Backwards

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Vesa Kivistö

Many startup guides tell you how startups are supposed to be created. You should identify a problem, create good solution, find markets and reach for success.

Process for creating UTU has been somewhat different.

Late 2011 my longstanding project for Nokia Finance & Control was wrapping up. Suddenly I had some extra time at my fingertips. This was fairly novel to me as I had been fully committed to various customer projects and own product development over very many years.

After taking some holidays my interests gravitated towards startups. I have always been interested on this area, but now I did a focused effort on this and learned many new things.

Soon I was rehashing an old startup idea with some friends. We worked on this idea for early 2012 in iterative fashion and came up with a good plan. Conceptually we were good to go, but detailed legal checks made us realize that the concept had serious legal and business problems. After some pivot attempts we decided to stop this track.

During this process I separately came up with UTU core idea. My earlier as-a-hobby experiments with “balanced flow networks” and other software concepts gave me necessary background to flesh out this idea. My understanding of finance, economics, nature of money and history certainly also pushed me to work on this idea. All this was likely happening sub-consciously. Finally the rough plan and vision just materialized in my head.

As often happens it would have been easy to just forget about the idea, but I refused to let go. The UTU system had fairly intriguing logical and conceptual properties which I thought to be quite unique.

At this point I was mainly thinking on system and platform levels. Potential large-scale benefits and transformative power of UTU became evident almost immediately. It was not however clear how one could actually make all this happen. This has been the major challenge.

My solution is to reverse-engineer from “success vision” all the way back to the “service launch” and “minimum viable product”. Thus we are doing this in quite backwards and somewhat unnatural way. This process has been very difficult, but we are making good progress and I find the process rewarding in itself.

Project Takoha

Posted on October 17, 2012 by Vesa Kivistö

Together with two friends we thought long and hard about copyright and how money could be collected to pay for the production and presentation of artistic work and performances. We figured out a system somewhat similar to Kickstarter.

After discussing the concept with numerous culture affiliated people we concluded that the concept did not excite them enough. We published our Takoha Manifesto and stopped the project.

Two years later Kickstarter went live.

lets care

Longitude

Posted on October 14, 2012 by Vesa Kivistö

Few years back I visited Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Inside you can find a progression of marine chronometers. As you walk past the cabin sized clocks you marvel at the diabolical complexity of these devices. You go past these devices and then you stop. At the pedestal is a small, compact and simple looking device.This is H4 created by self-educated English carpenter and clockmaker John Harrison. It’s simple, beautiful and totally different from all the predecessors. Somehow it seems to represent a quantum leap onwards.

Marine chronometers and “the longitude problem” were of crucial importance during the great ages of exploration. Lacking the ability to determine their longitude, sailors were literally lost at sea as soon as they lost sight of land. Ships ran aground on rocky shores; desperate captains in search for land navigated their ships away from nearest costs. Thousands perished in vain.

In 1714, England’s Parliament offered a huge reward to anyone whose method of measuring longitude could be proven successful. The scientific establishment–from Galileo to Sir Isaac Newton–had mapped the heavens in its certainty of a celestial answer. In stark contrast, one man, John Harrison, dared to imagine a mechanical solution–a clock that would keep precise time at sea, something no clock had been able to do even on land. And the race was on….

Longitude is a book by Dava Sobel. Inside you find “the True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time”. This is a real story of discovery, challenges and political intrigue. An excellent read.

Nepton

Posted on October 7, 2012 by Vesa Kivistö

Startups and entrepreneurship are quite familiar to me. My parents are long-term entrepreneurs. My grandfather and great-grandfather built several companies from small shops to sawmills and industrial manufacturing companies. I know how sweet the success can be and how bitter the failures can feel.

Year 2003 was time for me to move onwards. During my time at Satama I had learned tremendous amount. My brother suggested that we combine forces and start operating under the wings of our parent’s company. I had my doubts and hesitated too much, but finally took the plunge. Soon Nepton Oy was born.

Nepton is (so far) the most successful startup I have created or co-created. We started ten years ago by doing IT subcontracting for various clients. One client project semi-accidentally became our first product. We actively developed this product line over the years, learned the ropes and increased our market coverage. Now we employ 10+ people in this SaaS business and are rapidly gaining new customers. Future of this business look quite positive.

During last ten years my main focus has been on different subcontracting projects. My roles in these have been a mixture of technology, design, planning, management and sales.

Many of my projects have been related to Nokia. At one time I was the technical lead responsible for UI layers in all Nokia websites. Later I moved to finance side and together with group of extremely talented people developed and deployed large planning & analytics system for use in global Nokia organization.

Other customers I have worked with or sold projects to include 3, dotMobi, Eläke-Fennia, Ericsson, GSM Association, HP, MacMillan, Microsoft, Orange Group, Otava, Sampo Pankki, Samsung Electronics, Satama Interactive, Sun Microsystems, Technical University of Denmark, TIM, T-Mobile, Vattenfall and Vodafone.

Failing

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Vesa Kivistö

This is a story of eager investor, failing hope and total business failure. Originally I was quite depressed about this, but now I consider this as one one of the most important lessons in my life.

Early 2005 I was asked to invest funds into an exiting new ecommerce startup. Business plan was solid, there was good competitive advantage over most competitors, I personally knew the founder and my overall feelings on this venture were good. Some of my friends did advice me against this venture due to excessive NDA/secrecy levels the founder insisted on, but I decided to continue. The investment went forth and I also became an adviser for this new venture.

