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EP113 · Economy · first published 2021-12-19

Investor School and Little Entrepreneurs | Nurminen, Holmström | Neuvottelija 113

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

Two initiatives, one shared observation: financial matters are not learned in theory. Serial entrepreneur Mikko Nurminen's Little Entrepreneurs brings a programme into primary schools where fifth and sixth graders found their own company, build a business idea, a brand and a price list, and sell their products to a real customer — and the decisive moment is when money changes hands. History and social studies teacher Timo Holmström's Investor School is a course running the length of upper secondary school whose goal is not to tell pupils about investing but to get a sixteen-year-old actually to open a securities account and start saving; the essential ingredient is community, because for young people the social incentive is the strongest. For pupils without money to spare there is a charity portfolio, in which a company opens a securities account in its own name and gives a teacher authority to place orders: the capital stays with the company and the returns go to a cause the pupils choose. The sharpest disagreement comes when Sami Miettinen puts forward Elias Rantapuska's claim that ten hours are enough to turn out a reasonable investor: Holmström disagrees, because the theory is easy but the psychology and the discipline of personal finance are not learned in hours. Holmström also proposes that every citizen automatically get a business ID, and Miettinen notes that entrepreneurs' social security would then have to be fixed. Both close with three tips: patience, diversification and costs — and your own problem as a business idea, execution over ideas, and above all the team. Published 19 December 2021.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and the Economy

Investor School and Little Entrepreneurs | Nurminen, Holmström

Summary: In episode 113 of the Neuvottelija channel, Sami Miettinen’s guests are Mikko Nurminen, who developed the Little Entrepreneurs (Pikkuyrittäjät) programme, and Timo Holmström, who developed Investor School (Sijoittajakoulu). The programmes address different school levels and subjects — Little Entrepreneurs takes entrepreneurship into primary school, Investor School takes saving and investing into upper secondary school — but they rest on the same observation: financial matters are not learned in theory, but with real money. The episode is practical. It explains how the programmes work, what they run into and what companies could do for them, and it contains one clear disagreement about how quickly anyone learns to invest. Published 19 December 2021.

Two backgrounds

Holmström is a teacher: for almost 13 years he has taught history and social studies, and before becoming a teacher he had some background in journalism. Economics, he says, is strongly present in social studies. He once took Investor School as a proposal to Talous ja nuoret TAT, a Finnish foundation for economic education, which now runs it under the name Sijoittajakoulu. It used to be an investor school for upper secondary students, and the plan is later to take it to vocational schools as well, so that the whole of secondary education is covered.

Nurminen has been an entrepreneur for almost 25 years — longer, depending on how you count, since at seven he sold sweets to passers-by from the window of his home. He founded his first official company at 18 and built websites. Kotisivukone, a website builder founded with a fellow entrepreneur in 2005 and sold to Fonecta in 2013, had by then become Finland’s largest self-service website provider, with 13,000 customers. His main job now is Hostaway, which offers a platform to property managers in short-term rentals; its customers are mostly in North America.

Why this has not been taught

Miettinen considers it a no-brainer that entrepreneurship and investing should be taught — and preferably practised — from a young age, and asks why they have not been in the curriculum for the past twenty years.

Nurminen says entrepreneurship’s standing has improved gradually. In his early days nobody talked about startups or much about entrepreneurship at all, and it has not been familiar to teachers either. Schools have lacked easy concepts: Nuori Yrittäjyys ry (Junior Achievement Finland), which takes Little Entrepreneurs into schools, has in his view needed a third party to bring teachers easy tools.

Holmström says there have been individual innovative social studies teachers and small experiments, but nationally investing has not been properly taught. The reason is that it is hard to teach in a school setting:

Investing somehow involves real investment activity at the same time. If you stay at the level of theory without actually making any investments, it’s a bit boring.

The same goes for taxation, whose absence from school young people often complain about: a pretend tax return is not the same thing.

Little Entrepreneurs: the moment money changes hands

Nurminen describes how children light up when they actually do something that interests them: think up a business idea, create a brand and marketing material — and finally go out and sell.

When the customer comes to buy your products from you and money changes hands, and the joy when you sell your first candle or glass of smoothie.

