Antti Taskila

Tech Executive passionate about success, leadership, cars and watches. Currently in 🇫🇮, previously 12 years abroad 🇪🇪🇩🇰🇬🇧🇺🇸. Tweets are personal.

[Chris Fralic @chrisfralic]

“I have been asking for a person's worst reference and why since Zappos. Generally, this question puts the conversation into a more vulnerable discussion”

[Jari Sarasvuo @SarasvuoJari]

Tervejärkisyys tekee paluutaan @henrihei Valcon kaltaisten firmojen myötä.

Täyspäisyyttä ei tarvitse kuorruttaa hyveviestintäkermalla.

Riittää kun tekee järkeviä juttuja järkeville ihmisille.

Ostan sponssina Valcon VMK 25.2 vastamelukuulokkeet yhdelle tarvitsevalle. Perustele.

[Antti Taskila @anttitaskila]

Absolutely made my day. Are you aware of this @ir_rkp @PetteriOrpo ?

Capital * talent * risk is what will pull Finland and Europe out of the swamp we are in. FR8 seems to be the epitome of that.

Assuming the companies born out of it stay in Finland/Europe… what are we doing to keep them here?

Our focus on saving money to end the public spending crisis can’t come at the expense of driving top line growth.

It seems to me that there’s a higher likelihood of success in attracting next generation of multi billion companies to be founded and based in Finland vs. us being able to cut costs enough to balance the budget.

Why? Startups these days scale super fast. That means wealth, fast. On the contrary, we have 0 track record of actually cutting unnecessary costs and/or structures completely. We cut a bit here and there to keep everyone somewhat happy (hint: no one ends up happy), super slowly. Until we spend again.

Just focus on growth.

[Andreas Klinger 🦾 @andreasklinger]

FR8 is a 12,000 m² palace, filled with geniuses researching or building startups, it charges 0% equity and even pays for your food, living, and flights. One of their founders drank actual poison on stage to demo their tech.

Welcome to FR8.

Nothing about FR8 makes sense because it’s so over the top in their ambition, but they might eventually become the biggest thing for young founders globally. And it’s happening right here in Europe.

They are neither a hackerhouse, nor a startup accelerator, nor a classic research lab.

Instead they think of themselves as a university-like institution for the post AGI world that pushes you towards building companies, ambition, obsession, and bias-to-action.

Think YCombinator, Stanford and Bell Labs all wrapped into one thing for the most ambitious 20-somethings in the world to work, run by 20-somethings.

They just came out of stealth. Until recently people didn’t even know where their latest cohort is based. Because additionally on top FR8 is absurdly secretive. Their target group knows them and that’s about all they care for.

We visited last week to join them behind-the-scenes as they prepare for their first demo day in their new building - a 5 floor university building in the middle of Helsinki.

We knew them for quite some time so we were allowed to film them as the first team worldwide. But even we couldn’t film multiple floors and rooms of their building. This video gives you an insight into the ambitious craziness that FR8 is – but trust me there’s more to come in the near future.

The biggest new thing in startups – isn’t in SF – it’s in the north of Europe and attracts young geniuses worldwide. Welcome to FR8!

[Henri Heikkinen @henrihei]

@iltalehti_fi tänään: “Unohda suomalaiset vastamelukuulokkeet, tässä parempi vaihtoehto".

Ne toiset kuulokkeet ovat varmasti loistavat. Mutta kun käytännössä ainoa suomalainen valmistaja tässä kategoriassa on Valco, niin kyllä se otsikointi vähän meni tunteisiin.

Ei sillä tavalla ylevästi, että olisin katsonut järvelle ja lausunut Eino Leinoa. Vaan silleen kainuulaisesti, että tuijotin kahvikuppia ja mietin, että vittu muuttaisko Viroon.

Ei siksi, että toimittajan pitäisi kehua meitä. Ei pidä. Jos tuote on huono, saa sanoa että tuote on huono. Jos yrittäjä on pöljä, senkin saa sanoa. Kun ensi kertaa kerroin, että aiomme suunnitella ja tuoda oman kuulokemallin myyntiin, kaveri sanoi minua hulluksi. Jono alkaa siis Pasista. Rehellisyyden nimissä hän ei ollut täysin väärässä.

