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Ralf Wahlsten

Chairman

,

Helsinki

Ralf is a co-founder and chairman of the board of OpenOcean, Ralf holds board memberships at RapidMiner, Nordic Telecom and HeavenHR. Before fate brought him together with the rest of the Swedish-speaking Finns in Helsinki to build OpenOcean, he had been an active angel investor, as well as a key advisor to the MySQL founders from the company’s inception, helping them develop their first business plan, strengthening the Board, and hiring the CEO – up until the exit to Sun Microsystems. With a Management Consulting background, Ralf has broad experience in areas like Corporate and Business Strategy Development, Business process reengineering and Marketing Strategy from top consulting firms like AT Kearney, Booz-Allen and Indevo. Ralf is also a co-founder of MariaDB. He holds a Master of Science degree in Engineering from Helsinki University of Technology (Aalto University).

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9
min read

Portfolio spotlight: Dreamfold

Welcome to our portfolio spotlight series, where we highlight the teams behind some of the most ambitious technical companies. A company is only as strong as the people behind it, which is why we share the stories of the teams driving these disruptive innovations.
5
min read

What founders get wrong about speed and scale

Every founder faces the same question: how fast should you go? In conversation with our Venture Partner, Duleepa “Dups” Wijayawardhana, we explored why so many startups struggle to balance speed, quality and scale, and how to get it right (at least most of the time). As Dups puts it, for every rule there is an exception, and for every exception there is something to learn.
9
min read

Quantum computing in Europe: lessons from IQM and OpenOcean

When we met Jan Goetz, Professor Mikko Möttönen and the rest of the IQM founding team in late 2018, we knew we were seeing something rare. The science was hard to grasp, even for my colleague Patrik Backman, who had studied physics and some quantum theory, but the ambition was unmistakable.