everything went well.

But it was Friday evening and I got a phone call. The European Business Leaders Convention was starting on Saturday. So Friday evening, roughly around half past five I got a phone call that, hey, otherwise very nice but your products aren’t here. They should have been in a hotel in Helsinki, they aren’t here.

I told that they should have been. What I had to do was to go and look at it from the logistics centre that we used to deliver the water. It took me 45 minutes at that logistics centre to find our pallet. And it was thrown in the trash.

Petri: Whoops.

Tomi: It was thrown in the trash and it was about to be dismantled there.

And I was asking them, what the hell is this doing here? All the pallets have a small note where t’s heading. So that’d been ripped away and no one knew what the products were. I managed to take some driver that was about to leave home. Somehow, maybe positively manipulated him to help me.

And we drove those by eight o’clock in the evening. We had unloaded the pallet to the hotel. So that was a good example of how very well thought planning and execution didn’t work at all. By the end, we were so passionate that we managed to get those bottles there. And that has been a guiding light in everything as an entrepreneur I’ve done: you really need to give all you can and then you only have a possibility to succeed.

Petri: A couple of weeks ago, I had Ville Tolvanen, the digitalist, in my show. Ville told that everybody should be the lighthouse of their mission and really become a brand. But you just recently told me that it’s so hard and it’s easy to say that but the reality is something else. What’s your response to Ville or what’s your take on the matter?

Tomi: Let’s first say that I truly appreciate Ville. There’s nothing to it. Ville is actually my first ever customer. He was working for a company when I was a sales guy in my first job after graduation. He was the first customer I ever had. A very interesting person with good ideas.

It’s a bit simplistic to say that you should be… of course you should be the lighthouse and Ville if anyone has shown how you should do it, there’s nothing to it. But I’ve now done five my own companies and then as an interim manager also helped other companies to build their brands.

And I have to admit that branding and marketing it’s one of the hardest things to really get a spot on. And one of the hardest things is to keep pounding that message. Be passionate about what you do. As in Ville’s case, he’s really passionate, but understanding that branding is all about meaning.

And how do you build a cohesive understanding of how we are going to be meaningful for our customers. That takes time. That takes a huge amount of time. That also takes trials and errors. So to say that you should build a brand out of yourself. Of course, it’s easy to say, but then how do you do it?

It is at least I’ve noticed that it’s years of work. Getting into the mind of your customer and understanding what are the real things they appreciate and how you can simplify your message so that they will understand. And you can easily communicate that on all levels of your organisation. Because I truly believe that brand, when we talk about brand and branding, it has nothing to do with the visuals or marketing. It’s about everything we do as a company. Is this something that we can stamp the Sniffie brand on it. That’s why I feel that really to get good branding it’s harder.

That’s probably one of the areas where we Finns haven’t been that good earlier on but I think we are improving. We understand how much work, how much cooperation inside the company branding needs to really become an essential driver of growth. We’ve been very good at creating good products but it’s still a long way to build brands.

Petri: What are the parts in your life that you are struggling with? What are the sacrifices you have made? That was a question Hampus Jakobsson mentioned in his interview. And he finds that to be a very interesting question to ask people who’ve been doing things and being successful as well.

Tomi: Too often I’ve spent too much time working. When you work a lot, it’s hard to understand where’s the boundary of the next 20% of my investment that will be useless because I’m too tired. That’s probably one thing. I have been there for the family. I have been for my spouse and my loved ones. But I think that’s somewhere that I worked hard. Then also I think that I’ve sacrificed on other fronts. That I haven’t been looking after myself as I should. Those are probably the two most critical ones. They don’t sound that sexy. But those could be if you would continue on neglecting your loved ones. That’s the most essential part of your life. But then what could be more important than your wellbeing? And I know that many entrepreneurs do burn the candle from both ends. I’ve done that my fair share.

If you think from that point what I’ve done, maybe I have sacrificed also some on my own time. In certain things, I should have given up earlier on. In a way, I have sacrificed unnecessary time that I could have just said that, okay, here’s the line we don’t cross. Those may be the biggest ones. Yes, I’ve lost money. I’ve done my fair share, but it has nothing to do with sacrifices. You only have one life and how well you live that that’s the most important thing.

Petri: You mentioned as well that there’s been some diagnosed illness, which has been one of the defining factors in your life. Do you want to elaborate and tell what it is?

Tomi: I’ve always been open and I think we should be more open as a society for people’s challenges in different areas. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was a bit more than 30 years old. My life before that was truly a night between Tuesday and Sunday.

It really was quite chaotic. I always thought that I was a bit different than the others. There’s nothing wrong with my cognitive capabilities. Quite the contrary, I always felt that everything was easy as such. On the other hand, my concentration isn’t as good as it could be on a normal person.

And people who know ADHD, they also know that it could be a strong force for many entrepreneurs, for example. It’s not a diagnosis or illness that actually makes you somehow absent-minded or scatterbrained all the time, but it actually does two things.

You are either very sharp if you get interested in something. If you get highly motivated, excited. Your brain is like razor-sharp. And then on the other hand, when the exciting thing ends, you become very slow.

