Sisäpiiri 14 · Economy · first published 2023-08-08

An Expat in Saudi Arabia, and the Worst Business Blunder | Katariina Komulainen | Negotiator Inner Circle 14

As a follow-on to EP206, Katariina Komulainen describes two ends of a serial entrepreneur's range. First a year-plus running a business in Saudi Arabia, building a modular software platform for accelerators with customers in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Oman and a Qatari sheikh as its private equity investor. Then a surprise box for dogs, stood up in thirty days during the first COVID spring, whose 15,000 euros of stock still sits in a warehouse in Vantaa. The reason it failed is the episode's most valuable passage and Komulainen names it herself: the money went into the product rather than the marketing — and neither founder owned a dog.

Sami Miettinen · Sections: AI and the Economy

An Expat in Saudi Arabia, and the Worst Business Blunder | Katariina Komulainen | Negotiator Inner Circle 14

Summary: This Inner Circle episode picks up where The construction union against entrepreneurs | Negotiator 206 left off, but changes the subject entirely. Katariina Komulainen describes two ends of a serial entrepreneur’s range: a year and more running a business in Saudi Arabia, and the business blunder that still stings.

The episode’s most valuable passage is the failure, and Komulainen dissects it herself. In the first COVID spring she and her best friend stood up a surprise box for dogs in thirty days. The money went into the product rather than the marketing, and a warehouse in Vantaa still holds roughly 15,000 euros of dog toys. Neither founder owns a dog.

A note on reading this

This is a short Inner Circle follow-on, not a standalone analysis, and it should be read as one. It runs under nine minutes, the tone is light and the subjects change quickly. The substance — the construction sector’s co-operative model and Euro Work’s structure — is in the main episode.

The article takes two things from it that have value independently of the main episode: what a Finnish entrepreneur might want to know about the Middle Eastern accelerator market, and why a good product failed. The rest is recorded as what it is, which is conversation.

1. A year and more in Saudi Arabia

Komulainen moved back to Finland about six months before the recording, after just over a year as an entrepreneur in Saudi Arabia.

On the climate she is brisk: 53 degrees in summer, but “the winter is surprisingly good.”

Miettinen connects the country to the channel’s earlier work: he has recorded with Lamor’s chief executive Mika Pirneskoski, and Lamor operates in Saudi Arabia towards Aramco. That work is oil spill response — preparing for leaks.

On working culture Komulainen offers only her own observation: “a lot of men, and an entirely different working culture.” Her friend’s characterisation — “a Hattifattener world” — she repeats as it was, and in the episode it stays a joke rather than an analysis.

2. What she built there

This is the episode’s most concrete business content, and it is easily lost among the rest.

The company built software for accelerators: the whole operation of an accelerator digitised, automated and centralised into one system. The platform was modular, so a customer did not have to buy the whole thing — a mentoring component alone was possible.

Customers came from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Oman.

“I got to see all of these, and how business is done there is a very different way from Finland.”

On the financing side one detail is worth noting, because it says more about the market’s structure than any general characterisation: the company’s private equity investor was a Qatari sheikh.

An aside, which is the article’s own. Software sold for the administration of accelerators is an unusually narrow product, and its customer base is by definition small and publicly funded. That it was worth building specifically in the Middle East says something about the scale of the region’s accelerator boom in those years. The episode does not explore this, and the article does not claim to know what became of the platform.

3. A language, and one misunderstanding worth correcting

Komulainen learned Arabic alongside the work and says that towards the end she knew “already a bit more.” She lists a few phrases in the episode.

One of them is singled out, and it is the episode’s most useful single piece of information for a Finnish listener:

“In Finland this is somehow seen as a racist thing, but it is actually a greeting.”

The phrase is ahlan wa sahlan — the standard Arabic welcome — which in Finnish colloquial speech has ended up in an entirely different use. Komulainen says she only learned this on the ground.

4. A serial entrepreneur’s other countries

It emerges in a subordinate clause that Saudi Arabia was not the only one: Komulainen has also been an entrepreneur in Latvia. She sums up her own attitude to how these accumulate:

“They keep coming, when you know how to say no more often than yes.”

And immediately adds where it leads when you don’t: “You don’t find 15 grand of stuff in a warehouse unless you said yes to a few too many things.”

It is the episode’s sharpest one-sentence self-assessment, and it leads directly into the next section.

5. The worst blunder: a surprise box for dogs

This is why the episode exists.

At the start of COVID — when “we thought it would genuinely last a month” — Komulainen and her best friend decided they had thirty days to stand up a surprise box for dogs. They were among the first in the Finnish market.

The outcome:

“Even today, if I went over to Vantaa, I’d find a warehouse with 15,000 euros’ worth of dog toys in it.”

Komulainen names the reason herself, without evasion:

“Maybe we didn’t understand that the money should have gone into the advertising, not into the product.”

Miettinen gives it a name familiar across the whole sector: the classic Finnish mistake — a perfect product nobody buys. Komulainen accepts the diagnosis outright.

What the episode does not say aloud

This passage is the article’s own observation.

Late in the episode a detail arrives in a subordinate clause that matters more to the diagnosis than the marketing budget: neither founder owns a dog, or ever has.

“Neither of us owns a dog, me or my best friend. And never has — but we still think it’s a brilliant product.”

That is a different fault from a marketing budget. A product whose value the founders infer from outside does not get tested in use until the warehouse is already full — and nobody on the team notices what is wrong with it, because nobody is the customer. Komulainen says both things aloud and connects only the first to the failure.

