Episode 35 · 2020-09-04 · 48:50 · Original in Finnish
Career change and angel investing | Ali Omar | Negotiator 35
Originally published as “Uran vaihto Enkelisijoitukset | Omar | #neuvottelija 35”
Ali Omar, who began his career as a doctor and co-founded Med Group with Kustaa Piha, explains how a career change worked when medicine remained a fallback for the risk. The second half is about angel investing: why the portfolio leans on property and startups rather than listed equities, why a ten-to-fifteen-year leg demands patience, how SaaS metrics — gross margin, customer acquisition cost — drive the investment decision, and why the first overseas sales hire in an internationalising company costs more than anyone expects.
Watch and listen
Key moments
- 00:00 — Cold open: an intensive investor and B2B software
- 00:29 — Introducing Ali Omar
- 00:44 — From doctor to founder of Med Group
- 01:12 — Zero to a hundred million with Kustaa Piha
- 01:41 — A provocative LinkedIn post about changing careers
- 02:23 — Why career changers walk into the jaws of death
- 02:44 — Tacit knowledge and underrating your own competence
- 03:38 — A dip in mood gets blamed on the job
- 04:06 — Being a doctor as a safety net for entrepreneurship
- 05:10 — Sami's own leap at forty
- 05:32 — On-call duty taught workflow control
- 06:15 — An MBA alongside entrepreneurship — accounting is wonderful
- 07:06 — EMBA courses and the adult learner's edge
- 07:56 — Edtech as an investment target, and Spark VC
- 08:12 — Investment philosophy after the exit
- 09:36 — A sceptical temperament and set and forget
- 10:13 — Real estate and startups — the common denominator
- 10:49 — Care-property yield and the index as an alternative
- 11:13 — Lesson learned: the US at least at world weight
- 11:28 — FiBAN membership and the weight of a board seat
- 12:12 — Intensive support for the intellectually interesting
- 13:08 — B2B, software, analytics and language technologies
- 13:39 — Entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur support and hard pressure
- 14:35 — On call in Nivala: nobody says no to the boss
- 15:23 — The founder's bubble and loneliness
- 16:09 — Knowing how to ask for advice — is the problem the right one
- 16:34 — A 15k landing page versus a zero budget
- 17:02 — Experts only at the exit stage
- 17:12 — Secondary deals and expectations of the exit
- 18:04 — The culture of A, B and C rounds is changing
- 18:28 — A hundred grand in the account keeps the hunger up
- 18:43 — Founders do not grasp the end value
- 19:20 — Engeström's unicorn model versus 2x returns
- 20:09 — The angel investor's stochastics and surprise offers
- 21:07 — Down rounds and consistent valuation growth
- 21:45 — Cognitive dissonance for the earlier investors
- 22:00 — Look one round ahead
- 22:29 — The SaaS model: where scalability comes from
- 23:42 — The mathematical predictability of growth
- 24:19 — The aim of the A round and its illusion
- 25:01 — KPIs: gross margin, CAC and churn
- 25:58 — Zero churn is pure heroin
- 26:18 — Finland's few companies above five million ARR
- 26:37 — Midaxo moved to Boston and hired American sellers
- 27:03 — Kim Väisänen and the wrong kind of internationalisation
- 27:50 — A national of the country sells to nationals of that country
- 28:42 — The first office close by, physically and culturally
- 29:16 — Market size is not the bottleneck
- 29:30 — The founder goes to smell the gunpowder of the battlefield
- 29:53 — The first hire is make or break
- 30:16 — The price of internationalisation: 200 grand
- 30:56 — Complex B2B SaaS does not onboard itself
- 31:16 — Freemium works in games, not in B2B
- 31:36 — Manic play, one game at a time
- 32:26 — Apple's and China's manoeuvres
- 33:20 — WordDive, Duolingo and a critique of UI
- 34:14 — Finland's problem with usability design
- 35:10 — A UX improvement raises the price by 30 percent
- 35:55 — Inconsistency as a lack of competence
- 36:55 — How Finland gets more angels
- 37:48 — Angel investors are mostly amateurs
- 38:59 — A portfolio of 29 startups — only now am I learning
- 39:20 — You need a statistical base of 20 to 40 companies
- 40:16 — The Somali Warriors Slack community
- 40:56 — The entrepreneur's 125 percent load and the sermon service
- 41:38 — You reach founders only by investing
- 42:14 — Five daughters and four decades of sleep deprivation
- 42:34 — Eight-to-four success stories are rubbish
- 43:04 — The spread of working hours across the portfolio
- 44:53 — Burn the boats — the power of focus
- 45:06 — A small ticket and consistent development
- 45:32 — Ethics: to whom may illiquid assets be sold
- 46:44 — Closing vision: Helsinki as an international startup hub
- 48:01 — Call Sami first, then Ali
Summary
Ali Omar, who began his career as a doctor and co-founded Med Group with Kustaa Piha, explains how a career change worked when medicine remained a fallback for the risk. The second half is about angel investing: why the portfolio leans on property and startups rather than listed equities, why a ten-to-fifteen-year leg demands patience, how SaaS metrics — gross margin, customer acquisition cost — drive the investment decision, and why the first overseas sales hire in an internationalising company costs more than anyone expects.