Surrounded by loved ones, they often have a hard time to understand when I might be working on the slow mode. It’s demanding for your surroundings, and there’s a lot of people that are actually ashamed of having ADHD. There’s a lot of people who end up with different kinds of problems with alcohol or drugs, but it could be a driving force also. The openness that we talk more openly on the matter it will be really crucial that people tell that, hey, it is what it is. You could be as clever as the next man.

But you have that challenge. So it’s very important to understand, to openly communicate it. I met my current spouse who I love dearly. I told her immediately that this is some feature in me. It is something I need to work with every day. It also is something that needs to be taken into consideration when I’m running a company that my strengths are on things that motivate me. I might be really driving a change in the company.

I might be really all over the place but in a positive way. But then, for example, we early on in Sniffie, we decided that…I felt personally even that I needed a right-hand person that would be spot on always on the matter and could hold the operations in her hands. We hired Suvi and that was a conscious decision to see that the strengths that I had the company could utilise very well. Being very creative, being interested in people, being a driving force, always with new ideas, but then it could be that a little less exciting tasks would be something that no one does. What’s the most important thing in a company? It’s that it goes like a train.

After we hired Suvi, we noticed quite quickly that our company also started to do that steady growth. Our current customer base started to be happier and more persistent in using our service. And there was less and less churn all the time. And then I had the time to concentrate more on building the product, building the sales, building the marketing, and now we’re picking up also on that front getting also new businesses. In a SaaS business that we are currently working the main idea is to keep your current customers happy and keep them growing and add on a few new ones all the time. That’s something that I really encourage that if people have that kind of challenges, they have pros and they have cons.

In my case, I’ve been fairly open in all of the workplaces I’ve been or with any relationship. I tell quite bluntly that this is what it is. And I think people should be honest because then there’s no stigma of having any diagnosis in today’s world because people can still make a success, even though they have ADHD.

Petri: If you could leave a note to yourself in high school, what would it say?

Tomi: Do you want to hear what I would love to say? Or what I actually would say?

Petri: Both!

Tomi: What I would love to say, like as a parent to a kid, hey, take it easier and read more. But as me, I know that it wouldn’t really be something I would react to.

But as me now to my younger self, I would actually say that, hey, sit down and listen to yourself.

Petri: What would happen? What do you think would happen if you would actually heed the advice?

Tomi: I honestly think that if the younger me could hear me well or would be open to listening, he would sit down and I may notice how his behaviour could be changed, really understanding why he does the things he does. I think that’s the most critical thing that took years for me to notice that I was different. All the people who know me, they know that I was a bit different. For example, in the school teachers or teachers always felt that I was the one doing bad things, going to stuck in the school after everyone else left.

Instead of someone coming to sit down and helping you saying that I know that you are a bit struggling to concentrate on the things you’re not that interested in, but I noticed that in the things that you are really interested in, you are actually the best in the class. Instead of trying to make you fit in, I would have hoped that by even me understanding what are the strengths I should be concentrating or someone else, maybe in that case, a teacher. I could have found my strengths earlier on. That’s a good question. Finding my strengths earlier on would have probably made my life different.

Would it have made it any better? Don’t think so, but different.

Petri: What is your favourite word?

Tomi: Rakas. It means dear or loved one in Finnish. It can only be used if you have a truely special relationship with a person. And I don’t mean that I would say that only to my spouse or my kids. I can say it to my parents, I can say it to my friends. I can even say it to my team members in a certain tone of voice, rakas, so that the other person really understands that they are important to me as a person, not to me as a managing director or founder or anything, but as a person that you mean the world to me. Rakas is the word.

Petri: What is your least favourite word?

Tomi: I don’t really have a single word I hate. But I do hate when someone deliberately uses words that the other person listening cannot understand. And that’s any word that is used for raising your importance or superiority against the listener. I think those are my least favourite words.

Petri: What turns you on creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?

Tomi: Maybe that comes back also to VEEN. If I find that the thing is humoristic, meaningful and worth doing, I definitely get motivated. That’s where I get my spirits really to that kind of really razor-sharp focus on doing things creatively, living passionately, loving my spouse passionately. Loving my kids passionately. I love when there’s laughter and we do something, we live our lives that we feel that there’s a meaning. And we do things that we think are fun and worth doing.

Petri: What turns you off?

Tomi: This is easy to say, selfish, self-centred and greedy people. There are no words to that.

Petri: What is your favourite curse word?

Tomi: Vittu. And I use it quite a lot.

Petri: What sound or noise do you love?

Tomi: I love the sound of wind in summertime: the sound of wind in birch leaves.

Petri: What sound or noise do you hate?

Tomi: Sharp noises.

Petri: What profession, other than your own, would you like to attempt?

Tomi: An artist.

Petri: What profession would you not like to do?

Tomi: This was actually something I said, even today in the morning. I wouldn’t want to be a legal representative for serious criminals.

Petri: If you could be a cofounder of any startup in any era, which one would you choose?

Tomi: That would have something to do with motorsports or motors. Maybe something to do with the first Formula One companies or the companies running the World Rally Championship cars. That would be really a dream come true as a small boy that loved rally.

Petri: Any final words for the audience can be funny words, crazy words or words of wisdom?

Tomi: Anyone who’s thinking about becoming an entrepreneur: do it today!