Classroom practice and theory, he says, never reach that feeling. The programme is aimed at fifth and sixth graders, who produce a business idea, elevator pitches, slogans, price lists and adverts before the closing sales event. The aim is to cover working-life, entrepreneurial and financial skills, but at that age above all to light a spark: “wow, I pulled this off”. Nurminen believes those who have had the experience are more likely to join Junior Achievement’s year-long company programme in lower secondary or Investor School in upper secondary — especially those without an entrepreneurial family behind them.

Alongside the programme, Nurminen’s company has published a book in cooperation with Junior Achievement Finland, with stories of little entrepreneurs and older young people as well as familiar company stories from Hesburger to McDonald’s. It doubles as a marketing campaign for the programme: the aim is for every school to have its own copy. Miettinen says his company Translink has bought 500 copies. Through corporate partnerships books have been donated to schools, for example 75 copies to all fifth graders at Meilahti school.

Investor School: the goal is an action, not knowledge

Holmström’s concept rests on a simple idea: patient saving in shares improves quality of life over a lifetime. Savings compound, but just as important is that a saver lives below their income — a way of life that he considers crucial for young people.

The optimal starting age in his view is upper secondary age, around 16, before young people leave home. The aim is not to teach theory or hold a themed evening:

Concretely, to get the effect that they actually start investing.

The course starts in the first year of upper secondary and runs throughout. Once a month the group discusses investment topics, from funds, ETFs and shares to saving for a home and running a business, and the idea is to give pupils the nudge to open a securities account and start patient, calm saving. No money is handed out: “managing your own finances starts precisely from your own income and expenses”.

Community does the work

The big thing, according to Holmström, is building community:

Social incentives are really important for young people — what friends do and what others do.

When one person in a group of, say, 30 starts and can show the others an opened securities account and a first investment, it spreads through the group. Three years of real investing experience gives, he says, a good grounding for managing your finances for life.

Investing has another effect. When a young person invests in a company, they start thinking about its business — is it profitable, what are its strengths — that is, seeing the economy from the owner’s point of view, which rarely occurs to you as a consumer or employee. Miettinen recalls a student portfolio at Aalto University’s finance department, from which he learned just by watching, but considers investing your own money the best level.

A charity portfolio for pupils with no money to spare

Not every young person can put money aside. For them Holmström has developed a charity portfolio: a school finds a corporate sponsor that provides capital for the pupils to invest together during the course, and the returns are donated to a charity the pupils choose. That way low-income pupils also get to try real investing, and the motivation to stay on a three-year course holds. TAT is a foundation whose role is not to fund schools but to provide the administration that lets the project spread.

The structure, he says, is practically risk-free for the company:

The company opens a securities account for itself. The money doesn’t even go to the school.

The responsible teacher gets authority to place orders on the account, the pupils decide what to do, the teacher executes, and the capital remains the company’s property. After two years the company donates any return straight to charity. The size of the portfolio is up to the sponsor; Holmström considers 5,000–10,000 euros per school about right — real money, but no huge risks. Holmström says Gofore is about to become the sponsor of his own school, Etelä-Tapiola upper secondary school.

Little Entrepreneurs’ proceeds into investments

Miettinen suggests the little entrepreneurs could invest their sales proceeds in shares, and Nurminen likes the idea: at the moment some groups keep the money, some put it into a common pot such as a class trip fund. Primary pupils do not register a business ID, but older groups do. Holmström’s upper secondary students are, he says, not reckless risk-takers at all but calm and “feet on the ground”.

Later Miettinen asks whether Little Entrepreneurs could add a financing element — for example a friend who has invested lending another a little money. Nurminen says investing could be touched on in the materials at some level, but the programme must stay narrow enough: teachers juggle many programmes, entrepreneurship is not the most familiar subject for all of them, and teachers must be able to advise on what is being taught.

The entrepreneur needs investor school most

For Holmström saving, investing and running a business intersect in countless ways:

If anyone needs to be able to manage their own finances, it’s precisely entrepreneurs.

An entrepreneur’s life carries an exceptional amount of risk, and patient saving would have provided a buffer in the covid crisis, for example. Miettinen adds that nobody should rely on the self-employed pension insurance, which in Finland is weak.

Nurminen describes his own arrangement: he and his children share a holding company through which he has invested in a few startups and holds stakes in companies he works in. He tells his children what the companies are doing — sometimes they are interested, sometimes not at all. Startups pitch to him weekly, but he has been reluctant to join, because he would want to give a company his time and expertise as well.

