Technology promised better — Perttu Pölönen's reminder for the founder who builds "solutions"

Perttu Pölönen says, in the one-hour-45-minute episode on Ilmiö Podcast, a sentence that stays in mind longer than many: the smartphone connects those who are far away and separates those who are close. In one sentence is condensed what twenty years of tech discussion has mostly stayed silent about — that every “solution” produces its own problem, and that problem is often exactly the thing the promise was solving.

This is an important episode, because its message does not go through easily in founder circles. We build products. We promise the user that their life will become easier, more efficient, better connected. Pölönen’s reminder is uncomfortable but essential: the promise is not the same as the outcome, and followers are not friends.

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Source: Ilmiö Podcast — Perttu Pölönen: Tech promised better but it didn’t turn out that way, 26 May 2026 (in Finnish)

What the episode is about

Pölönen is one of Finland’s best-known speakers on technology and learning, and his book The Future Curriculum has brought him to both founder audiences and education-policy tables. This Ilmiö episode is not his first with Tomi Tolonen, and its feel is like a conversation between two good friends, where both get to finish their thoughts. The episode moves from the smartphone’s effects on loneliness to the shift of communities from the real world to digital, to AI’s effect on trust in oneself, and to whether ease has stolen meaning from life.

One of the episode’s most striking observations is the difference between American and Chinese young people’s dream professions. In the US, top of the list is influencer; in China, astronaut. This is not just an entertaining detail — it is a snapshot of what two superpowers’ education cultures produce: in one, youth’s goal is to be seen; in the other, to do something so hard that only a capable society can support it. From a Finnish perspective we should be worried about both — we don’t want an education system that produces only influencers, but we also don’t want a society that rewards only those who never question.

What the founder takes away

Pölönen doesn’t address startup founders directly in the episode, but his observations are worth translating for that audience. For founders building applications, services and “solutions”, four concrete lessons rise from the episode.

First: ask what you promise, and also ask what the promise produces on the other side. The smartphone promised connection, and delivered it — but on the other side was that people stopped calling each other. Social media promised community, and gave it — but on the other side, local communities thinned. An efficient booking system promised faster service, and gave it — but on the other side, the user became just a number in time slots. Recognising the flip side of the promise is part of responsible product development. Pölönen does not demand that promises must not be made — he demands that the one who makes the promise must know what waits on the other side.

Second: ease is not a value in itself; it has to serve a larger meaning. Every “one-button” service makes the customer’s life easier in some small respect. But if ease leads to her no longer doing the things through which she feels she belongs somewhere, the end result is poorer than the starting point. This is a clear product question: am I building a solution that frees time for more meaningful doing, or one that replaces that more meaningful doing altogether?

**Third**: AI changes trust in oneself in a way not yet visible. Pölönen raises that as we outsource more and more small decisions to AI — what to read, what to eat, how to write, how to answer a customer — we simultaneously lose practice in trusting our own judgement. This is an especially important observation for founders, because the founder’s whole job rests on the ability to make decisions on imperfect information quickly. If this skill weakens, the entire founder’s capacity to grow into a growth-company leader weakens. I have written earlier in Innohub about Tero Ojanperä’s reminder that the limits of AI are not going away in the coming years — the same logic applies here: AI does not replace the founder’s ability to trust their own decision, and should not.

Fourth: measure the product’s effect on the rest of life, not its usage hours. This is perhaps Pölönen’s hardest message for founders. Most consumer products built in the last decade optimise the number of usage hours — because their revenue model (advertising, engagement, data collection) rewards it. But when the user is asked afterwards whether their life was better thanks to the product, the answer is often unclear or even negative. This is a structural incentive problem, not any single company’s fault — but it is increasingly the new founder’s job to solve in their own product.

What for Finland

In Pölönen’s conversation there is a point where he speaks about how the private sector creates a problem and the public sector has to clean it up. Estimates of smartphones’ effects on young people’s mental health put the healthcare-system cost at considerable — and the original producer does not carry it. This is a societal dimension that may look small from a single founder’s perspective but, multiplied by hundreds of millions of users, is a question on the order of billions.

For the Finnish founder this means two things. First, Nordic legislation moves year by year in a tighter direction on producer responsibility for the longer-term effects of their product. This is a coming cost worth pricing into the business model already now. Second, Finnish consumer trust in the supplier has historically been higher than in many other countries — and that trust should not be eaten away by short-term engagement metrics. I have written earlier that choices build the brand more than messages — the same applies to the product. What you build tells who you are.

What to take away

Pölönen’s episode is long, but its whole message fits into one question every founder can ask themselves tonight: if my user looks back at my product five years from now, was their life better because of it? If the answer is an unambiguous yes, you have built well. If the answer is “maybe, but…” or “yes in the short term, but…”, it is worth pausing. Pölönen’s message is not that making technology is bad — he himself is a technologist and innovator. His message is that the gap between promise and outcome has produced, in the last twenty years, damage that no single founder intended to produce, and it is only correctable by the next generation of founders asking this question in advance.

Finland is in a good position to do this better than many other countries. We have a cultural foundation that values honesty, long relationships and moderation — all the things the tech business model has abandoned over the last decade. Our task is to build the next generation of products that, five years from now, can be looked back upon with: you promised better, and you delivered it.