The boring road to a million — a finance professor's lesson for the founder who can wait

In an Ilmiö Podcast episode, finance professor Vesa Puttonen sits down with Tomi Tolonen and does something rare in financial-investing conversations: he takes the fantasy out of becoming a millionaire. Puttonen’s new book *How to make a million and how to spend a million* grounds its question in modest arithmetic: 700 euros a month, forty years, an index fund and patience. The result is a million.

This is a surprisingly important episode for founders, even though it does not directly address entrepreneurship. Its underlying note — a long time horizon, human capital before financial, delayed gratification — is the very logic by which durable companies are built. And its cross-current — the role of consumption in happiness — is something few founders weigh before their first exit, and many regret later.

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Source: Ilmiö Podcast — Finance professor Vesa Puttonen, 19 May 2026 (in Finnish)

What Puttonen really talks about

In Finnish conversation the word millionaire often gets unnecessarily dramatic edges. It is associated with either a great catch from some company sale or a lucky strike on the stock market — that is, an event that happens once and changes everything. Puttonen wipes this image off the table. His message is that the ordinary Finnish wage earner does not need to wait for an event. It is enough that he starts moderate saving young, diversifies his money into an index and lets time do the heavy lifting. The end result is a number that looks large — but the road there is so boring that many drop off simply because boring does not sound like a strategy.

This is an important observation, because it shows that the barrier to financial independence is, for most people, not intellectual but emotional. Running a company over the long term is hard for the same reason it is hard to keep an index portfolio untouched for forty years: because every five years a moment comes when there is a temptation to do something that looks sensible now but may not be over the longer term.

What the founder can take from this

In the middle of the episode Puttonen opens three themes worth translating directly to the startup founder’s desk.

The first is the skill of delayed gratification. The classic marshmallow test, in which children chose one marshmallow now or two in fifteen minutes, predicted many kinds of later success in research. For the founder this is a familiar structure: in the first quarter there is always an option to do something easy that delivers fast sales numbers — a discount push, capacity overselling, or a partnership whose terms feel bad in the next round. Building a company for the long term requires the ability to leave this undone, and it is a practiced skill, not a personality trait.

**The second is the primacy of human capital when young.** According to Puttonen, a twenty-something should not worry about accumulating financial capital as much as building skills, a network of relationships and health. These are the kinds of capital that pay out for the next forty years — and if they were not built when young, they are hard to build later at the same pace. For the founder this means that the first company is not necessarily the one that makes millions — but it is the one that builds the skill, the network and the reputation with which the next company can. I have written earlier in Innohub that the long game is the long-game player’s edge — this is the financial sibling of the same thought.

The third is money as a means to happiness, not its destination. Puttonen’s book has an important chapter that spending a million is often harder than making one. For the founder waiting for the first exit, this is a useful advance reminder. A large one-off sum does not automatically make life better — it can equally well expose one to “money dysmorphia”, the feeling that money never seems enough even though the account holds more than ever. This is a documented phenomenon among founders who have exited, and one can only prepare for it in advance by accepting that the financial goal is not the same as a meaningful life.

A Finnish pitfall — and a Finnish strength

In Finland there is a cultural split around money that shows up also in this conversation. On the one hand we have a traditional saving culture in which dental care is postponed and the café is skipped because “money has to be saved”. On the other hand we have a newer current in which consumption is justified through social media as if it were a status signal — and in which becoming a millionaire shows up as the only socially acceptable goal.

Puttonen sits both of these pitfalls — neither leads to a good outcome. The first saves itself out of life; the second consumes itself out of the economy. His own message is structurally Finnish: moderate saving, moderate consumption, long-horizon direction. This is the Nordic school that has produced for Finland the welfare society and for many Finnish growth companies sustainable growth. And it is surprisingly well applicable to startup entrepreneurship too, even though in startup circles it sounds old-fashioned compared with the Californian “grow fast and fix later” mentality.

I have written earlier in a column that the Finnish founder’s most durable competitive edge is trust, long relationships and deep local understanding. Puttonen’s lesson connects to this directly: these things are built on the same skill of patience that makes becoming a millionaire boring but achievable.

What to take away

Puttonen’s Ilmiö episode is an hour and 40 minutes, and worth listening to if you want to calm your relationship with money and clarify the structure with which a long-term goal is reached. But its core message for the founder fits in three sentences:

1. Saving and entrepreneurship are siblings, not opposites. In both you build something that pays off ten years out — not next month. Patience is the shared currency.




2. Human capital is the only special advantage of the young. Do not spend it on short-term goals. Use it for building skills, relationships and reputation as deep as you can.




3. A money goal does not replace a life goal. If you build a company only chasing an exit, prepare for the exit to leave you empty in the place where you were going to find fulfilment. Build other meaning into your life along the way.

Puttonen does not promise the reader an easy road. He promises a boring road. For the founder this is good news, because a boring road is repeatable, while running after a lucky strike is not.