We just heard yesterday that Jyri Engeström, Jaiku co-founder, is leaving his Product Manager job at Google after his two year earn out is up. Today Petteri Koponen, the other Jaiku co-founder announced that he is leaving Google and joining Lifeline Ventures, a Finnish startup accelerator that’s part of the Vigo program (See our previous stories on Lifeline Venture here and here).
This not such a big jump as Petteri worked at Google in a wide variety of roles that gave him an ideal view into what was happening in the market. First Petteri worked at the Android product team and subsequently on Google’s New Business team, which continuously searches for and works with startups that partner with Google. It’s exciting to follow how the Vigo program evolves. At least Lifeline Ventures seem to be already hard at work. Petteri told me that they have already done some investments even though the whole program is just coming together.
Jyri on the other hand told me that after rather intensive three years, first with Jaiku and then with Google, he will use the opportunity to reflect and take his time before the next adventure. Along with traveling and spending time with his family, he told me that he will be helping out a few startups and considering doing some angel investing. He will also be helping out her wife Ulla-Maaria Engeström with her startup, Thinglink, that operates in the design space. (see our story here). Jyri also organized an Open Web workshop here in Helsinki, Finland just recently, bringing Chris Messina with him to Finland to talk about the developments in the Open Web arena. Read their thought provoking article here.
We wish the best of luck for Jyri and Petteri in, as Jyri put it, making meaning and welcome the guys back home to the Arctic region.
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
Ville – is Jaiku primarily popular in Finland/Scandinavia?
Lydia,
Jaiku was very popular especially in Finland and in Sweden. Now most people have moved to Twitter. Jaiku was much more popular here than Twitter in the early days (2007). The two companies started roughly the same time, but as Jaiku kept on being invitation only Twitter grew faster and the network effects kicked in – More people in Twitter drew more and more in, and less people in Jaiku made it less and less attractive. Also the Google acquisition literally stopped the further development of Jaiku as the team got spread around the company after the acquisition.
There’s still many people here who strongly believe that Jaiku is still to this day a better service than Twitter. One of the die hards include our own Paula Marttila who covers Sweden for ArcticStartup.
Jaiku would have been popular if it had embraced other regions languages.However,the idea is still OK and can be embraced by those who feel twitter is not the thing.The departure of the duo will be felt at Google in the long run.Their wealth of experience cannot be taken for granted at all.All in all their new ventures will benefit immensely.
But what makes it different than Twitter? What’s so much better about it? And should I sign up, lol.
Did you guys read this? http://247wallst.com/2009/10/13/major-blogs-can-lose-90-of-their-value-if-founders-go-huffington-techcrunch-gawker-drudge/ it’s about websites losing their value after the founders leave?
Lydia,
You’d need to try Jaiku to see the difference and I don’t think I can do justice by telling you how it’s different. But here’s the gist. Jaiku will enable coherent conversations since it gives you the whole thread (think for example this comment taking shape around a tweet), where as Twitter is as bare bones communication skeleton as it gets: Sound bites flying back and forth. Both have their benefits, but they really are different kind of services.
Jaiku does not have that active user base anymore as it missed the window when Google put its development on ice, but am sure you can get the feel of it by signing in and joining a conversation in there.
Let us know what you think.