The Board's Job

Teemu Kaltea

Teemu Kaltea has spent his career on a single question: what makes a company more valuable. He has worked it from every seat at the table. He built his first career in technology investment banking, beginning as an award-winning equity analyst, rising to Nordic Head of TMT at Nordea, and founding Öhman's corporate-finance business in Finland. Since 2007 he has been founder and Chief Value Officer of Value Group, advising listed companies, family owners, and entrepreneurs on value creation and better strategic decisions about capital.

He came to AI through that same lens, and early. He has followed it for fifteen years, longer than most boards have had it on the agenda. Value creation, taken to first principles, runs into how a company is built to coordinate work, and AI is the largest change to the cost of that coordination he has seen. He has watched it from inside as a board member: at Titanium, a listed asset manager he has served since its IPO, and at Palkkaus.fi and Snowfox AI, two AI-native financial-management software companies, one of which put AIs on its agenda as an existential question.

As an advisor and angel investor he has backed more than twenty technology companies, and stood beside founders rebuilding their firms AI-native from the inside. Through the Directors' Institute of Finland he has sparred with the non-executive directors this book is written for. He holds an M.Sc. (Econ.) in finance from the Helsinki School of Economics, hosts Rahoituskierros, a podcast in which founders tell the stories of their funding rounds, and lives in Helsinki, Finland.