Kilpailemme Sonyn, Applen, Samsungin ja Bosen kanssa. Siellä on lakiosastoja, pilvenpiirtäjiä ja työryhmiä, , joiden ainoa työ on päättää, miltä pakkausmuovin rapinan pitää videolla kuulostaa. Pelkästään Applen liikevaihto on isompi kuin Suomen BKT.

Meillä on noin 20 ihmistä, kumppanit päälle. Suunnittelemme, myymme ja huollamme kuulokkeita Suomessa.

Silti me hullut olemme Suomen pienillä markkinoilla kärkikahinoissa. Tuotteita vertaillaan tuplahintaisiin ja asiakastyytyväisyyskysely näyttää niin hyvältä, että jos meille ei tulisi asiakkailta kuvia, joissa Valcon logo on tatuoitu käsivarteen, emme uskoisi itsekään. Emme ole täydellisiä, mutta emme myöskään katoa pilveen heti kun asiakkaalla on joku ongelma.

Samalla markkinaosuudella globaalisti Valco tekisi yli miljardin liikevaihtoa. Käytännössä nollabudjetilla ja parilla kuulokemallilla.

Tässä kohtaa järkevä ihminen hakisi rahoituksen maailmalta ja karistaisi Suomen pölyt jaloista.

Mutta ei me haluta.

Me haluamme rakentaa tehtaan Puolangan syrjäseudulle. Tehdä maailmanluokan tuotteita Suomessa ja Euroopassa. Ei pörssin, ei sijoittajien, ei pikavoittojen takia. Vaan siksi, että me haluamme tehdä niin ja olemme siitä ylpeitä.

Verot maksetaan tänne. Ei meidän panoksella vielä rakenneta uutta lastensairaalaa, hoideta eläkepommia tai pelasteta koko hyvinvointivaltiota. Mutta jotain silläkin tehdään. Ehkä paikataan yksi routakuoppa, ostetaan päiväkotiin kurahousut tai pidetään joku terveyskeskuksen kahvinkeitin hengissä.

Kun kerron tästä, ihmiset katsovat kuin olisin ilmoittanut rakentavani sukellusveneen perunasta.

Välillä tuntuu, että Suomessa on erikoinen kansallinen refluksitauti: jos joku täällä yrittää jotain tarpeettoman kunnianhimoista, ihmisiä alkaa välittömästi närästää.

Suomessa saa olla kyllä idiootti, että lähtee yrittäjäksi. Onneksi meitä vielä muutama on.

Sitä paitsi.

Kuka tahansa voi menestyä Amerikassa.

Mutta moniko on menestynyt Kainuussa?

[Mari Luukkainen @mariluukkainen]

Finnish loyalty cards are one of the biggest jokes in the country. Here's an overview.

S-Group and K-Group control over 80% of the grocery market. Nearly every Finnish household has an S-Etukortti, a K-Plussa card, or both. In most countries, shop staff ask if you found everything you needed. In Finland, the only thing you hear at checkout is "onko S-etukorttia?"

The entire system is designed to make you feel like you're winning while you're being locked in. You get 1-5% back in bonus depending on how much you spend monthly. Sounds great until you realize that the duopoly sets the prices, so your "bonus" is a rebate on inflated pricing that exists because there's no real competition. In reality you're not saving money, you're just getting a fraction of the overcharge back and feeling somehow grateful about it.

The genius is that the card is really not even a loyalty program. It's a big data collection machine. S-Group knows what you eat, when you shop, how much you spend on alcohol, which pharmacy you use, where you refuel. K-Group knows the same. They use this to optimize pricing, product placement, and marketing and give you back a few euros a month so you feel like you're getting a great deal.

Lidl entered Finland without a loyalty card and just offered lower prices. They now have double-digit market share by doing literally the opposite of the Finnish model. Lidl's CEO publicly doesn't own an S-Etukortti. As a marketing strategy it works because deep down everyone knows the loyalty card game is rigged.

The most Finnish thing about this is that people defend their card. "But I get 5% back!" Yeah, on groceries that cost 15-20% more than in Germany or Spain. The card is a psychological lock-in mechanism for a duopoly that has no incentive to compete on price because they've turned every household into a loyal data source.

[Jussi Halme @HalmeJus]

Nvidian osakekurssin rakettimainen nousu on tehnyt työntekijöistä rikkaita: arviolta 75 % eli yli 27 000 työntekijää on jo miljonäärejä. Lähes puolella henkilöstöstä on yli 25 miljoonan dollarin nettovarallisuus.

