An “As Told To” interview by Kristaps Kovalonoks, Research Coordinator at Aalto School of Business.
This interview is part of a first-person storytelling series highlighting the journeys, ideas, and insights of members and friends of Aalto University’s Entrepreneurship Unit (ENTU). Real stories, told in their own words.
What if being a good entrepreneur starts with being a good teacher? For Antti Lähtevänoja, the answer lies in combining hands-on experience with a clear educational approach. With a background spanning special education, startup building, sales, and research, he brings a practical and strongly interdisciplinary perspective to entrepreneurship education. Now working as a Lecturer at Aalto University’s Entrepreneurship Unit, he reflects on his journey from early business experiments to startup exits, and how he helps students turn ideas into something concrete.
I’m Antti Lähtevänoja, a University Lecturer here at Aalto University in the Entrepreneurship Unit at the School of Business. Alongside that, I’m also active in the startup space, advising startups and working on projects of my own. My background is originally in teaching, more specifically in special education, and over time that path gradually expanded into startups, entrepreneurship, and research. I’ve also founded a company that we later exited, so my work today sits quite naturally at the intersection of education, entrepreneurship, and practical company building.
I think the entrepreneurial mindset was there quite early. I always liked doing things on my own and building something from scratch. I established my first company when I was 18, while I was still in high school. It was a mobile phone repair business, and I repaired my friends’ phones, tablets, and computers. It was actually a good business, and it taught me many of the basics of entrepreneurship: pricing, accounting, and what kind of planning is needed even in a small company.
Later, after that first experience, I continued exploring both education and business. I studied educational sciences and trained as a special education class teacher, but after graduating I moved quite quickly into startup and scaleup environments. I started working in a company creating virtual reality learning environments, first from the educational side and then increasingly in sales as well. From there, teaching, entrepreneurship, and research started to connect more clearly in my own career.
They have taught me many things, but two stand out. First, they taught me a lot about leadership and teamwork. I’ve worked in relatively flat organisations, and I like that kind of environment very much. I think good entrepreneurial work is not only about leading others, but also about being an effective team player yourself. You need to understand how people work together, how responsibility is shared, and how ideas move forward in practice.
Second, those roles taught me how important it is to communicate across different worlds. At times I was a project manager, account manager, and salesperson all at once. That meant discussing one thing with the client, another with the programmers, and something else again with the financial side. In many ways, that was a crash course in how a company actually works. It also taught me that if you have an idea, it helps enormously if you can make it concrete early on. A pitch deck, a prototype, or a proof of concept makes it much easier for others to understand what you are trying to build. That is also something I try to pass on to my students.
The short answer is that the role felt like a very natural fit. I came across the job advertisement on LinkedIn one evening and immediately felt that it matched my background unusually well. It brought together teaching, research, and practical startup work, all in one role. That combination really stood out to me, because those are exactly the areas I’ve been moving between throughout my career.
I also appreciated the recruitment process itself. It included a teaching demonstration and a teaching portfolio, which I thought made a lot of sense. Those parts allowed me to reflect on what kind of teacher I am and to show not only my academic side, but also the practical experience I bring from startups and venture building. I felt that background was genuinely seen as valuable, and that gave me the impression that Aalto, and ENTU in particular, would be the right place for me.
My doctoral research at the University of Helsinki focused on educational selling, or customer education in sales. I sometimes describe the central idea quite simply: if you are a good teacher, you can also be a good salesperson, because you are able to help the client understand the product or service.
That idea comes directly from my own experience in sales. I have often worked with products and services, such as virtual reality and AI solutions, that first need to be explained before they can be sold. Together with my supervisors, I explored whether educational selling can be understood as a distinct sales approach alongside more familiar ideas like solution selling, value-based selling, and consultative selling.
In the dissertation, I had one systematic literature review and two empirical studies based on interviews with both salespeople and buyers. I looked at questions such as how salespeople use educational methods in their work, how customers perceive those methods, and what conditions make educational selling possible. One of the findings I found especially interesting is the role of psychological safety. For this kind of selling to work, both the salesperson and the buyer need to feel safe enough to admit what they know, what they do not know yet, and what they actually need.
More broadly, I see the topic as closely connected to entrepreneurship education, because founders are constantly in situations where they need to explain, persuade, and create value through understanding.
At the moment, I teach Go to Market for Founders, and I also have a storytelling course coming up, as well as Founder Principles. All of these courses are very practical in orientation. Of course, they include academic components because we are in a university setting, but my main aim is that students leave with tools they can genuinely use if they want to build something of their own.
In Go to Market for Founders, for example, the focus is on questions like how to enter the market, how to do customer research, how to think about sales and marketing, and how to understand competition. In the Storytelling course, the focus is on how founders communicate their mission, vision, and value in a compelling way. Across all the courses, I try to bring in real frameworks, models, cases, and practical exercises that students can continue using after the course has ended.
I also try to connect the classroom to real-world situations. That includes using AI in areas like market research, building practical simulations, and working with real case companies. For me, it’s important that students do not feel they are just completing an isolated academic exercise. Credits matter, of course, but what matters more is that they leave with something concrete and useful.
There probably isn’t one typical week, but my work usually involves a mix of teaching, research, meetings, supervising master’s theses, and startup stuff. If a course is running, then there is teaching itself as well as a lot of interaction with students outside the classroom. Sometimes students from earlier courses also get back in touch with new ideas and ask for feedback, so those conversations continue beyond the course itself.
One thing I appreciate a lot in my current role is that there is a real place for research in it. Around 30 per cent of my working time is reserved for research, which I think is extremely valuable. It allows me to keep developing my own academic work while also teaching. I like that combination very much. In practice, some days are meeting-heavy, while others are more focused on writing. On writing days, I often still come to campus because the work environment is very good, and I enjoy being able to combine focused work with lunch or a quick discussion with colleagues.
What has stood out most to me is the community spirit. I have had the privilege of being part of excellent research groups before, but here I especially appreciate the atmosphere in ENTU. It is a very global and diverse group, and I think that matters a lot. Different nationalities, different perspectives, and different professional backgrounds create a stronger environment both for teaching and for research.
What I also value is that people here do very high-quality work, but in a relaxed way. There is a strong sense of internal motivation. It does not feel like people are doing things only because they have to. There is also a very clear connection to practical working life, not only to academic discussion. That has always been important to me personally, and I feel it is very present here as well. So for me, ENTU is a diverse, internationally minded, high-quality community with a strong team spirit and a genuinely practical orientation.
I usually put it in two simple rules. First, do not do it alone. You can start exploring an idea on your own, and you can move quite far by yourself, but at some point, you need the right people around you. A good team and complementary co-founders make a huge difference. Entrepreneurship is difficult enough already, so there is no reason to try to push through everything alone.
Second, run decisions through Excel. By that I mean: calculate. Take risks, be bold, and try ambitious things, but also estimate the consequences and understand the numbers behind your decisions. In my startup experience, that balance has been crucial. I'm the one with the wild visions and big ideas – but I need a counterpart who can pressure-test them from a financial standpoint.
So if I had to summarise it very simply, my advice would still be: do not do it alone, and use Excel.
