The First Winter

I was born in a small factory city in Eastern Finland called Varkaus. My father was a car spare parts seller and my mother is a kindergarten teacher. It was early November, so I had to get used to the extreme winter conditions from Day 1. By the age of four I was convinced I was meant to be a football player, “el portero” – the goalkeeper. I used to carry a rugged little ball with me all the time wherever I went, as all five year-olds did in my neighborhood. Football was my first true passion.

A nomad from the start

Maybe the travel bug was planted before I could even walk. When I was three, my dad sold his share in the business and we moved to Gran Canaria for a year, where my little brother was born. After Spain, we traded the beaches for the open road, purchasing a caravan to explore Europe until it was time for me to start school in Varkaus. Eventually, we parked that caravan at a ski resort called Tahko, where I spent nearly every weekend and winter holiday riding icy half pipes as much as humanly possible, no matter the weather.

A mind-blown six-year-old

While the winters were for the snow, my digital path began in an unexpected place: the back of my father’s car parts warehouse. Before I ever saw a graphical interface, I spent hours tucked away among the rows of shelves in front of a Microfiche reader. It was a magical device that used a bright internal light to project tiny photographic sheets of car part numbers onto a large, glowing screen. I was captivated by the logic of it, sliding the tray to find the right frame and trying to figure out how it was even possible for such a small sheet of film to hold an entire world of information.

That initial spark turned into an explosion in 1992 during a visit to my godfather. He was a computer salesman and showed me a device running Windows 3.0. Seeing a visual world behind the glass left me six years old and completely mind-blown, though I vividly remember the frustration of trying to master the double-click just to open a single folder. By 1995, my parents had set up our family’s first computer in my tiny room, running Windows 95 and unknowingly opening the door to my future and billions of double-clicks.

Finding harmony in unique letters

The years that followed were a mix of snowboarding, football, and exploring every corner of Windows 95. Without the internet, I memorized MS-DOS commands just to launch Heroes of Might and Magic II. When the turn of the millennium brought Hip-hop into my life, school had to compete with breakdancing and graffiti. My first taste of the web was the dial-up soundtrack of Napster via a 56k modem. While I wasn't the best breakdancer — though I can still throw down a windmill — I found my true calling in graffiti. Trying to find harmony between unique letters and styles was fascinating. It was those rebel years that eventually led me into the world of Graphic Design.

The Accidental Entrepreneur

In 2001, I discovered PaintShop Pro 7 and eventually Photoshop. I began posting "graffiti-inspired artwork" to galleries like DeviantArt and taught myself the basics of code. School never motivated me; my only real ambition was to be a pro snowboarder. But after dropping out of high school and promptly breaking my arm on the local hill at 15, I found myself stuck in a cast and forced to stay off the snow.

A direction in life

It was during those months of recovery that I sold my first website to a local bowling alley for 100 euros—designing and developing the entire thing with a cast on my primary hand. That project gave me the spark I was looking for. It turned a hobby into a path and gave me the confidence to pursue an Audiovisual Communication degree.

The audacity of starting a company

The beginning of my third year of studies was supposed to be an internship period, but the small city of Varkaus didn't offer the challenges I was looking for. Frustrated by the lack of local opportunity, I decided to create my own. I started my first company and immediately hired one of my best friends and classmates, Miikka, as my intern. My teachers loved the audacity of it, and soon the workload grew so much that I was teaching myself the technical details of the craft weeks before we ever reached them in the curriculum.

As I focused 100% on real clients, the school walls began to feel too small. In 2008, I moved to the youthful energy of Jyväskylä and discovered ThemeForest. What started as a way to generate passive income quickly evolved into a global network of connections. That international recognition boomeranged back to Finland, landing me relationships with major agencies and a winter spent designing digital identities for six different Finnish cities.

The Search for Myself

Life in Jyväskylä didn’t last long; I caught a serious travel bug that felt like a return to the caravan days of my youth. Having already left high school in 2004 and eventually dropping out of my Audiovisual Communication degree to focus on my business, I realized my true education lay elsewhere. I gave away all my belongings and closed my open businesses. Three weeks later, I landed in Barcelona with 163.50 euros, a backpack, and a laptop — stepping completely outside my comfort zone.

Finding confidence in the unknown

For the next 963 days, I lived a book’s worth of adventures: dancing with tribes in Ethiopia, practicing black magic in the Philippines, seeing the wonders of the world and crossing items off from my bucket list. That old MacBook Pro I packed in Jyväskylä became my lifeline; it gave me the freedom to be completely location-independent, funding my way across borders one project at a time.

Traveling alone through remote corners of the world forced me to find a self-reliance that no classroom could provide. In the silence of the high mountains and the chaos of foreign cities, I discovered that the more lost I felt in the world, the more I found my own center. Stripping away the person I thought I was supposed to be, these years left behind a version of myself that was resilient, quiet, and deeply intentional. This journey wasn't just about seeing the world—it was about becoming the man I needed to be to eventually lead a family and a craft. It was in this headspace of total independence that I met Anna, who would become my partner in both life and adventure.