Chapters
- 00:00 — Cold open: an intensive investor and B2B software
- 00:29 — Introducing Ali Omar
- 00:44 — From doctor to founder of Med Group
- 01:12 — Zero to a hundred million with Kustaa Piha
- 01:41 — A provocative LinkedIn post about changing careers
- 02:23 — Why career changers walk into the jaws of death
- 02:44 — Tacit knowledge and underrating your own competence
- 03:38 — A dip in mood gets blamed on the job
- 04:06 — Being a doctor as a safety net for entrepreneurship
- 05:10 — Sami’s own leap at forty
- 05:32 — On-call duty taught workflow control
- 06:15 — An MBA alongside entrepreneurship — accounting is wonderful
- 07:06 — EMBA courses and the adult learner’s edge
- 07:56 — Edtech as an investment target, and Spark VC
- 08:12 — Investment philosophy after the exit
- 09:36 — A sceptical temperament and set and forget
- 10:13 — Real estate and startups — the common denominator
- 10:49 — Care-property yield and the index as an alternative
- 11:13 — Lesson learned: the US at least at world weight
- 11:28 — FiBAN membership and the weight of a board seat
- 12:12 — Intensive support for the intellectually interesting
- 13:08 — B2B, software, analytics and language technologies
- 13:39 — Entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur support and hard pressure
- 14:35 — On call in Nivala: nobody says no to the boss
- 15:23 — The founder’s bubble and loneliness
- 16:09 — Knowing how to ask for advice — is the problem the right one
- 16:34 — A 15k landing page versus a zero budget
- 17:02 — Experts only at the exit stage
- 17:12 — Secondary deals and expectations of the exit
- 18:04 — The culture of A, B and C rounds is changing
- 18:28 — A hundred grand in the account keeps the hunger up
- 18:43 — Founders do not grasp the end value
- 19:20 — Engeström’s unicorn model versus 2x returns
- 20:09 — The angel investor’s stochastics and surprise offers
- 21:07 — Down rounds and consistent valuation growth
- 21:45 — Cognitive dissonance for the earlier investors
- 22:00 — Look one round ahead
- 22:29 — The SaaS model: where scalability comes from
- 23:42 — The mathematical predictability of growth
- 24:19 — The aim of the A round and its illusion
- 25:01 — KPIs: gross margin, CAC and churn
- 25:58 — Zero churn is pure heroin
- 26:18 — Finland’s few companies above five million ARR
- 26:37 — Midaxo moved to Boston and hired American sellers
- 27:03 — Kim Väisänen and the wrong kind of internationalisation
- 27:50 — A national of the country sells to nationals of that country
- 28:42 — The first office close by, physically and culturally
- 29:16 — Market size is not the bottleneck
- 29:30 — The founder goes to smell the gunpowder of the battlefield
- 29:53 — The first hire is make or break
- 30:16 — The price of internationalisation: 200 grand
- 30:56 — Complex B2B SaaS does not onboard itself
- 31:16 — Freemium works in games, not in B2B
- 31:36 — Manic play, one game at a time
- 32:26 — Apple’s and China’s manoeuvres
- 33:20 — WordDive, Duolingo and a critique of UI
- 34:14 — Finland’s problem with usability design
- 35:10 — A UX improvement raises the price by 30 percent
- 35:55 — Inconsistency as a lack of competence
- 36:55 — How Finland gets more angels
- 37:48 — Angel investors are mostly amateurs
- 38:59 — A portfolio of 29 startups — only now am I learning
- 39:20 — You need a statistical base of 20 to 40 companies
- 40:16 — The Somali Warriors Slack community
- 40:56 — The entrepreneur’s 125 percent load and the sermon service
- 41:38 — You reach founders only by investing
- 42:14 — Five daughters and four decades of sleep deprivation
- 42:34 — Eight-to-four success stories are rubbish
- 43:04 — The spread of working hours across the portfolio
- 44:53 — Burn the boats — the power of focus
- 45:06 — A small ticket and consistent development
- 45:32 — Ethics: to whom may illiquid assets be sold
- 46:44 — Closing vision: Helsinki as an international startup hub
- 48:01 — Call Sami first, then Ali
Watch
The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: Uran vaihto Enkelisijoitukset | Omar | #neuvottelija 35. A Finnish edition of this episode is published at www.neuvottelija.fi.
People and topics
Guests: Ali Omar
Topics: Investing & Markets