Pathways Coaches

Get to know the coaches who will be by your side throughout the programme!
Minna Mustapää
"When you change the way you look a thing, the thing you look at changes."

Minna Mustapää is a passionate impact driven entrepreneur with an international background. She has experience as an investor backed startup CEO, small business founder and establishing non-profit community organisations. What unites all her entrepreneurial efforts is a mission of positive impact be it through healthier foods, better emotional wellbeing, or supporting small business owners.  

What boosted her entrepreneurial beginnings was moving to San Fransisco at the age of 24 to immerse herself in working with her business mentors and the world of personal development. After these life forming months, she moved back to London to pursue her first business idea and continued her studies in conscious leadership. 

As the daughter of an educator, she has always been keen on sharing her learnings and since 2017 she has given workshops at various entrepreneurial programs in London and Finland. Continuing to today, she is one of the lead trainers at Spark Academy - a three month program for early stage female and non-binary entrepreneurs, a coach at Pathways and delivers other trainings per requests. 

Minna's special skills:

"Entrepreneurship is a lot about mindset and storytelling. These are the tools I look forward to sharing with the participants to expand what kind of opportunities they see, how they feel about going after them, and how they are able to convincingly pitch their concept."

Polina Vishnia
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." — Albert Einstein

Polina Vishnia is an impact-driven intrapreneur with experience in driving impact innovation, building startups, and fostering collaboration within the sustainability and entrepreneurship sectors. For the past two years, she has led a sustainability marketplace platform that connects startups with companies, facilitating meaningful partnerships to create positive change.

As a board member of Wicked Community, she helps build a vibrant ecosystem in Helsinki for impact-driven entrepreneurship. She has been actively involved in organizing key events, such as the Run For Impact charity run, a Session on Impact Prioritization Over Profit at the Waves Summit, and a Doughnut Economics workshop. These initiatives focus on building social foundations while respecting planetary boundaries, promoting regenerative business models, and inspiring community action.

In her role at Wicked Community, she also led community outreach efforts as part of their partnership with the Waves Summit, bringing together key stakeholders to create a meaningful discussion. 

Her journey in entrepreneurship began at the Red Brick pre-accelerator, where she launched my first startup-ish project. Since then, she has run operations at Crowd For Impact, volunteered, and participated in key industry events like Slush, Arctic 15, Nordic COP 26 Hub, Waves Summit, and Change Now. 

Through these experiences, along with her participation in the Helsinki Incubators' Circulator 1.0 and Biosphere, she has gained a deep understanding of entrepreneurship, sustainability, circular economy, and the importance of collaboration in solving complex global problems.

She is passionate about creating innovative solutions to global challenges, driving impact initiatives, and building strong, collaborative communities.

Polina's special skills:
  • Impact Assessment: Guiding participants on how to measure and evaluate the social, environmental, and economic outcomes of projects, ensuring they prioritize impact over profit.
  • Researching Problems and Creating Solutions: Offering techniques for deeply understanding global challenges and designing innovative, actionable solutions based on sustainability principles and entrepreneurial thinking.
    Building Impactful Collaborations: Sharing strategies on connecting diverse stakeholders, partners, and ideas to foster meaningful collaborations.
  • Networking at Events: Teaching practical networking skills, including how to approach people, ask engaging questions, and form lasting connections for future collaborations. 
  • Community Building: Providing insights into creating and nurturing engaged, mission-driven communities. 
  • Entrepreneurial Mindset: Helping participants develop a mindset focused on innovation and problem-solving. 
  • Connecting the Dots: Training participants on how to identify opportunities, link ideas, and bridge gaps between different sectors and stakeholders to create holistic solutions.
  • Sales and Marketing for Impact: Sharing techniques for promoting sustainability initiatives, using marketing and sales strategies that align with social and environmental goals.
  • Constructive Feedback: Offering methods for giving and receiving feedback in a constructive, actionable manner to drive continuous improvement in projects and collaborations.
Jukka Tastula
"The best way to predict the future is to create it." — Peter Drucker

Jukka Tastula is an entrepreneur, consultant and coach.

Jukka's Special Skills:
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Thinking Big
  • Problem Solving
  • Resilience
Ann Patterson
“Marketing is the homework that we do before we have a product.” — Philip Kotler

Ann Patterson is a business professional with a background in marketing strategy, she likes working with early-stage startups who are establishing their product-market fit.

With years of experience working in different industries, in both B2C and B2B markets, she has worked on many business cases focusing on defining target markets, understanding customer needs and building marketing strategy into product development.

Her project manager mindset means that she likes to keep tasks moving, to make sure there are good reasons for actions and that plans are realistic.

Ann's Special Skills:
  • Asking ‘Why?’ - until we get to the right answer
  • Tightening up your ideas and dreams into something worth pursuing
  • Keeping you accountable and on track
  • Making sure the end user is considered from beginning to end
     
Jori Karvonen
"There is no such thing as an overnight success." 

Jori Karvonen is an experienced digital sharing economy entrepreneur and multilingual mentor, fluent in English, Finnish, Spanish, and Russian. Over the last 22 months, he has mentored tech startups across Europe, focusing on product development, product-market fit, and securing funding, with a strong emphasis on technology, sustainability, and circularity. As a two-time founder—first in Spain with a startup creating sustainable solutions for the agriculture industry, and later in Finland with a subscription-based consumer electronics business—Karvonen has gained valuable insights into agility, flexibility, and company culture in the fast-paced tech world. He has a proven track record of building and scaling digital products, managing diverse teams, and driving innovative solutions. Karvonen is passionate about supporting impact-driven startups, women and non-binary entrepreneurs, and AI-focused teams across various programs.

Jori's Special Skills:
  • Business strategy & plan
  • GTM
  • Product-market fit
  • Fundraising
  • Technology (P2P platforms, mobile apps, AI etc...)