Meet our Angel: Matias Mäenpää

Matias Mäenpää

Interview with one of our new members coming from Finland and the author of a book on "EXIT."

Meet Matias

Current roles: Serial entrepreneur and angel investor in nine Startups

Hails from: Finland

Education: Executive MBA from Henley (University of Reading)

First Job: Gathering and selling strawberries at a marketplace being six year old

Work Attire: Easy-going

Hobbies: Playing ice hockey at Tornado Luxembourg

Most admired entrepreneur and why: Anssi Kiviranta – I´m always amazed how he can bring value to different industries and surprises others with the extraordinary ideas.

How you began angel investing?

How did you get involved with angel investing?

For almost ten years journey as a co-owner of company which was exited I wanted to be involved with growth seeking companies as close as possible. Doing work as an angel investor gives a possibility to dig deep with several different businesses at the same time – and learn from them.

Your first Angel investment: Hostaway is vacation rental software that makes running property management business easy and more profitable. Spend less time on annoying tasks and more time building your business. More info from www.hostaway.com

Matias & LBAN Why did you decide to join LBAN? One of most important fundaments to succeed as an angel investor is to meet and work with other investors. Like every other business, it´s about giving others and getting back.

What would you like to share with the LBAN Member? I encourage everyone to spread the word you are keen to invest – quite many angel investors are not making noise about what they are doing. It´s critical to reach as large deal flow as possible to make a successful portfolio.

What are your exit criteria? I´m not the guy who seeks the future unicorns. I mostly believe to 20m to 100m€ exits so those are the cases I´m seeking naturally.

Pieces of Advice

Lessons learned due to investments which failed if there were such in your life?

Advice for new angel investors: Get to know the founders as much as possible. You can replace everything else but founders not so likely.

Your one last piece of advice to conclude? Work with people you like. We live here only once so there´s no room for spending time with douchebags.

Thank you very much, Matias, for such insights! Sonia FRANCK for LBAN