Jesse Heikkilä joins Coventures
Jesse Heikkilä joins Coventures
We are happy to announce that Jesse Heikkilä, an experienced product professional and startup founder, joins Coventures as an Entrepreneur in Residence.
Jesse has solid technical experience and a background in computer science and business. He has co-founded the global startup Playven, a SaaS sports facility management and scheduling solution.
We asked Jesse about his background and why he decided to join Coventures.
I have had a long startup journey followed by a few years at a startup growing into a scale-up. Another Entrepreneur at Coventures heard about my future work projects and how they allow me to have spare time now and I could use it to help other companies. His experiences and positive words about Coventures convinced me to find out more!
I am a technical founder with a computer science, business, and product background. I've set up product teams, established development workflows, worked on the codebases, and hired a development team to scale that work.
As a DevOps enthusiast, I have completed cloud migrations from quick deployment platforms to Kubernetes deployments and built side-projects around ephemeral microservice deployments.
On the business side, I’ve have established multi-continental business strategies and remote work and hiring processes. This also extended into establishing sales teams and performance marketing processes in the US and Finland. As a founder, I also have experience fundraising millions from American and Finnish investors. I've crafted pitch decks for my own companies and helped other entrepreneurs with theirs to raise substantial financing rounds.
As a product leader, I've hired and led the product teams, helped create new products, and rebuilt legacy software into new blossoming product portfolios.
I have to start with Playven, the company I co-founded. Playven was a SaaS sports facility management and scheduling solution that helps facilities make more money. We launched a self-service SaaS product, a consumer-facing marketplace app, and managed it across multiple continents.
Secondly, I have to list Playtomic. At Playtomic, I got to see the challenges and successes that come with hyper-growth in a scale-up. Playtomic acquired Playven and was a direct competitor. I got to be a part of growing the product and tech organization from around 15 people to 70 and acquiring +10 companies. During my time there, we also raised over 75 million euros.
I have experience starting teams from zero and establishing the processes that shape the work that goes into growing the products and teams, and eventually scaling that success into a larger organization that constantly delivers results.
I've seen the mistakes of product teams and successes of data-driven teams. I can and know how to help other teams avoid the common pitfalls and apply the correct methodologies for a successful outcome.
Having an experienced group of entrepreneurs together and helping companies in venture building and product leadership sounds like a fun challenge to me. I am excited to see how big of an impact this kind of group can have and how it can disrupt the more traditional consulting scene.