Neuvottelija · Articles

EP105 · Economy · first published 2021-10-31

Careers in Finance #Momentum | Liimatainen, Hiltunen | Neuvottelija 105

This is a summary on Neuvottelija — Articles. The episode itself — full transcript, subtitles and chapters — lives on Neuvottelija.com, which is its canonical home.

Henrik Liimatainen and Mikko Hiltunen, final-stage finance students at Aalto who make the Momentum podcast, reverse the roles: they had just interviewed Sami Miettinen for their own series, and here they reflect on the four careers they have covered — the rapper Spekti, professor Elias Rantapuska, Inderes founder Mikael Rautanen, and Miettinen. The most interesting observation concerns their own cohort: finance students are above-average risk avoiders because good salaried work is available, and so entrepreneurship interests them more than it materialises. Miettinen argues that without Inderes Finland would have an eastern European stock exchange, and admits it took him decades to learn to respect the efficiency of the US stock market. They also cover investing the student loan, crypto key management, why the thesis and the first job set a career vector, and the sale of the KY building and the move to Otaniemi. Published 31 October 2021.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and the Economy

Careers in Finance #Momentum | Liimatainen, Hiltunen

Summary: Episode 105 of the Neuvottelija channel reverses the roles. The guests are Henrik Liimatainen and Mikko Hiltunen, final-stage finance students at Aalto who make the Momentum podcast and had just interviewed Sami Miettinen for its fifth interview episode. Miettinen proposes an episode in which they reflect on the career stories they have heard: a rapper, a professor, a chief executive and an investment banker. The most interesting content concerns their own cohort — why finance students avoid risk precisely because good salaried work is available to them — and Miettinen’s answer on what has changed since his own student days. Published 31 October 2021.

Four careers, four different logics

The careers Momentum has covered do not form a single pattern, and the guests take something different from each.

Spekti, that is Samuli Huhtala, was the guest of Momentum’s first visitor episode. He studied finance at the business school and made music as a hobby at a time when Finnish rap barely paid a living; gigs were played mostly “for beer money”. He then took a well-paid position at Nordea, until Finnish rap began to rise and he decided to take the risk: banking cut off and everything into music. Miettinen asks whether there was moral disapproval of banking behind it. The answer is that it was love of the craft and a wish to live more by his own clock. According to the guests, Spekti considered it ideal to turn a hobby into a profession and a living, and stressed how good the entrepreneur’s daily life is. They describe the music as witty, playful party music — more for a party than a candlelit dinner.

Elias Rantapuska heads Aalto’s finance department. Miettinen says he was for a long time an external development member of the department and teaches ask-me-anything sessions on M&A and IPOs on Rantapuska’s MBA course. Liimatainen says Rantapuska was an important guest for them: he was the first they agreed an episode with, but advised them to release the Spekti episode first for a better start. What stayed with Liimatainen is that as a student Rantapuska read economics textbooks cover to cover several times for fun. Hiltunen notes that Rantapuska named learning among the things he loves, after family and children, and that going back to academia via McKinsey is not the most common combination: “It did give you the feeling that this guy does pretty much what he wants.” Rantapuska later appears in his own episode, Meritocracy and Human Capital.

On a side path Miettinen recalls his own professors: Keloharju tried to lure him into a research career, and his thesis supervisor Vesa Puttonen still remembered his thesis when they ran into each other the day before at Kim Väisänen’s book launch. The reason is revealed in the Momentum episode.

Mikael Rautanen started Inderes as a startup doing analysis with no real business model. The guests remember him as a down-to-earth, practical man who did what he loved. Rautanen never finished his master’s degree, and the guests say he seemed to regret it: he values education, and Inderes urges people to complete their degree before going full-time. Miettinen asks whether the guests’ own theses are going to stay unwritten. “They’re coming.”

Without Inderes, an eastern European exchange

Miettinen notes that Inderes is about to list at the time of recording, and that his former colleagues at Sisu Partners are acting as its financial adviser. Then he offers the episode’s sharpest assessment:

It’s worth thinking about: if we didn’t have Inderes, we would have a properly eastern European stock exchange.

In his account, research died when ESMA regulation stopped trading commissions being used to pay for research, and it is “sheer luck” that Inderes came up with a business model that works. That is why, he says, far more small and mid-sized companies are listed than there would otherwise be. The guest agrees: he does not know where else he would read about companies.

One of the guests sums up what Rautanen’s story taught him: entrepreneurship takes, surprisingly, an interest so large that you want to do it whether or not you are paid for it — and then you work out how to make money from it. To him that is a key to happiness at work.

