Author
Petri Lehmuskoski
Written from scars, not trophies.
Founder, operator, investor
Petri Lehmuskoski has founded, scaled, repaired and exited companies over more than four decades.
His first company, started in the 1980s in computer gaming and B2B2C distribution, grew into a Nordic group of roughly 50 million euro before its sale in 2004. After the sale he ran the acquirer's distribution business across seven countries, through a leadership change and a turnaround, to 120 million euro and market leadership. His second company, built in IT infrastructure and mainly B2G, reached market challenger status before its exit to a buyout fund in 2016.
He began angel investing in 2008 and early-stage venture investing as a Nordic VC with three funds and fifteen years of operating history. He has reviewed more than 10,000 startups and has been involved in more than 20 positive exits and more than 20 M&A transactions.
The scars in this book are his own. They are real decisions he lived through, not composites or hypotheticals.
The same lessons, written up over the years, are collected in the Writing library.
A scar that steered twenty years
Years ago he was asked to pitch for the distribution of a games console that had not yet launched, from a company that had never made one and was known for televisions and stereo equipment. He never pitched. He was afraid of the size of the commitment, doubted his own understanding of what it would take, and did not believe an outsider could win. About two years after launch, that console had overtaken the market leader.
Only one of those three reasons pointed at evidence. A disciplined refusal names the missing proof and the test that would supply it. He named his fear.
The scar did its work later. When the next outsider arrived with the next console, his company was small against giants and won the Nordic distribution rights anyway. The launch that followed still went wrong, for reasons the book examines. Scars steer. The steering is not automatically right.
Why this book exists
Most business books are written from trophies. This one is written from scars.
Founders rarely destroy companies with one bad decision. They destroy them with the right decision made six months too early. More Scars Than Trophies exists because nobody explained which activities generate evidence and which generate only motion. It is the shortcut its author did not have.
Gorilla Capital
Petri is Founding & General Partner of Gorilla Capital, a Nordic institutional super angel investor backing early-stage technology companies in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and the Baltics.
Gorilla invests in what it calls camels rather than unicorns: capital-efficient companies solving real business problems, usually before value or scaling proof. Funding is tied to milestones. Premature scaling is treated as the thing to avoid, because adding fuel to a machine that does not yet work destroys optionality.
That is the same argument this book makes, arrived at from the other side of the table. The Proof Stack is what it looks like when the principle is written down.
Follow the journey
Petri and Gorilla Capital are both on LinkedIn.
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PDF, 8 pages.
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