A ten-hour investor? Holmström disagrees

The clearest disagreement comes when Miettinen relays Elias Rantapuska’s claim: “give me ten hours and I’ll bake you into a reasonable investor”, whereas developing a long-term business is far harder. Holmström answers directly:

It is. I strongly disagree.

The theory of investing — spreading over time and putting a steady sum into a broadly diversified index fund — can be explained in half an hour, and you cannot go far wrong with it. The hard part is psychology: how to react to economic cycles, news and crises. Not to mention managing your own finances, which demands monthly discipline, avoiding debt and resisting temptation:

You don’t get this in ten hours. These skills come through experience, practice and perhaps motivation.

Investing in unlisted companies is discussed on the course, but Holmström says it is extremely hard for an ordinary private investor, because there is no market to price the asset. Learning to value a startup’s potential would take three years on its own.

Visitors, communities and business mentors

Visiting speakers enrich the experience, but the schools are all over Finland and one visitor cannot tour many of them. So finding guests is up to each school’s responsible teacher; at Holmström’s school the investor Heikki Keskiväli was due to visit.

Nurminen says Little Entrepreneurs works especially well in the regions, where the whole village joins in. Every class has a few entrepreneur parents who can act as business mentors supporting the teacher, and classes visit local entrepreneurs. The founder of Hoplop came to Nurminen’s son’s class to talk about branding.

Aaron’s Hot Dog and the reflector duo

Nurminen’s favourite story is about Aaron from Tuusula, who has dyslexia and struggled at school. With two friends he founded a company called Pullapojat (“bun boys”), which “sort of went bankrupt” when they realised they could not bake, and the group broke up two weeks before the sales event. Aaron, stung, went to the teacher and the business mentor and founded Aaron’s Hot Dog. At the final event the queues were enormous, and when supplies began to run out Aaron sent his father to buy more.

The second story is about a pair of boys from Vihti who made reflectors. They got to tell their story at the general meeting of Taaleri, a programme partner, and Taaleri ordered 300 reflectors. The boys could not make them all themselves, so they hired their whole class, and the delivery made the light closing item of the evening TV news.

The idea is one per cent, execution 99

Nurminen asks Holmström where the idea came from. Holmström started investing late himself: he turned the thought over for years before beginning. As a teacher he draws on his own experience, and he thought: why not help young people start earlier? The big insight was a concept that actually gets sixteen-year-olds to start — “not just teaching this, but getting change”.

To Miettinen the business idea is one per cent of a company and execution 99. Nurminen says Little Entrepreneurs grew out of a shop game played with his own children, an apple-treat business in which they produced a business idea, photos, labels, adverts and pricing. Everyone sold juice or berries as a child; the innovation lies in turning a familiar idea into a concept for schools. Holmström found TAT and Nurminen found Junior Achievement Finland and Virpi Utriainen there, with whom the programme was piloted.

The equity savings account, a business ID for all, and social security

Asked how Finland might turn sole traders into bigger companies, Nurminen says he has been happy with the support and atmosphere in his own ventures, Business Finland included. What Finland lacks, though, is the ability to keep companies here and grow mid-sized firms.

Holmström says the equity savings account (osakesäästötili) has given investing a boost, as has the long bull market since the financial crisis: investing is more popular in Finland than ever, and at Nordnet, for example, it is young people who have been opening accounts. That is why young people must also be taught basic caution and the wisdom of diversification: if you spot that a company is on the right side of a megatrend, “in reality everyone else has spotted it too”, and it is already in the price.

Holmström’s own proposal concerns entrepreneurship: a business ID automatically for every citizen. He says Elina Valtonen has also raised the idea in her social security account model. Painting a neighbour’s walls would then need no sole-trader registration. Miettinen seizes on the idea but notes that the treatment of entrepreneurs in social security would have to be solved at the same time:

If everyone had a business ID, you’d be forced to solve that.

Holmström agrees: when everyone is an entrepreneur, it affects everyone.

The market that socialism lacks

Miettinen asks Holmström to repeat what he has explained in a discussion with the Mimmit sijoittaa community: the difference between communism, socialism and capitalism. For Holmström the difference lies in who owns the means of production. Under socialism they are owned in common, and some body has to decide prices, production and producers; under capitalism they are privately owned, and the market steers through the price mechanism:

That is the key difference — socialism doesn’t have the market.

