You have startup and management experience. What motivated you to join the Finnish Business Angel Network as CEO?

I’ve been with the Software-as-a-Service startup Priceff for the last five years in different roles, as CEO, Chairwoman, and shareholder, which I still am. I led it from startup to growth phase and trained the next CEO, and feel that I gave the company all I could. As an entrepreneur, I’ve been through the process of looking for business angel and VC funding. I find investing in general and angel investing in particular to be very interesting and appealing topics. In short, this leadership position at the non-profit organization FiBAN seemed to be an exciting challenge, and it is.

With nearly 700 members, FiBAN is the biggest business angel network in Europe. Where do you want to take the organization in the coming years?

Indeed, the founders who established FiBAN in 2010 have managed to create an organization that is very alive and active. The power of a network is very important, and it should be the community where you feel like you belong. But our job is not done yet. We want to spread the idea of investing in startups to even more people out there. If I look at the backgrounds of our members, most of them are entrepreneurs who have either successfully sold their businesses or are currently building them up. We also have employees of larger and smaller companies as members, but this number could be bigger still. If you are ready to learn and take risks, angel investing and following startups’ development is the perfect way to find out what the world of business might look like in 5 years. FiBAN is a platform for startups and investors, and we want to strengthen both sides in the future. A broader and even better deal flow on one side will lead to more successful business angels on the other side.

How do you ensure a high-quality deal flow?

We receive more than 600 applications every year and have a well-established process in place to screen and choose the startups for our regular pitch events. But the process is just one element. We’re thinking about how to educate and coach startups before they even enter the screening stage so that they have a higher rate of success. We need to get the information out early on what business angels are looking for. We also want to establish ties with other organizations that run pitch events in Finland, such as banks.

What keeps wealthy Finns from investing in startups?

I guess that many of them are very traditional. There are billions of euros that have been sitting in bank accounts for a decade without even generating interest. It is our job to get the message out that investing in startups is appealing and can be very lucrative if you do it right.

Investor education is a big topic for every business angel network. Some of your members have been angel investors for 15 years, while fresh joiners might be completely new to it. How do you bridge that gap?

When I joined FiBAN, I joked that the education modules would even have benefited me as an entrepreneur; they’re not only interesting for investors! Jokes aside, education is a topic close to my heart and very relevant, even for our members who have successfully sold a business. A successful entrepreneur is not automatically a good investor. It is a different story. Instead of knowing one company and one industry by heart, as an investor, you need to be more flexible and take more information into account: the personality of the founders, what it takes to sell, cultural aspects, and even the mechanics of the whole startup ecosystem. I’m happy that with our cross-border and investment training programs, 4NGELS and Connet2Scale, we have a way to give our members the opportunity to learn from very experienced angel investors.

Will you be able to increase the number of female business angels?

Around 12% of our members are women, and I want to increase this number by organizing events and tapping into female networks. The main reason for this low number is simply a lack of information. As the very first step, women should ask themselves: Could I be a business angel? I’m convinced that many times, the answer is yes! We’re here to help them with the second step, namely giving answers to the question: What do I need to become an angel? I know that many women are interested in board positions. Now, if you have the money, you can learn about how to invest in startups and how to become a board member at the same time since many of these young companies need board members who can help them.

What is holding women back from becoming business angels today?

We need more role models. Take politics: Tarja Halonen was the first woman who served as President of Finland, and after her, there have been several female prime ministers, Sanna Marin, for example. They have shown that you can make it if you want. But in business matters, women still hold back. When we looked for a new CEO for Priceff, out of more than 100 applicants, less than 10 were women. I asked myself: Why are there not more?

And?

I read an interesting article about how certain words and concepts seem to be more attractive to men than to women. In the startup and business world, you often hear that companies are fighting for something, customers or investors, that they’re aggressively expanding; everything is a constant war-like struggle. This concept might simply excite men more than women.

Words alone certainly didn’t hold you back from joining the Finnish army. Finland has compulsory military service for males and only around one thousand female volunteers per year. Why did you join?

I wanted to serve my country and test myself to see if I could survive in a man’s world. And I did it for the leadership education of the Reserve Officer School, which is highly respected in Finland. I was the first woman to be promoted to the rank of Major in the Reserve Forces, and even though I am a bit older now, I can still keep up at sports with much younger guys. I like leading people.

Giving back to society is a strong motivation to invest in startups, one of FiBAN’s members told me. Another simply stated that he wants to change the world by investing in companies that benefit it. And a female angel told me that she only invests in startups with a positive impact. In this regard, there doesn’t seem to be a gender gap.

According to a member survey we did, startups in the sustainability or impact fields are the second most attractive to invest in after software companies for our members. For me, this category is very important for society but make no mistake. Even though these labels might sound somehow soft and endearing, achieving a big impact with a startup is still a tough business in the end.

To increase the impact startups are able to achieve, we also need more cross-border financing for the best ones. Do you share this view?

Finnish business angels, by large, focus on startups in Finland. It is safer and easier to invest at home and co-invest with people you know and trust. Investing in a, say, French startup, is simply too complicated, except maybe via Verve Ventures. That being said, maybe people are also missing out on great opportunities by investing only in their home country. One thing is sure, though: we have very active exchanges with our friends from the Estonian Business Angel Network, and some of our members are investing in Estonia as well. There are a lot of high-quality startups there, and Estonia is a comparatively small country that is also quite welcoming to external investors.

Stockholm is farther away than Tallinn, but Swedish is also an official language in Finland. Why are the ties to the Swedish startup ecosystem not stronger?

Many Finns go to Stockholm to study or work, so there are plenty of personal networks or family ties. However, it is more complicated regarding angel investing since the Swedish investor networks are more numerous, informal, and fragmented. There is no SweBAN we can call to organize a study trip or cooperate. Nonetheless, we’re very interested in collaborating more closely with Sweden and the other Nordic countries in general.