Every significant moment in Tuomas Hulkkonen's career has come down to the same choice: the safe path, or the unknown one.
He has picked the unknown every time.
It started with a lunch. Antero Hanhirova asked whether Tuomas might be interested in joining a small Google reseller. A handful of people. An early-stage bet on a technology most Finnish companies had barely heard of.
Tuomas showed up and said, without hesitation, that he knew nothing about Google. He'd used Gmail. That was about it.
He got the job anyway. What he brought was the ability to learn fast, do the work, and not pretend to know things he didn't. In a company that size, in a market that new, that turned out to be exactly what was needed.
He first came to Gapps on a trial basis, still officially on leave from his previous job. Within weeks he was deep in deployments, figuring things out in real time, running projects with limited resources and a team that had more ambition than it had budget.
"You could see that Google had a real future, and that Gapps had a brilliant future. Incredible people and serious drive."
The technology was new. The market position was challenging. And there was a clear sense that something real was being built.
Then came the first test.
A management role opened up at his old organization: more established, more secure, a clear career track. Tuomas took it.
He lasted a year.
"The big organization started to feel frustrating. My heart beats more for places where you can show your own work."
When Gapps called him to lead a significant project and the entire technical team, he made a quick decision. He came back to Gapps full time.
"I'd rather go on an adventure than play it safe."
That project turned out to be one of the more meaningful things he's worked on. A large custom software build for a major Finnish media organization, built on Google infrastructure, delivered with a young team over nearly a year. It stretched everyone involved. It worked. And what came out of it eventually grew into Happeo, a product that spun off from Gapps and became a company in its own right. None of them fully anticipated it when they started.
Tuomas ran that project. He doesn't bring it up to impress anyone. He brings it up because it taught him something that stayed with him: you don't need certainty before you begin. You need the willingness to figure it out as you go.
Over the next decade, Tuomas' role changed constantly. Technical project manager. Account lead. Chief Offering & Innovation Officer. Head of Partners & Ecosystems. CTO. Interim CISO. The titles shifted with leadership changes and strategic pivots, and throughout the years, Gapps went through several of each. What stayed consistent was that Tuomas kept stepping into whatever the business needed next, even when it pushed him outside what he already knew how to do.
The biggest shift came around 2020. He took on responsibility for growing a significant part of Gapps' business, the Cloud Journey, and it required him to think in a completely different way.
"I had to think about growth, about the whole organization, about what capabilities we really need to scale properly and profitably."
It was the point where he stopped thinking primarily as a technologist and started thinking as someone responsible for whether the business worked. Revenue. Margin. Long-term client relationships built from almost nothing into substantial partnerships over years of patient work.
That shift has only deepened since.
Tuomas' role now as a Business Director is largely about enabling others rather than delivering himself. But he's careful to point out that enabling isn't passive. This year, he redesigned the incentive model for his business unit, moving away from individually-focused structures toward shared team goals. It was a deliberate bet that the old model was creating silos and costing the team more than it was worth. So far, the results back him up.
"I get a lot of energy from seeing someone I've supported start performing at a really high level. When that fire is burning — when someone is contributing at a high level, and they know it — that's when I know the setup is working."
He builds teams the same way he built his own career: by putting people in situations slightly beyond their current comfort zone, and trusting that the right people will rise to meet them.
There's a thread in Tuomas's background that explains some of this. Before Gapps, he served a year in the Finnish Defense Forces in NATO KFOR, with time in crisis management operations. He doesn't lead with it, but the influence is visible in how he talks about teams and performance.
"When there's a mission — when something needs to be achieved — the team is fully committed and supporting each other in everything. High performance, attention to detail, in that moment."
Then, once the mission is done: recovery, a different pace, a different mode. The idea that sustained high performance requires genuine recovery isn't something he learned at a management seminar. It's something he internalized through experience.
The same logic extends to problems.
"If you want to be in a leadership role, you have to love problems. Not just technical ones, but the people problems, systemic problems, the everyday ones. That's what the job is. If you find it exciting to solve them constantly, you're in the right place. If you don't, it's worth thinking carefully before stepping into that kind of position."
If he could go back and give his 2014 self one piece of advice, it wouldn't be about technology.
"I'd want to help myself understand the rules of the game in a growth company earlier. Sales, risk, imperfection. You have to move forward under conditions that are never perfect. Learning to tolerate that while still knowing where you absolutely cannot afford to cut corners took years. Someone could have handed me that frame much earlier."
He sees the same gap in people he hires now. Sharp technically, but sometimes slow to internalize that a growth company runs on different logic than an established organization. Resources are scarce. Certainty is a luxury. The goal is knowing which things matter enough to be worth getting right.
After 12 years, the reason he's stayed comes down to two things.
The people, what he calls the underlying "Gappsiness," a quality that has survived leadership changes and strategic pivots and the rough patches that come with building something real. It's harder to define than a culture deck, but easier to feel after a few weeks in the building.
And the fact that there has always been something new to step into.
"There's always been a new challenge, a new set of responsibilities to grow into. I've always been able to see my own fingerprints on what gets built."
In bigger organizations, that sense of personal impact tends to diffuse. Here, it hasn't.
He also mentions something quieter, almost as an afterthought.
"At Gapps, your work self and your personal self can be a lot closer together than most people assume is possible at work. People can be more themselves here."
After 12 years of watching people arrive, leave, and arrive again, that observation holds up.
Some choices look risky in the moment and obvious in hindsight. Tuomas has been making those calls since 2013. He doesn't seem inclined to stop.