Pasi Herranen 🇫🇮
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read
''Just remember that this is a marathon, not a sprint''
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Pasi is the Founder of VacuumWood - The World's First Modular Wood Construction System Making Moisture Damage A Thing Of The Past. He has taken the challenge to answer our 20 Truth Questions, For us to gain some insight, And learn the Truth about the person behind the venture.
My TRUTH Story:
1. INTRODUCE YOURSELF IN THE THIRD PERSON TO A CROWD OF 10,000+ PEOPLE?
An ex online poker professional turned into an impact driven innovator, tech developer and entrepreneur originally from the city of Lahti, the “Chicago” of Finland.
After spending over a decade finishing his mechanical engineering studies at Aalto University alongside his poker career, he got worried about the indoor air quality problems constantly covered in Finnish media.
After two years of hard work without any salary and career savings already spent, he was able to pull out a functioning prototype of prefabricated wood construction module exploiting a physical phenomenon called vacuum drying as an onsite moisture control system - as the very first technology of its kind in the whole world.
After launching VacuumWood.tech, the technology has progressed to utilize IoT wellbeing surveillance plus a strong vacuum insulation boost together with a rapid structural cooldown via evaporative cooling feature has been demonstrated with the the next chapter in this story being cargo shipping. Please welcome ' The Navigator' Pasi Herranen.
2. WHAT IS YOUR DEFINITION OF A TRUTH FOUNDER?
A Truth Founder can provide something valuable for both people and the planet at the same time while also pointing out the feasibility of a fully developed system.
3. WHAT EVENT OR EVENTS HAPPENED TO YOU THAT INSPIRED YOU TO BECOME A FOUNDER?
Becoming a founder was kind of natural for me after my decade-long poker career during which my brain was trained to search for optimal decisions for multivariable problems as quickly as possible based on limited information that was available.
Poker is a kind of university of logical thinking, and the poker table is the war zone. Generally I had to make over a thousand decisions per hour and every one of them increased my chances of winning or losing in the long run.
I feel this skill learned during my online poker career has played a major role in guiding me to this point where I am now. I also see that online poker is the greatest teacher for you to learn how to face unfairness. The unavoidable part of the game is that you just end up losing your hand even though you have done everything right, and after thousands and thousands of practice rounds of facing unfairness, it really changes your personality and teaches you to stay calm.
As they say, while becoming a startup founder you choose to take a million punches. So you need to be prepared. After I found my passion from pointing out the ways to deliver impact, founding a company felt to be the most effective way to change the world.
4. WHAT IS YOUR MORNING ROUTINE & RITUAL? I wake up at 7 AM to handle all the usual family morning routines before driving our boy to the day care. I am back home around 8 AM and then I have my everyday oatmeal and two cups of coffee.
5. WHAT MANTRA,QUOTE,LINE OR PHRASE DO YOU SAY OFTEN TO INSPIRE AND MOTIVATE YOURSELF? In case you are seeing only the downside of things, it’s because you are too tired. Remember this is a marathon, not a sprint.
6. WHY DO YOU THINK PEOPLE SHOULD CARE ABOUT YOUR VENTURE? I have been imagining a world where constructing new buildings would be an Eco Act instead of a large source of CO2 emissions. Wood growth is one of the cheapest ways to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.The question is how can we store that carbon for centuries, effectively utilizing this precious materialized resource and at the same time maintaining effective forest growth rates over generations.
Throughout history we have just sent these “carbon molecule soldiers” of ours to the battle-field and hoped that they would just survive - and if they didn’t, they were just replaced with new ones. - We want to help change that.
7. WHY DO YOU THINK YOU ARE THE ONE TO MAKE YOUR VENTURE A SUCCESS?
As the inventor of our technology together with already nine years of research and development work under my belt, I know the solution inside out, and understand it perfectly at the system level in great detail.
For the last seven years me and my co-founder, Panu Miettinen, have also become experts in the field of indoor farming which forms the core of our beachhead market strategy today.
8. WHAT DOES SUCCESS LOOK LIKE FOR YOUR VENTURE? ( START WITH: IMAGINE A WORLD... WHAT IF... WE WILL BE... )
Imagine A World where global warming has already reached the 2 degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels, we're facing even more moisture in the wrong places, and outdoor yield levels are dropping while the total population on earth is still growing.
What If We would have already built our urban food production facilities and we would have chosen to make them extremely moisture resistant instead of using materials prone to rusting?
We Will Be positioned to produce local and healthy food steadily with much less concerns about how bad the future is going to be. And while getting there, we have also mitigated climate changes by storing megatons of carbon inside our walls and roofs.
9. ANSWER THESE AS MANY TIMES AS YOU LIKE - I BELIEVE... I DON'T BELIEVE...
I believe in passion.
I believe in imagination.
I believe in expected value.
I don’t believe in impossibility.
10. WHAT'S ONE DECISION YOU MADE AS A FOUNDER THAT COMPLETELY CHANGED THE COURSE OF YOUR JOURNEY? After I managed to pull together the first functional prototype and my 'sparking trio' ( my team ) had already been formed, we started to wonder where this technology would make the most sense to be utilized.
We had three options on the table:
1) The general construction industry.
2) Water thermal energy storages.
3) Indoor farming.
