Juha Ristolainen

Any views expressed on this site are fully my own and do not represent views of any of my employers, advisees or mentees.

I am open to additional non-executive / board roles.

I am a Finnish technology leader and software craftsman with more than two decades of experience in delivering value to customers by building digital products in all shapes, forms and stages. I am a non-executive director and a board member as well as an advisor to startups. My leadership style is based on the Nordic values and build on trust and transparency. I currently reside in Berlin, Germany.

For the first part of my career I worked in a consultancy and got to see all different aspects of how to deliver digital products in a lean and agile fashion. I also saw my career grow with the company going from 10 people in an office to more than 500 in many offices in multiple countries. After that period I wanted to focus more on building products and moved on to deliver cloud native digital products in different industries from travel to automotive to logistics and now fintech and healthtech in different leadership roles.

Currently I am building next generation investment infrastructure in the form of a modern easy to integrate API, fast to go to market solution in Berlin as the Co-founder and CTO at Upvest GmbH.

I enjoy getting to the bottom of new technologies with potential and I am spending a lot of my time with both machine learning and the application of AI as well as different decentralised technologies. I think both domains have huge potential for the future.

I’ve been writing code since 1986 and still enjoy it whenever I get some time for it. My recent weapons of choice include Go and Rust. I love Go for its simplicity and productivity for building microservices. Rust on the other hand is the modern systems programming language to me. Modern C++ is quite good but I love Rust for the things I used to use C++ for. Both languages are great for cloud native apps as well with small footprint single binary deliverables that you can run in an almost scratch Docker-container. During my career I’ve worked with a lot of technologies and domains so if you want to know more just ask.