Serial Entrepreneur From Finland: Verto CEO Hannu Verkasalo (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: There are lots of lead customers, which is really important for a startup.

Hannu Verkasalo: You’re right. Let’s talk about the incident on mobile. Many of these companies including Google and Facebook want to support new innovations and new ideas. In many cases, they use you because they want to bring something new to the market. In Europe, people care more about the name and the reputation. They are more conservative. Big companies are less willing to spend money on a new product.

Sramana Mitra: 2010 was when the acquisition happened?

Hannu Verkasalo: That’s right. I worked for Arbitron for the next 14 months. It was a good experience. It was a publicly listed company.

Sramana Mitra: That’s when you started becoming based in New York.

Hannu Verkasalo: That’s right. It was a good experience. I certainly understood better how corporations operate for the good and bad. Eventually, I left as I felt that my skills are meant more for creating something new.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve never worked for large companies. I’ve turnarounds as a consultant. I’ve done large company assignments, but I’ve never worked for a large company. This is my fourth startup as Founder/CEO.

Hannu Verkasalo: There are people who fit different roles. It was a good experience.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a good learning ground, but the politics really get to you.

Hannu Verkasalo: You’re right. I got a bit of that with Arbitron.

Sramana Mitra: But some people are really good at it. There are people who are seasoned company executives. They know how to play the politics. They have the patience to play the politics. I don’t. You probably don’t.

Hannu Verkasalo: That’s right.

Sramana Mitra: In 2012, you left Arbitron. What happens next?

Hannu Verkasalo: I took a bit of time out. I did invest into several companies. I invested in several European companies as well. I was on their advisory board. I still help companies. I still do that, but not as a professional investor. I did a bit of that for a year while thinking about the next venture. In 2013, we founded Verto Analytics, which is the company I’m now running. The business model, market, and the product have changed radically. I’m still very keen to understand how people behave on mobile. What Nokia was doing early this millennium was figuring out how people are using music on mobile. In the past decade, people were interested in doing surveys on mobile to understand if people are happy with the usability. Today mobile is a channel for advertising and content.

Sramana Mitra: Commerce. All kinds of things. Community.

Hannu Verkasalo: In late 2012, I had a dinner with some Facebook folks. I was asking, “What’s your biggest problem? You are saying that you go all in to buy more land. What is the bottleneck?” I knew that they have lots of great people. I knew they had lots of data. I was surprised to hear that one of the things they are struggling with is to be able to communicate to the market how big Facebook is, to be able to understand, as Facebook, the new things people do on mobile so they can acquire the right companies.

In fact, I felt that there was a gap in the market. Facebook had their own tools. I could have licensed Facebook with my previous company to collect data on Facebook users. What was missing was the Nielsen of mobile and the Nielsen of cross-device usage. We really care about what consumers are doing with all the media channels they use. Mobile has been one of the examples of a new media channel that wasn’t accounted for. We invented and built a business plan where the idea was to collect data from the market, own the data, and to be able to product reports and information and help companies like Facebook understand how they are growing against Snapchat. This is what we do today.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Serial Entrepreneur From Finland: Verto CEO Hannu Verkasalo
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