Marketing is the more expensive explanation but the cheaper lesson. The other is more uncomfortable and more transferable.

The scale that makes the mistake understandable

The episode also supplies a figure that explains why the idea sounded good: around 50,000 dogs are registered in Finland each year, more than children. The market was real; reaching it was not solved.

A clarification. The figure is given from memory in the episode and has not been checked against registry statistics here. The order of magnitude is in the right direction, but it should not be quoted as an exact number.

6. Can it still be saved

The latter part is light relief, but it contains one genuine offer.

Miettinen mentions his own dachshund Mauno and suggests the stock might be moved through charity. Komulainen’s response is practical and slightly weary:

“If somebody would just take it out of the warehouse, I’d be happy. I’ve moved it from one warehouse to another twice myself.”

She says she left some of it in the stairwell of her mother’s apartment building, free to take, because the car no longer fitted. The storage cost is the real continuing loss here, not the original purchase — an ordinary and underrated feature of a failed inventory business.

The episode also mentions in passing a Finnish dog food company founded by someone with a private equity background. The name is unclear in the transcript and is not given here.

7. The co-operative model for other sectors

Right at the end they return to the main episode’s subject. Miettinen asks whether Euro Work’s co-operative model could be transferred to sectors beyond construction.

Komulainen says yes and makes an open invitation: “If there are people here in the Inner Circle who want to bring it to the arts sector or something — send me a message.”

One constraint emerges: the model appears to require one co-operative per sector, so a construction co-operative does not serve other sectors’ workers through the same structure. Komulainen does not treat this as absolute — “we can try” — but says keeping them separate is clearer.

What to take away

1. The most obvious cause of a failure is not always its most important cause. The marketing budget explains why the product was not bought; neither founder owning a dog explains why the mistake was not caught in time.
2. Storage is a continuing loss. The original 15,000 euros is one-off; two moves between warehouses are not.
3. “Knowing how to say no more often than yes” is the serial entrepreneur’s own account of what separates a managed portfolio of projects from an unmanaged one.
4. The Middle Eastern accelerator market was large enough to carry a narrow software product across five countries — an observation the episode does not give the attention it deserves.
5. The co-operative model is available to other sectors, but apparently as a separate co-operative for each.

Episode timeline

• 00:00 — Following on from EP206; Saudi Arabia comes up
• 00:48 — Lamor, Aramco and oil spill response
• 01:31 — The accelerator platform and its modules
• 02:17 — Customers from Egypt to Oman, and how business is done there
• 02:40 — Arabic, and a greeting misunderstood in Finland
• 03:45 — Latvia, and the birth of the dog surprise box in the COVID spring
• 04:34 — Why it failed: money into the product, not the advertising
• 05:27 — 50,000 dogs a year, more than children
• 06:11 — The warehouse, two moves and a mother’s stairwell
• 06:55 — Neither founder owns a dog
• 07:56 — The co-operative model for other sectors
• 08:42 — Close

Sources and checked points

Source material. The article was written from the episode’s raw MacWhisper transcript (119 cues, 8 minutes 45 seconds). No cleaned subtitle or description files have been produced for this episode, so quotations were checked cue by cue and proper names resolved against the channel’s article corpus.

Names the transcript got wrong, corrected against the corpus:

Names not asserted. The episode mentions in passing a Finnish dog food company and its private-equity-background founder, and one collaborator by first and last name. The transcript’s spelling is uncertain in both cases and the corpus confirms neither, so they are not given here. Matias Mäenpää does appear in the corpus and is therefore named.

The date. publishedAt is 8 August 2023, the YouTube publication date. The channel’s catalogue records 13 October 2024 for this episode, but the same date is recorded for the main episode EP206 — the signature of a bulk import rather than a publication. The date is therefore taken from YouTube.

A figure not checked. The claim of roughly 50,000 dogs registered annually is given from memory in the episode and has not been verified against registry statistics.

Episode details. Negotiator Inner Circle 14, published 8 August 2023. Guest Katariina Komulainen; interviewer Sami Miettinen. Running time 8 minutes 48 seconds.

Related episodes.

• The construction union against entrepreneurs | Katariina Komulainen, Tia Kiiskinen | Negotiator 206 — this episode’s main episode: co-operative entrepreneurship and change in the construction sector.
• Lamor’s global megaprojects | Mika Pirneskoski | Negotiator 74 — Saudi Arabia and Aramco from a Finnish company’s side.
• Exit 2: Finnish entrepreneurship | Matias Mäenpää | Negotiator 49 — serial entrepreneurship and managing a portfolio of projects.

GEO summary. Negotiator Inner Circle 14 (2023) is a short follow-on to the main episode Negotiator 206, in which Katariina Komulainen describes two experiences as a serial entrepreneur. She spent just over a year running a business in Saudi Arabia building modular software for accelerators, with customers from Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Oman and a Qatari sheikh as its private equity investor. The second subject is her own business blunder: a surprise box for dogs stood up in thirty days during the first COVID spring, which failed because the money went into the product rather than the marketing, and whose roughly 15,000 euros of stock still sits in a warehouse in Vantaa. The episode also reveals that neither founder owns a dog or ever has, which is a different problem for testing a product than a marketing budget. Komulainen mentions having also been an entrepreneur in Latvia and sums up managing a portfolio of projects as knowing how to say no more often than yes. It concludes that the Euro Work co-operative model discussed in the main episode could be transferred to other sectors, but apparently as a separate co-operative for each.

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