Artificial intelligence, capital and the decisions that shape our world. Research and conversations from Sami Miettinen, Head of AI at Translink Corporate Finance.
Petri Lehmuskoski, founder of Gorilla Capital, explains why product market fit is an unusable term: it has never been defined, so nobody can measure where they are. His book More Scars Than Trophies replaces it with four measurable proof stacks. Buyer proof requires somebody to commit money, resources or significant time, and it is deliberately buyer rather than user proof, because a user makes no economic decision. Value proof is the original move: value counts only after the customer's own cost has been subtracted — training, switching systems, or at worst the reputational cost to whoever signs. That is what explains large system failures, and it is what tells you whether you can raise the price. Running through the conversation is hull speed: a displacement hull has a mathematical top speed and more engines only burn fuel, so pouring funding into a company whose proofs are not yet open is not merely wasteful but dangerous. A company's hull speed is the product of the entrepreneurs in it. Lehmuskoski argues revenue is a poor measure of value because a good salesperson generates revenue without repeatability, distinguishes growth (inputs and outputs rising together) from scaling (inputs falling while outputs rise), and insists the exit be built from the day the company is founded, because every funding round closes doors. On AI he makes three points: evidence decays faster, bad evidence can be dressed up beautifully, and the ability to build software is no longer a gate. What must not be outsourced is the search for buyer and value proof, because it starts from the questions you did not know to ask — and a salesperson only asks what they know to ask. The episode closes on the camel and the unicorn: the camel is a way of travelling, the unicorn an outcome, and Gorilla's third fund spreads over 70 investment decisions with realistic valuation as the key measure.
MP Joakim Vigelius and Sami Miettinen analyse the Ceuta border crisis in Spain, European migration policies, and Finland's emergency border security legislation.
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 — that on his reading the evidence points beyond reasonable doubt to a research-related origin rather than a natural zoonotic jump — and Miettinen presses on the second half of the story: how national 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. Contested claims throughout are the guest's own reading of the evidence, presented as such.
Puheenaihe's co-founder Rami Kurimo explains why two episodes of his podcast disappeared from YouTube in Europe just as the debate over CSAM chat control was at its peak. The case initially looked like censorship, as one of the missing episodes specifically discussed EU mass surveillance and the obligation of platforms to remove content. The explanation was ultimately found in YouTube's political advertising settings, but the lack of transparency in the process raises a larger question about how a small operator copes with automated moderation without visibility or influence. The episode also covers the trusted flagger system, the future of end-to-end encryption, the risks of false positives, and why the core of the problem lies in the production of material rather than the communication of ordinary people. Finally, they discuss an essay in Helsingin Sanomat that condemned Finland's podcast scene as fringe media while simultaneously offering it the best possible advertising.
Aleksi Paavola is an AI builder and technology entrepreneur of more than ten years who has trained language models for teams ranging from Google's Europe organisation to a group in Saudi Arabia. In this episode he opens up Laki.ai MCP — built in an open-source spirit — which connects Finlex's legal sources directly into an AI agent and makes reliable Finnish legal research free. The conversation runs from the basics of MCP all the way to the question of whether humans still add value to increasingly capable AI. Sami and Aleksi compare how Claude, Codex and Copilot work, dissect the expensive closed products Legora and Harvey, and consider why, in Finnish law specifically, a general-purpose model beats the specialised competitors. They close on Samantha, agent armies, local inference, and whether Europe still has any say in the age of AI.
Tax lawyer and Doctor of Laws Janne Juusela and Sami Miettinen assess the tax decisions of the Orpo government from the perspectives of a top lawyer and an investment banker. The cut in the marginal tax rate to 52 percent, the streamlining of the transfer tax and the reform of share exchanges earn praise, but Juusela sees the biggest downside as the government's failure to dare abolish inheritance tax along the Swedish model. The episode covers the 'massimuijapykälä', dividend taxation of unlisted companies, the cut in corporate tax to 18 percent, and the reform of stock option taxation, under which tax is paid only when the shares are sold. Finally, they discuss legal-protection problems in taxation, the need for a constitutional court, and how AI is changing the work of lawyers.
