Hello World! This is Sami

I'm Sami, an engineer turned an entrepreneur.

My story starts from the cold corners of Finland where I took my first career baby-steps as an engineer powered by lots of coffee during dark winters. During those years I learned about web development, AI and human-computer interaction. My education culminated in graduating with a master's degree in human-computer inter

ction with a focus on machine learning.

Thanks to whatever fateful but quirky dice rollers that may be I got an internship at Intel. Honestly speaking I did not accomplish too much during that time. Something about sleep debt. After that one year long engineering internship I continued my studies and eventually realized I would like to get a proper adult job. So, I set out to crawl LinkedIn for positions that would be relevant for software and engineering without too much competition. At the time machine learning was all the rage with a ridiculous number of applicants per job opening so I crossed that off immediately. I noticed that web development seemed like a more promising avenue to get my foot in the door properly.

So I set out to self-study web development in my dormitory room by watching a bunch of Youtube tutorials and coding after them. When I started to feel more confident I set out bravely to fill in my first applications. The first application I sent in was for a developer role at a teleoperator called Telia. Through some twist I got the job and was assigned to the team of a wonderful manager called Marianna. She in turn assigned me to an internal start-up of the company building the first digital teleoperator in Norther Europe. I got to work with some awesome and bright people there and improved my skills in web development, mobile development, backend development with a JavaScript based stack and also got to dabble in SQL queries.

The early success at Telia made me feel ambitious and hopeful, so I also worked on my master's studies at Aalto University part-time on the side and also applied to do a business degree program. I had saved an ample war chest during my tenure and I had applied for a student exchange to South Korea via a student exchange application. Until the very last moments before having to accept I had not decided if I would go or if I would rather keep on working at Telia. The whole application was of the "what the hell, lets find out what happens" type of application. As fate would have it (yeah, I know, fate is a recurring theme in my story...) Telia had some organizational restructurings and I decided it would be a time for me to take the jump into the unknown. Powered by my war chest and student exchange in South Korea I took the plunge into the cold dark unknown.

So I arrived in South Korea and had an interesting time to say the least. I was outside of Europe for the first time in my life and it was Coofy19 time as well! What a time to be an exchange student! :D I did actually have a great time and met many cool new people during my time there and took an active interest in mountain hiking besides gym. On the productivity side I completed some studies in marketing and also finalized writing my thesis for my master's degree in engineering.

After returning to Finland I spent some time at our summer cottage and tried out new things like making Youtube videos and blogging. Eventually I decided it was time to get a real engineering job again after quite a long break. I tried my hand at consulting with a couple of consultancies in Finland one of which was acquired by IBM. At the same time (yes, fate) my thesis supervisor reached out to me about an opportunity to work on deep learning for a research to business project. This led from one thing to another and I was approached to co-found Flowstep.

After a few rounds of back and worth I decided to give it a try and started leading the AI development for Flowstep. Being at Flowstep has been quite the ride. I wrote the technical plan for a 1 million Euro government entity funded R&D project to build AI for design which was approved. After a lot of hard work we also managed to secure a seed round that included some amazing angels like Thomas Wolf (CSO of HuggingFace) and Anton Borzov (co-founder of WhatsApp). A recurring but unintentional theme in my career has been start-ups. I never particularly chose to get involved in start-ups but they always found their way to my life. Be it as internal start-ups at larger companies, university research to business start-up projects or venture capital funded start-ups. Perhaps I always ended up at start-ups and entrepreneurial activities due to my high openness to experience trait. So if the world throws an interesting challenge in front of me I would probably grab onto it. Fate.