Soon the business was started and marketing pulled people into the web shop. In just few weeks were we had good flow of orders continuously coming in. Things looked positive.

The company was however in dire trouble. Most of time and resources were used to create advanced systems & processes to support high levels of demand which were assumed to soon be there. Some key operations were outsourced and off-shored. Information flow within the company or towards investors was almost non-existent. Supply/Demand management was totally out of control and serious problems in customer satisfaction were starting to appear.

It was clear that something had to be done immediately. On top of my primary work I started working in the new company, trying to assist it back on track. Some problems were easy to fix, but it soon became apparent that there were critical problems in the way the business was structured and managed.

Finally I had to admit to myself that under current management the business was going to fail soon. And I did not have power to change things to the model which would have made more sense to me as the founder had majority control. And it was already too late. Ultimately the business failed, not with a bang but with sort of a sizzle as everyone just stopped working with the company.

In hindsight my mistake is clear. My great trust and hopes were quite misplaced and I continued to follow misguided vision long after problems became well apparent. Numerous danger signs were visible at different times, but I ignored them all. Likely I didn’t want to face the truth so opposite to my hopes and world-view.

After the failure I was quite depressed for a while. I had put fair bit of money and large amount of time towards this venture. Pure business failure would have been more acceptable, but my failure in estimating people felt really bad.

Ultimately I was able to leave this episode behind and move onwards. Now I consider this as most helpful experience which made me realize how unpredictable people can be and how hope can blind us all. This also made me more critical towards my own opinions and more eager to ask opinions from others.

Key Lessons:

Trust But Validate
Do Not Ignore Small Warnings
Information Is Power
Premature Scaling == Disaster
Cut Your Losses

Transforming Government

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Vesa Kivistö

TED talks are great as always. Enjoy this fun and inspirational one from Clay Shirky, showing how democracies can take a lesson from the Internet, to be not just transparent but also to draw on the knowledge of all their citizens.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEN4XNth61o

Good Bureaucracy

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Vesa Kivistö

Here in Finland there are various public programs supporting and funding aspiring entrepreneurs. That at least is the publicly stated mission. Apparently reality has been more mixed, some people are happy with government efforts while some argue them to be inefficient and wrongly focused. The main problem many apparently see is the willingness of these programs to only support “safe and secure” projects and typical growth-startups can rarely be categorized as such.

Today I met with a local-level person from such a government program and discussed the UTU business plan with him. My hopes were not set very high, but reality was actually quite good. These advisors are ex-entrepreneurs or current entrepreneurs. This arrangement makes tons of sense compared to discussing business plans with “Ye Olde Civil Servant”. Most of the advice was along the lines I expected, but also got some fresh advice and had a chance to practice talking about UTU with brand new person.

There will soon be a continuation on this track. My hope is that ultimately some government support is forthcoming in one form or another.

Crazy Internet Years

Posted on September 24, 2012 by Vesa Kivistö

Spring 1999 brought many changes to my life. Internet was really gaining momentum and I was riding the wave. It was ridiculously easy to find a job as I already had good working knowledge of many essential tools and technologies. I interviewed with three companies and was offered position with all. I picked Satama as they seemed to have nice people, professional attitude and well-known clients.

Satama soon became one of the largest web and digital media agencies in Finland. It was built by fusing together several small startups and boatloads of investment money. I was almost in time to be one of the early employees but not quite. We grew insanely fast and spread to several continents. I was in excellent position to work with so many great people.

Satama gravitated towards ever-larger clients. We started building really big and scalable web applications. I gained much better understanding of underlying business processes and moved towards more senior roles.

At Satama we were connected and keen on new things. We were among the first 0.01 % to join LinkedIn.

After the dotcom crash everyone moved onward from Satama. Many forged their new destinies in the digital world.

At Satama I did projects for Chunghwa Telecom, Finnish Red Cross, Finpro, HIM, International Youth Foundation, Nokia, Satama Interactive, S-Group, Sinebrychoff, Sonera, Talentum and Yliopiston Apteekki.

My First Startup

Posted on September 23, 2012 by Vesa Kivistö

Year was 1999 and while studying in the university we were deep-diving into the world of servers and web hosting. After provisioning some capacity from US data-center during hobby project we realized that we could repackage and sell this capacity for Finnish customers.

Soon we founded a company on this idea and named it Da Vinci Innovations. I think we picked name like this so we could also sell IT consultancy alongside hosting. In hindsight must say that for pure web hosting our name was not too great 🙂

This being our first company and us being typical “IT guys” we had really limited understanding of business, sales and marketing. Somehow we still muddled our way to customers, revenues and ramen-profitability.

Ultimately we scaled this company down as growth was fairly slow, competition was increasing very fast, and our university studies limited the time we could commit into this venture.

Friends Are Great

Posted on September 23, 2012 by Vesa Kivistö

The business plan for UTU is slowly taking shape. However, one can only go so far with own brainpower and imagination. Thus i have now contacted large group of suitable friends and associates. My request for them was to provide concrete and honest feedback.

I am quite happy with the results so far. Good comments and proposals are coming from all corners. I could always benefit from even more external input, but my brain is already being stimulated and new possibilities are appearing.

Big thanks to everyone who has participated and will participate on this track.