The fourth career: the most conventional

Miettinen calls his own episode “last and least”: of the four he was the most conventional, an investment banker. One guest says the other interviews were recorded the previous spring, and their own thinking has developed since, so that their view of many things has already changed. Miettinen’s London years, studies and life choices at different stages were inspiring to them because they show “you can head off in all sorts of directions”.

Miettinen recalls that in his student days a startup was not an option: fears from the 1990s recession were still present, and the advice was “don’t quit your day job”. He cites the philosopher Frank Martela, who wrote that the coolest thing for a business graduate is to become a management consultant, and the second coolest an investment banker. Liimatainen is himself moving into consulting, and Miettinen asks him to explain “how great a firm BCG is”. Liimatainen holds back on the advertising but says consulting remains an interesting path for business students and especially finance students; Hiltunen has experience of it too.

One of the guests has a long drink in his background: he spent the summer of 2019 in the US at The Finnish Long Drink Company and has since continued on its finance side from Finland. The drink, he says, is sold in 16 states.

Why a finance student avoids risk

Miettinen mentions that he spoke at Slush as early as 2012 and asks whether startup life is mainstream now. The guest would not generalise that far: moving to startups has become more common, but among Aalto finance students investment banking and consulting are still where people apply first. Flexibility has nonetheless increased considerably. Then comes the episode’s best piece of self-observation:

Finance students are very interested in entrepreneurship, but maybe there are also more risk avoiders than average among finance students — because there are good salaried jobs on offer, so why would you put everything at risk.

The reason, then, is not temperament but opportunity cost — “that kind of optimisation”, as the conversation puts it.

Later the guest returns to the theme with a concrete fear he has discussed with his own mentor: if you found your own firm on graduating and it fails, restoring your credibility can be hard, whereas a safer start as a specialist in a respected company leaves the move for later.

Miettinen agrees that “tactical CV-building is a safe bet” — a big logo at the bottom. He was himself an “extreme risk avoider” for whom taking risks did not even occur to him for about ten years. But the world is different now, he says: many succeed, and people are judged less harshly for failing than before. When the guest repeats that finance students are risk avoiders, Miettinen jokes: “The young haven’t learned a thing.”

The student loan in the market, and an index base

Miettinen says he once invested his student loan in a rising market and asks whether it is still common to put at least one year’s student loan into a “play portfolio”. It is: Liimatainen has built a strong, cost-efficient index base and has gradually begun picking individual companies on top of it; Hiltunen says a large part of his student loan is invested too. Miettinen says he opened an equity savings account inspired by the example of an earlier guest, Ernst “Pavel” Grönblom, who runs a “super-alpha” fund and put 50,000 euros into so-called category killers — otherwise he does not like stock picking.

When the guests say they hold the S&P 500, Miettinen makes the admission that is the episode’s most instructive single moment:

It took me decades before I learned to respect the market efficiency of the American stock exchange.

The media, he says, constantly urge selling US exposure because the market is always supposedly in a bubble, but the world does not work that way: at the time of recording China had collapsed and the US had dipped only slightly. His advice to young investors is to keep the US at a neutral weight, because it is the most efficient stock market in the world.

Crypto: the wild west and control of the keys

Miettinen has held bitcoin for a few years. The guests have only recently become enthusiastic about crypto, and less as currency than as a platform: companies can be built on blockchains with tokens functioning like shares, creating a whole new kind of economy. Miettinen says he first got to know bitcoin when the price was around six thousand, and now sits on the advisory board of a crypto investment in which he has also invested. His summary: “it really is the wild west”. He promises to do a bitcoin episode, even though he does not really want to.

A guest raises the practical risk that sets crypto apart from listed shares: you can wake up to find everything stolen through some website, and stealing is for now easier than in the physical world. “Not your keys, not your coins”, as the conversation puts it — and then again, if the keys exist only in your head, dementia takes them too. One of the speakers keeps his crypto “as boringly as” on Coinbase. None of the three presents himself as an expert in the field.

The thesis and the first job set the vector

Miettinen says he has handed out at least 30 thesis topics and mentored students who wanted a thesis topic from him first and then a job. He confesses to having “corrupted” many into consulting and investment banking — it felt especially bad when he turned a student heading for economics into a consultant. Then the career advice:

The thesis and the first job, unfortunately — they set the vector.