Kapitalismi on välillä kaunista niin työntekijälle.

[mert @mert]

the internet could not replace fax machines from like 90% of medical institutions in 20 years but yeah I'm sure AI will replace all jobs in 5 months

[Ilkka Paananen @ipaananen]

💪 Supercell 2025: $3B revenue, $1B+ profit – one of our best years ever.

The mobile games industry needs more innovation to grow.

That's why we're going full startup mode in new games 🚀

Founders: come build the rocket, we'll be your launchpad 🎮

https://t.co/tWHq0Vz9J6

[Antti Taskila @anttitaskila]

Damn, this is how it is done.

Most if not all modern cars suffer from an incredibly bad user experience. Not to even mention design, which is driven by the exact same outline of screens and broght neon lights that make your eyes fall.

I can intuitively feel from just the designs that Luce is going to be incredible to drive and operate. I mean the steering wheel alone… damn it looks great!

Well done. Others take notes… pls…

[Mike Matas @mike_matas]

After many years of development, I’m excited to share the interior of the first electric Ferrari designed by LoveFrom. Tactile controls and digital interactions blend into one cohesive interface, shaped through deep collaboration across engineering, interaction, graphics, typography, sound, and industrial design. So incredibly proud of the thoughtfulness and care the team brought to every detail.

https://t.co/JZCleflfu7

[Linus ✦ Ekenstam @LinusEkenstam]

https://t.co/mXpDb4TyBN

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

People I know, with a collective net worth of $500B, scrambled and left California for good yesterday.

They took no risk because of the proposed asset seizure tax - introduced as a “Billionaire Tax”.

Without these people, the California budget deficit will only get bigger.

This hole gets filled in one of two ways: more borrowing from the bond market - who is purely financial and unforgiving or more taxes on everyone else.

Meanwhile waste, fraud and abuse runs rampant from the hundreds of billions in revenues the state already collects.

[Antti Taskila @anttitaskila]

Energy, energy, energy.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Satya just told you the entire AI trade thesis is wrong and nobody is repricing anything.

Microsoft has racks of H100s collecting dust because they literally cannot plug them in. Not "won't," cannot. The power infrastructure does not exist. Which means every analyst model that's been pricing these companies on chip purchases and GPU count is fundamentally broken. You're valuing the wrong constraint. The bottleneck already moved and the market is still trading like it's 2023.

This rewrites the entire capex equation. When $MSFT buys $50B of Nvidia GPUs, the Street celebrates it as "AI investment" and bids up both stocks. But if half those chips sit unpowered for 18 months, the ROI timeline collapses. Every quarter a GPU sits in a dark rack is a quarter it's not generating revenue while simultaneously depreciating in performance relative to whatever Nvidia ships next. You're paying data center construction costs and chip depreciation with zero offset.

The players who actually win this are whoever locked in power purchase agreements 3-4 years ago when nobody was thinking about hundreds of megawatts for inference clusters. The hyperscalers who moved early on utility partnerships or built their own generation capacity have structural leverage that cannot be replicated on any reasonable timeframe. You can order 100,000 GPUs and get delivery in 6 months. You cannot order 500 megawatts and get it online in 6 months. That takes years of permitting, construction, grid connection, and regulatory approval.

Satya's point about not wanting to overbuy one GPU generation is the second critical insight everyone is missing. Nvidia's release cycle compressed from 2+ years to basically annual. Which means a GPU purchased today has maybe 12-18 months of performance leadership before it's outdated.

If you can't deploy it immediately, you're buying an asset that's already depreciating against future products before it earns anything. The gap between purchase and deployment is now expensive in a way it wasn't when Moore's Law was slower.

The refresh cycle compression also means whoever can deploy fastest captures disproportionate value. If you can energize new capacity in 6 months vs 24 months, you get 18 extra months of premium inference pricing before competitors catch up. Speed to deployment is now a direct multiplier on chip purchase ROI, which means the vertically integrated players with their own power and real estate can move faster than anyone relying on third party data centers or utility hookups.

What makes this really interesting is it changes the competitive moat structure completely. The old moat was model quality and algorithm improvements. The new moat is physical infrastructure and energy access. You can train a better model in 6 months. You cannot build a powered data center in 6 months. This is the kind of constraint that persists for years and creates durable separation between winners and losers.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Satya just told you the entire AI trade thesis is wrong and nobody is repricing anything.