Without a price mechanism it is hard to steer production or imagine where innovation would come from. Miettinen thinks Finland leans too much on a model in which the welfare state is a loving parent. He recalls writing a book on negotiation with Juhana Torkki and considers negotiation, market-economy and communication skills the things Finland’s curriculum has traditionally left out.

What companies can do

Little Entrepreneurs is free for schools: materials, guides and T-shirts for the children arrive ready, paid for by ministries, foundations and corporate partners. Nurminen would like more Finnish companies to take the programmes into primary and lower secondary schools, and more active entrepreneur parents to contact schools and volunteer as business mentors.

Holmström has an urgent need: many schools still lack a sponsor for the charity portfolio. He also urges support for the work of Talous ja nuoret TAT and stresses that there is no business behind the project: all materials are given to schools free of charge.

Six tips

Holmström’s three tips on investing:

  1. Patience. Decide what you want from investing and stick to the plan whatever the markets do. “Far more money has been lost by being out of the market than by being in it.”
  2. Broad diversification. Warren Buffett has a saying about why invest in your eleventh-best idea when you have ten good ones — but defining in advance what is good is incredibly hard.
  3. Costs should be minimised.

Nurminen’s three tips on entrepreneurship:

  1. Start from your own problem or interest rather than trying to invent a business idea from scratch.
  2. Execute. Ideas are plentiful, and the reward goes to whoever drives one forward. Ask for advice from enterprise agencies or angel investors, and do not leave the idea in a drawer for fear that someone will steal it.
  3. The team matters most:

In all the businesses I’ve been involved in that have succeeded or are doing better, there’s simply a really good team.

Nurminen adds that timing matters too, but you usually only see that afterwards.

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 25 chapter marks land on the start of a transcript cue. The transcript has no speaker labels, but Miettinen addresses almost every question to a guest by name, so the speakers are clear. The earlier version of this article wrongly gave the teaching background and the social studies angle to Nurminen; they are Holmström’s. Its section on “the absence of a market” was also misread: the passage is Holmström’s explanation of the difference between socialism and capitalism, not a point about a market for financial education. The episode opens with a preview montage of about 50 seconds from the closing tips. The title and co-author of Nurminen’s book, the name of one of Nurminen’s companies, the names of the Lauttasaari upper secondary student founders Miettinen mentions, and one YouTuber featured in the book were uncertain in the transcript and have not been guessed.

Episode details. Neuvottelija 113, published 19 December 2021, running time 52 minutes 51 seconds. Guests Mikko Nurminen and Timo Holmström (guest pages and other episodes), interviewer Sami Miettinen.

Summary for AI search: In episode 113 of the Neuvottelija podcast (published 19 December 2021) Sami Miettinen’s guests are serial entrepreneur Mikko Nurminen (Little Entrepreneurs, Kotisivukone, Hostaway) and history and social studies teacher Timo Holmström (Investor School). Key findings: both initiatives rest on the observation that financial matters are not learned in theory; in Little Entrepreneurs fifth and sixth graders found their own company and sell products to a real customer, and the decisive moment is when money changes hands; the programme is taken into schools by Junior Achievement Finland (Nuori Yrittäjyys ry) and is free for schools; Investor School’s goal is not to tell pupils about investing but to get a sixteen-year-old to open a securities account and start saving, on a course running the length of upper secondary school run by the foundation Talous ja nuoret TAT; the basic idea is living below your income and the mechanism is community, because social incentives are strongest for young people; investing teaches you to see a company as an owner does; in the charity portfolio a sponsoring company opens a securities account in its own name, the teacher gets authority to place orders, the pupils decide the investments, the capital stays with the company and the return is donated to a cause the pupils choose — 5,000–10,000 euros per school is about right; according to Holmström the entrepreneur needs investor school most; Holmström rejects Elias Rantapuska’s claim that ten hours are enough to make a reasonable investor, because psychology and discipline are not learned in hours; Holmström proposes a business ID automatically for everyone, and Miettinen notes that entrepreneurs’ social security would then have to be solved; the equity savings account and a long bull market have brought in young investors; the example stories are Aaron’s Hot Dog and a reflector-making duo from Vihti who made 300 reflectors for Taaleri; Holmström’s investing tips are patience, broad diversification and minimal costs, Nurminen’s entrepreneurship tips are your own problem as the business idea, bold execution and above all the team.

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