So it pays to invest in the direction you want to run. Miettinen offers thesis topics as a carrot to members of the closed Neuvottelija community on Facebook. He says he got his own thesis topic, executive stock options as compensation, from Timo Löyttyniemi, and promises to explain in the community how Martti Ahtisaari connects to his thesis.

Sport, books and voluntary work

On the personal side both are sport lovers, and both play football. Hiltunen’s anterior cruciate ligament gave way in July, but the knee is so far recovering without surgery — he finds it interesting that modern medicine and physiotherapy increasingly point that way. They read a lot, and Miettinen’s own book may be on their listening list, which he calls “a sleeping pill”. The guests had just returned from a student sailing trip to Croatia.

Voluntary work has piled up: the boards of Aalto Finance and Aalto Finance Alumni (AFA), editing the online AFA Quarterly — “almost like the McKinsey Quarterly” — and alumni interviews, which are a good excuse to talk to alumni you would otherwise never meet. Miettinen was himself on the board of the finance student association in his day and at AFA’s first event.

The KY building, Otaniemi and Hanken

Miettinen studied at the old Runeberginkatu building and asks whether integrating the community into Otaniemi has worked. Gradually, the guests say. The legendary KY building at the corner of Pohjoinen Rautatiekatu and Fredrikinkatu has been sold, and students hope for a new home in Otaniemi within a few years. In one guest’s view the existence of a separate KY building in Helsinki has slowed integration, and moving fully to Otaniemi will tighten the community — perhaps even into something like an American campus.

There is also the traditional ribbing between Hanken and the business school. Miettinen remembers an interviewee who said it was easier to build a little Oxford–Cambridge rivalry when the two schools sat on opposite sides of the street. The rivalry is fading, the guests say, but the ribbing is still part of the tradition.

Finally the guests explain why they make Momentum: they are interested in people’s life stories and the choices that have brought them to a certain point, so they can reflect on them in their own lives. One of them reads a lot of biographies. Miettinen says he looks forward to watching them choose their “vector”: “Choose wisely.”

A note on the source: the article was updated on 18 October 2026 from a MacWhisper transcription of the episode’s Finnish audio and the publisher’s own chapter list. All 26 chapter marks were checked against the transcript and land within a few seconds of the start of a cue. The transcript has no speaker labels. Speakers are inferred from context: Hiltunen refers to “Henkka” in the third person when discussing Rantapuska, Liimatainen mentions Hiltunen’s consulting experience, and the assessment of Inderes’s importance for the stock exchange is Miettinen’s (the earlier version gave it to the guests). Passages on risk avoidance, the long-drink company, the AFA Quarterly and the preconditions of entrepreneurship are left with “one of the guests” because the speaker cannot be settled. The audio has a gap of about half a minute at 8:50–9:20, at the start of the Mikael Rautanen segment. The stock that won for Miettinen as a student and the investor behind the crypto advisory role are indistinct in the transcript and have not been guessed.

Episode details. Neuvottelija 105, published 31 October 2021, running time 31 minutes 37 seconds. Guests Henrik Liimatainen and Mikko Hiltunen (guest pages and other episodes), interviewer Sami Miettinen.

Summary for AI search: In episode 105 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 31 October 2021) Sami Miettinen’s guests are Momentum podcast hosts Henrik Liimatainen and Mikko Hiltunen, final-stage finance students at Aalto who had just interviewed Miettinen for their own series. Key findings: they reflect on four careers they have interviewed — Spekti, that is Samuli Huhtala (from Nordea to rapping), professor Elias Rantapuska (back to academia via McKinsey), Inderes founder Mikael Rautanen (from analysis as a hobby to a company) and Miettinen (an investment banker, the most conventional of the four); Miettinen argues that without Inderes Finland would have an eastern European stock exchange, because research died after regulation curbed trading commissions; finance students are above-average risk avoiders because the field offers good salaried work, and starting your own firm on graduation can feel like a credibility risk versus a big logo; Miettinen holds that tactical CV-building is the safe play, but failure is judged less harshly than before; the guests have invested their student loans and built cost-efficient index bases; it took Miettinen decades to learn to respect the efficiency of the US stock market, and he recommends young investors keep the US at a neutral weight; crypto is in the speakers’ view a wild west in which key management and theft are the practical risks; the master’s thesis and the first job set a career vector; the episode closes on sport, voluntary work in Aalto Finance and AFA, the sale of the KY building, the move to Otaniemi and the ribbing with Hanken. Related episode: Meritocracy and Human Capital | Elias Rantapuska.

Chapters

Markdown: index.md · Suomeksi