Story of Stardoll.com - a co-founder's story, Part Four

I was at that point an avid user of finnish website called Mikseri.net, which allows people to share their own music and discuss softwares and hardwares. As I liked how it felt to use, I contacted its founder and manager Arto Aaltonen on IRC (not the gallery) and briefly presented our little thing called Liisa's Paperdolls. As a very entrepreneur-spirited guy, he got excited and was like "yeah let's do it". Together we created a new site, which included basic social networking features and made into a bit more professional looking, logos and all. Arto was really fast at coding the site. I realized only later on, being more around with other coders, how fast he actually was. I'm really happy to have started my internet career with him, because that way I understand what kind of work attitude and end result is possible. At times they can be really lazy and managers are wondering why projects are stalling, while their coders are surfing the net and not doing anything.

Fifth lesson: Hire people who work hard as well. Do not recruit rockstar coders, or anyone with huge ego.

Company was founded by the three of us, Liisa, Arto and me, money was getting in, site kept growing like crazy. To get where we were going with product dev, we needed a Flash coder. We talked with few, but they all decided they wanted to stay at their cozy jobs, rather than doing some fantasy startup company about paperdolls. We started to think about having venture capital money in the company, in order to develop the things we wanted. Enter Danny Rimer.

Danny is a general partner at Index Ventures, one of the best VC companies in the world. We had decided to start looking for venture capital money just one week before out of the blue he contacted me and said he liked the website and wanted to talk about it. I didn't know anything about how everything works regarding venture capital company involvement. At this point I contacted Taneli Tikka, who at that time was the CEO of our hosting company, and who I knew had a lot of VC experience. We met and had an interesting talk. He had many good advice about our company, service and he helped understand more about venture capital. And kudos for also understanding how valuable the site was for girls online. I also met Aapo Kyrölä, the other co-founder of Habbo Hotel. I presented the site to him, and we mainly talked about negotiating with VC:s. We were a lot smaller than Habbo at that time, but were still competitors in 50% of their target market. I highly respect his attitude towards us, in spite of us being competitors. Finland is a small country and we should help each other out like that more often.

to be continued..