We chose to concentrate on indoor farming because our moisture management technology seemed to offer never-seen advantages especially for built moist environments, and the application itself felt to be a lower hanging fruit compared to thermal energy storages. This decision led us to an incredibly cross-disciplinary world of vertical farming.
After some months of deep-studying this field and pushing our business forward, A major door opened for us where we won the opportunity to execute a reverse technology transfer for Aalto University's Research To Business pre-startup funding program in Finland.
11. WHAT DO YOU REGARD AS YOUR GREATEST SUCCESS PERSONALLY & AS A FOUNDER? This story reflects heavily on the founder’s side of the question but resonates strongly also on the personal side.
In 2010, I was writing my master’s thesis about fracture mechanical behaviour of nuclear waste capsules designed to be stored hundreds of meters below ground level inside Finnish bedrock for over 100,000 years. I quickly learned that this was not an ordinary master’s thesis, The computational simulation part of the assignment turned out to be multiple times heavier than expected but I just kept pushing forward.
After six months the progress turned out to be so slow that I wasn’t able to sleep. So I bought a flight to Las Vegas and spent three weeks in a row at a poker table, and came back as a new man with a smile again on my face. I returned back to our solid mechanic’s department embarrassed, But ended up still finishing my studies on time and with the best grades.
My greatest personal success still remains my wonderful family with whom I am privileged to spend most of my time.
12. WHAT DO YOU LIKE MOST ABOUT YOURSELF AND WHY? My imagination - I never know what will pop up next.
It's great fun while playing with my kids, but I also use it for problem solving too.
Sometimes i wake up in the middle of the night and can see a new idea come to fruition so clearly.
13. WHAT'S ONE THING YOU CAN IMPROVE ABOUT YOURSELF, AND WHY DO YOU THINK YOU HAVE NOT DONE IT BY NOW?
Sometimes I try to handle too many things by myself at once and especially non-mandatory tasks might idle for a while due to my personal behaviour. I'm still learning to delegate more tasks to my team members.
14. WHAT'S THE BEST PIECE OF ADVICE YOU'VE EVER RECEIVED OR GIVEN, OR BOTH?
As a founder you will get plenty of good advice but also many bad ones. You need to figure out which are good for your company and which are not. The same wisdom applies when raising your children.
15. ON A SCALE FROM 1 TO 10 - 10 BEING THE BEST. HOW WELL DO YOU THINK YOU AND YOUR TRUTH STORY IS CLEARLY UNDERSTOOD BY YOUR COMMUNITY? ( WHY NOT 10? )
5. My core community of course understands me and my truth story far better but in general I feel that we haven’t found the functional ways yet to communicate the overall benefits of our approach in a concise and easily understandable way , especially to the customers.
Due to the proprietary uniqueness of our solution and generally the uncommon beachhead market, A 3 minute pitch is a total nightmare for me when both of these segments need to be covered.
Personally I would prefer a two hour presentation slot while interacting with the audience, but that doesn’t fit very well with today's hectic lifestyles.
16. WHO DO YOU MOST ADMIRE AND WHY?
Nikola Tesla - He dedicated his whole life to make our lives better.
17. DESCRIBE YOUR VENTURE - ELEVATOR PITCH STYLE?
VacuumWood offers a modular wood construction system making moisture damages a thing of the past.
We can simply remove all of the unwanted excess moisture out of our wooden framed construction modules onsite whenever this is needed by exploiting a phenomenon called vacuum drying.
Every module we manufacture is equipped with IoT moisture content sensors so we know the wellbeing situation of each module in real time.
This is the very first technology in the world to achieve this. The way we enable wood construction even for the moistest climates or indoor environments of earth. We have also demonstrated a strong vacuum insulation boost taking place inside our modules and also a rapid structural cooldown by an evaporative cooling feature.
18. WHAT IS YOUR CURRENT MISSION STATEMENT OR MESSAGE + MARKET FIT FOR YOUR VENTURE?
Mission Statement: Sustainable and very long lasting modular construction solutions with temperature and moisture resistant wooden reusable elements for various types of environments from dry up till very wet conditions while keeping carbon footprint at negative.
Current Market Fit: We are the sustainable solution for moist environment construction.
19. WHAT DO YOU LIKE TO DO TO UNWIND AFTER A LONG WORK DAY?
I love spending time with my family. For the last few weeks our 3-year-old boy has been telling us about his plan to build a wooden multifloor building on the grain field next to our home and the color of the building will be green.
His plan is to live in the penthouse and his little sister gets the basement. :)
20. WHAT WAS THE LAST THING YOU TREATED YOURSELF TO AND WHAT DID YOU CELEBRATE? Me and my wife arranged a surprise wedding directly after our daughter’s name ceremony. My wife (then to be) just changed her dress in a couple of minutes and pulled her unaware father aside after the name ceremony. We managed to really surprise our guests while our wedding song began playing.
BONUS QUESTION: WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO SAY TO ALL THE PEOPLE THAT ARE SUPPORTING YOU ON YOUR AMBITIOUS JOURNEY?
Thank You for being there - I wouldn’t have reached this far without you all.
This story published by Aalto University might be an interesting sequel for your readers: https://www.aalto.fi/en/news/anything-but-an-ordinary-greenhouse
Here is a Youtube link of an artistic celebration of our technology’s capabilities: https://youtu.be/zKZukhei03E?feature=shared
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