Microsoft has racks of H100s collecting dust because they literally cannot plug them in. Not "won't," cannot. The power infrastructure does not exist. Which means every analyst model that's been pricing these companies on chip purchases and GPU count is fundamentally broken. You're valuing the wrong constraint. The bottleneck already moved and the market is still trading like it's 2023.

This rewrites the entire capex equation. When $MSFT buys $50B of Nvidia GPUs, the Street celebrates it as "AI investment" and bids up both stocks. But if half those chips sit unpowered for 18 months, the ROI timeline collapses. Every quarter a GPU sits in a dark rack is a quarter it's not generating revenue while simultaneously depreciating in performance relative to whatever Nvidia ships next. You're paying data center construction costs and chip depreciation with zero offset.

The players who actually win this are whoever locked in power purchase agreements 3-4 years ago when nobody was thinking about hundreds of megawatts for inference clusters. The hyperscalers who moved early on utility partnerships or built their own generation capacity have structural leverage that cannot be replicated on any reasonable timeframe. You can order 100,000 GPUs and get delivery in 6 months. You cannot order 500 megawatts and get it online in 6 months. That takes years of permitting, construction, grid connection, and regulatory approval.

Satya's point about not wanting to overbuy one GPU generation is the second critical insight everyone is missing. Nvidia's release cycle compressed from 2+ years to basically annual. Which means a GPU purchased today has maybe 12-18 months of performance leadership before it's outdated.

If you can't deploy it immediately, you're buying an asset that's already depreciating against future products before it earns anything. The gap between purchase and deployment is now expensive in a way it wasn't when Moore's Law was slower.

The refresh cycle compression also means whoever can deploy fastest captures disproportionate value. If you can energize new capacity in 6 months vs 24 months, you get 18 extra months of premium inference pricing before competitors catch up. Speed to deployment is now a direct multiplier on chip purchase ROI, which means the vertically integrated players with their own power and real estate can move faster than anyone relying on third party data centers or utility hookups.

What makes this really interesting is it changes the competitive moat structure completely. The old moat was model quality and algorithm improvements. The new moat is physical infrastructure and energy access. You can train a better model in 6 months. You cannot build a powered data center in 6 months. This is the kind of constraint that persists for years and creates durable separation between winners and losers.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

AI will largely automate tasks, not jobs. Even as AI agents get better at automating more of what we define as a job in a particular field, we will just raise the bar for what the job is. Ultimately, today’s jobs are tomorrow’s tasks.

Today, many things that we consider as tasks were entire jobs in the past. Telephone operators, telegram clerks, message runners, bookkeepers, typists, and on and on. But then we used technology to digitize and automate parts of the work, and then expanded the scope of the job requirement.

AI agents will cause us to just constantly expand the expectation level of what work output looks like in a particular field.

This is the continuous cycle of technology and automation. Now it’s being applied to knowledge work in a scale that hasn’t been seen before, but the general trend will likely remain the same.

[Nokia @nokia]

We are thrilled to announce that @NVIDIA will invest $1 billion in Nokia to accelerate AI-RAN innovation and lead the transition from 5G to 6G as part of a new strategic partnership. https://t.co/pxGT5DYsA2 #NVIDIAGTC #Nokia

[Antti Taskila @anttitaskila]

Exceptional execution, congratulations on the deal.

[Alexander Stubb @alexstubb]

Prime Minister Orpo and I met with President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Rubio, and Secretary of War Hegseth in the Oval Office.

Today was a good day for Finland.
_

Tapasimme pääministeri Orpon kanssa presidentti Trumpin, varapresidentti Vancen, ulkoministeri Rubion ja sotaministeri Hegsethin Oval Officessa.

Tänään oli hyvä päivä Suomelle.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

.@charliekirk11 is an amazing, brilliant and courageous man. Let us all pray for his recovery.

[Jari Sarasvuo @SarasvuoJari]

Kannattaa tehdä ajoissa päätöksiä, jotka olivat aiemmin poliittisen rälssin mielestä "mahdottomia", niin pääsee aikanaan tekemään päätöksiä, jotka oikeasti parantavat kansan hyvinvointia.

Eihän tämä kysy kuin kaukonäköisyyttä ja selkärankaa päättää silloin, kun mandaatti parantaa tulevaisuutta annetaan.