20 years in the room.

The story

Stefano Mosconi grew up in Italy, studied engineering in Rome, and ended up in Finland in 2005 — joining Nokia just in time for the last great mobile revolution. He spent seven years there, grew from sysadmin to engineering manager, and contributed to seven mobile devices including the Nokia N9.

In 2011 he co-founded Jolla and spent five years as CTO building Sailfish OS from scratch — ramping an R&D organisation from zero to 80 engineers in a single year, raising $50M, and learning more about leadership under pressure than any course could teach. It was the hardest job he has ever done, and the one that propelled his career forward.

Since then: VP at Elisa (Finland's largest telco), VP Engineering at Utopia Music, certified business coach, trained in ML and product management through Stanford Online, and — somewhere in there — awarded the title of Knight by the President of the Italian Republic for connecting the Italian and Finnish startup ecosystems. He competes in Ironman 70.3 triathlons as an age grouper — while running two businesses — which is perhaps the most honest signal of how he thinks about preparation, sustained effort, and performance under pressure. He hosts the Nordic Leaders Podcast, and speaks Italian, English, and Spanish fluently, is conversational in Finnish, and has basic French.

He now runs Britemind and Black Belt Consulting. At Britemind he works with a small number of CTOs, CPOs, and VPs of Engineering and Product who are figuring out the parts of the job nobody prepared them for. At Black Belt he does whatever it takes to grow the company — from customer gigs to finances to the technology that holds it all together.