The compass was still spinning

After thousands of banana shakes, dozens of countries, and hundreds of friends, a changed man finally returned to Helsinki-Vantaa Airport. I spent eight months in the high-stakes corporate world of Miltton, the biggest communications agency in Finland, but the compass was still spinning. My internal rhythm had been set by the vastness of the world, and I soon headed back to the mountains of British Columbia and Alaska for more.

The funny YouTube video

I found myself in Santiago de Chile in the summer of 2014 when an email landed in my inbox that changed everything. My website's contact form required a funny YouTube video to get my attention; Juho, the co-founder of Sharetribe, sent one that made me laught. That human connection, paired with a massive technical challenge, drew me in as Sharetribe’s first designer. I spent my first months working from a hostel kitchen table in Patagonia, where, at 3 am, I had the epiphany to connect two handshakes into a hexagon logo, which they still use today.

The Masterclass in SaaS

The years from 2015 to 2022 were a masterclass in the soul of a startup. I didn’t just design a product; I learned how a SaaS business actually breathes — from the pressure of investor meetings and funding rounds to the granular architecture of scaling a global platform. I moved from being a designer with a backpack to a Lead Designer, responsible for the digital infrastructure of thousands of marketplaces. It was here I realized that every pixel and every line of code I touched affected the livelihoods of entrepreneurs worldwide. That weight turned my billions of double-clicks into a disciplined, professional practice.

Purpose over profit maximization

One of the most defining moments of this era was Sharetribe’s transition to a steward-ownership model. We moved away from the traditional "exit-driven" startup path to ensure the company remains independent and mission-driven forever. This shift taught me that profits are a means to an end, not the end itself. This philosophy now sits at the heart of everything I build at J&CO. I design for longevity, choosing to work with those who value sustainable growth over a quick exit.

Bridging product and engineering

During this time, I evolved from a designer who could code into a unicorn who lived at the intersection of product and engineering. Integrating deeply with the dev team pushed my technical boundaries into GraphQL and APIs, while I honed the soft art of workshopping complex ideas to ensure everyone was on the same team and page. I found my home in the middle ground between two worlds that often speak different languages, learning to translate abstract vision into rigid, high-performance reality.

Brainstorming in the middle of nowhere

Sharetribe was built on a culture of freedom that matched my own values. While I still traveled and worked remotely, my favorite memories became our team cottage trips — days spent in the middle of nowhere, brainstorming and building the kind of human trust you can’t get over a video call. These moments in nature reminded me that even in the high-tech world of SaaS, the most important connections happen when we slow down and step away from the screen.

The First Winter

In 2022, Anna and I made the life-changing decision to trade the Helsinki buzz for the silence of the fjells. We moved 1,000 kilometers North to Äkäslompolo, buying a house where the pace of life is dictated by the outdoors — a place where the air is cold, the community is tight, and the mind finally has room to breathe. After a decade of building in the city, the silence here became the missing piece of the puzzle.

Living by the light of the fjells

In Lapland, we have eight seasons, and I’ve learned to find clarity in the deep blue light of the Kaamos and boundless energy under the midnight sun. From my office, I often watch the Northern Lights dance across the sky — a silent, shifting backdrop to the agonizing polish of a final design. In many ways, life in Äkäslompolo feels like childhood again; it’s a world where the natural world sets the rhythm for everything else. The half pipes of my youth have been replaced by the quiet, vast, open fells, where I can once again step out of my door and find connection on a snowboard or mountain bike. This proximity to the elements is essential to my craft; it provides the headspace required to strip away the noise of the "soulless sameness" and focus on building things that last.

Eager for a fresh canvas

After a few work trips back to the city, I realized that a decade is a beautiful length of time to dedicate to a single mission. I had spent ten years refining the same set of problems, and while I loved the depth of that mastery, I felt my internal compass shifting toward a new challenge. I was eager to take the principles I had perfected and apply them to a fresh canvas — one that matched the clarity and scale of my new environment in the North.

The final push came unexpectedly in early 2024. On our way to the local ski resort, we were involved in a three-car accident where another vehicle ran into ours. There were eight of us caught in the wreckage, and while miraculously no one was hurt, the impact left me with a jarring clarity. I had already been contemplating my next move, but that moment made me realize that life is too short to wait for the "perfect" time. It was time to follow my gut. In the spring of 2024, I made the emotional decision to move on from my role as Lead Designer at Sharetribe to launch J&CO — treating it not just as a new business, but as the ultimate expression of my architectural responsibility.

The cycle starts again

The fall of 2025 brought my most profound period of growth yet: becoming a father. There is a specific kind of clarity that comes with the quiet of the North and the weight of a new life in your arms. As I watch my child experience the biting cold and the soft light of their own first winter, I see my own story starting over, but with a new depth of purpose. We are already planning to take our own RV to the open roads as a small family, hoping to pass on the compass and watch as he begins to calibrate a direction of his own. My work is no longer just about the pixels on a screen or the code in a repository; it has become a silent promise to the future.

I’ve come to realize that my greatest responsibility isn't what I build, but what I protect. It is a quiet stewardship for the craft, the people, and the world we are preparing for the ones who will follow our tracks in the snow.

Thank you for reading,

Janne Koivistoinen

Äkäslompolo, Finland

January 2026