What Have You Gained at Foundry, Pirkka Sippola?

This October, the Foundry team had the pleasure of welcoming Pirkka Sippola back to the team. A 24 year old Finance student from Helsinki, he decided to join us (again) for a new interesting challenge in his colorful career. 

“I wish I can use my learnings from Foundry to help build a more sustainable future for our planet,” he says.

Pirkka is currently completing his master’s studies at Aalto University. Beyond lectures and course work, he has also been active in the university community. 

“As an Aalto Entrepreneurship Society Board Member of 2018, I was helping to scale projects like Kiuas Accelerator, Hel Tech, and Dash Design Hackathon” he says. His work in this position, for raising multi-year funding for students’ entrepreneurship associations in Finland, was recognized with an award. 

On top of this, Pirkka has also been active professionally throughout his studies, with his earlier experiences all being selected with the future in mind.

“In 2019, I worked for Tesi (Finnish Industry Investment Ltd) as an Analyst Intern in their direct investments team,” he says. “I have also been the Brand Ambassador of a non-profit community, called The NextGen Project.”

Also in 2019, Pirkka joined Foundry for the first time. As a part-time team member, he was in charge of collecting and crystallizing the business needs of Foundry companies. These responsibilities were not just important back-office tasks, but included significant customer facing work.

“I am grateful for the Foundry team for the amount of trust they gave me early on,” Pirkka recalls. “On top of that, my colleagues gave me all the support I needed. I also learned good practices and tools for handling large datasets and automating this type of work.”

For his new role, Pirkka will be applying his skills to Foundry core operations. He will be working closely with the Business Developers to screen and shortlist the startups that submitted solutions for this Fall’s Foundry Cycle. There are many reasons why Pirkka decided to return to Foundry. He sees many opportunities for continuing to develop himself, along with enjoying working with the team. Furthermore, the environment Foundry works in has fascinated him right from the beginning.

“I see Foundry as a great opportunity to put together my earlier experiences with early stage startups, venture capital, and different collaborative projects,” Pirkka says. “The Combient network is fascinating: helping transform industrial corporations into digital frontrunners is not only special, but crucial for the whole economy and society to thrive and become more sustainable.”

For new team members joining us in the future, Pirkka has a few words of advice on how to best get started in the role.

“Ask a lot of questions from early on,” he says. “Allow yourself enough time to gain an understanding of how things work. Also, be bold and propose developments to the methods we used at Foundry. It is a constantly developing field, so you have a great opportunity to positively stand out and provide fresh angles on how to improve our work or even approach it from totally new perspectives. These suggestions are genuinely and greatly appreciated by the companies.”