Build The Future: Building a Startup Inside a Scaleup

Stan has had a lot of ownership from day one, in the most literal sense. Aiven headhunted him to build a new product from the ground up. "My onboarding was thirty minutes with my boss, who gave me a handful of really good and original ideas, he says. "After that, I had to figure it out. Build a team, build a product, all of it."

Building a Startup Inside a Scaleup

He is a Product Director now, almost a year in. Before Aiven there were startups, a couple of them his own. One raised four and a half million euros to build an online platform for real-world games. Another, still running, works in enterprise data modelling. He studied programming, moved into marketing, PR and events, but kept ending up in product development. He describes his range with a shrug. He is not precious about what he works on.

The phrase he keeps returning to about his current role bridges those two worlds. "It's like a small startup inside a large company," he says. "I think of myself as the CEO of that small startup, so I just do whatever it takes. That's the mindset at Aiven."

Being the so-called CEO of his small startup means deciding what kind of team he needs, and Stan is specific about it. He looks for people he can trust with real ownership.

"I want experts I can give a lot of freedom to, people who are curious and who can decide things for themselves."

In a team working on properly hard technology, he wants specialists who each own their corner. It’s the same freedom he was given, passed one level down.

He is just as deliberate about what he tells candidates before they sign. When engineers ask what they would be joining, he answers with a line borrowed from his CEO.

"Oskari says people shouldn’t join Aiven if they want to do easy things. We solve hard problems." He means it as a filter, not a warning. "If you want to challenge yourself, grow and learn, this is a great place, because every day is a challenge. It's demanding. The question here is always, can we be even faster, can we do this even better?"

Stan explains more about how he approached building a startup inside Aiven:

What Made Startup Founder Stan to Join Aiven?

That candour is what recruited him in the first place. He had only ever worked at startups, the largest around eighty people, and by his own measure Aiven counts as a massive company. What convinced him was not the scale but the conversations, including with CEO Oskari Saarenmaa and one of the co-founders before he signed.

"Everybody was very smart, and nobody was sugarcoating anything," he says. "They told me the way things actually are. It was a transparent, open culture, and that's what I really liked."

Not everything about a bigger company suits him, and he does not pretend otherwise. He likes to make a decision and act on it in the same breath, and Aiven, by his standards, comes with process. There are also habits from smaller companies he is still learning to let go of.

"I used to know everyone, every single person, what they did and where they came from. At a company this size you can't talk to everybody. You have to manage how much context you can hold in your head, and prioritise what matters."