Net People Oy (Ltd.) was founded late 1994. The initiative came from originally from the same Jukka Orajarvi who had put the whole OuluNet on it's track two years earlier. The ten founding members were three older (about twenty three years) students from and seven of us high-school kids, sixteen to nineteen. I was seventeen, soon turning to be eighteen at the time. All we seven had more than a year experience in administrating the schools' UNIX-servers, taking care of people's accounts, teaching other kids and teachers and a strong technical background from the earlier years. Some had been active in the demo scene, some also as hackers/crackers, most could program some and everyone was familiar with the Internet and spend a lot of time there. The older three had been using the 'net a lot too but didn't have the same service oriented background. All of them had been working already either for their school (the polytechnic) or for Nokia (like everyone..). We young were proud to make a [vala] for not to work for Nokia ("the rubberboot factory") ever .. ;/ The business idea was simple: provide people and companies in the Oulu-area (with?) Internet-services. Of course there were already many companies doing it in Finland. The first to provide access to the Internet is, as far is I know, that started it back in '86 already. Also had been around since early 80's and was marketing for private users in the 90's. So we bought a Twinhead Sun-clone running SunOS 4.1.3 and connected it first to the school's and after a couple of months to the commercial network of the local telephone company . The idea was that the telephone company would take care of the access, i.e. the modem pool part and we would handle the rest: user's e-mail accounts, home directories, web services, customer support, customizing and programming, installing intranets etc. Problems started right in the beginning: the first server we got didn't work. The supplier's service was bad and we couldn't really cope with it. Somehow the boys managed finally to put things work and so we got the server running in the beginning 1995 and could start using it. The telephone company had trouble as well, actually theirs were lot more severe than ours as they couldn't get the modems working until .. (how long did it actually take??). As our customers were supposed to be the ones using the telephone companies access, which didn't work, our business didn't really start up that well. We did have some other projects already, our first CEO was excellent in finding them, so by the spring we were working on them and got our first income for the company. What we charged of our work didn't really even cover the costs but we didn't know it and it sounded like a lot of money so we were happy. We spent great, even though troubleful time together and partied a lot. Most of us, I believe five of us seven young experts which makes half of the whole group, were graduating from high-school that spring so work was more like a hobby anyway. The company was a nice way of getting together and gaining loads of server resources and fast access to ourselves as there were no customers yet. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that we didn't have any physical office, none at all. Why would've we needed one? All papers were on the net, decision making on different mailing lists and most of the discussion on irc. In practice there was no separate governing board but everybody could participate in all decision making as much as they would like to. School class rooms and nice bars and cafes were quite comfortable for meetings and we had to travel a lot around the area installing servers etc. anyway so the net made a good office. The CEO and other important people had mobile phones for customers to call but we ourselves didn't really care about them in the beginning. Soon, however, the company bought for the people who needed to be reached one. I got mine next summer ('95) and that's when I learned really to use a telephone. Their turned out quickly to be the other important communication channel besides the Internet itself. (Nowadays digital cellular mobile phones are more common in Finland than any other one telephones - their use exceeded the conventional copperwireds' in September 1997. I gave mine away fall '97 when I moved here to Amsterdam - no one has them here anyway and the net is much nicer .. I guess I need this peace for change. We're expecting the whole telephone network to converge to be a part of the Internet by the end of '98 as Nokia and others release new portable / wearable network devices that handle both sides. Too bad the change is always slower than we'd expect.) I can't still use a fax but many people in the company had to learn it, uh. Soon we were to confront other difficulties too: the customers were complaining that they had hard time contacting us. As business started growing the important people were busier and not reachable by their mobiles. (That was quite typical of us: we didn't advertise or really even look for customers but they had to find their way to us and still we sometimes neglected them totally if there was something more interesting going on on the net.) The customers were not yet used to e-mail or it didn't work so that was no option for them. So we decided to rent an office, put the servers there and also the fax machine. The technology park was a good place as most hitech companies in the area are based there, including Nokia. The park is also only a couple of hundred meters away from the university of Oulu where most of us young started studying fall '95. The technology park itself and the companies there started to be interested in the Internet too so there was a lot of work for us. The first task for us to do was to put up the server for them and take care of the networking. It turned out to be that I was the one tied up at the office that summer. I answered all the phone calls, most of the e-mails, looked after our own servers and took care of the services of the technology park creating new accounts and helping people etc. Actually it was just the same I had done for a couple of years in the school before but this time it was in the middle of corporate business world. Besides the technology park itself and Nokia our customers included companies like Elektrobit, Wasala , BusCom etc... of which some are doing quite well nowadays. Besides taking care of the everyday business and answering the office phone I was also responsible for a new service we started that summer. It was a telephone support service for Finnish people who had trouble with the Internet called 9-NET-9 (the number was 0600-9-net-9). It cost about a dollar (5FIM) a minute and was open from 8am to 8pm, Monday to Saturday i.e. every day except Sunday's. When I was not at the office I put a .forward to the number so that it'd ring my mobile. Quite often, after three-four months of that work, I had such a strong routine that people's problems were quite easy to solve even in the most awkward situations where the mobile use allowed me to go. Once we climbed on the roof of the university to see the view with Heikki. It was a beautiful, bright spring-winter's day, strong wind though. Of course someone called the number just then and I had hard time finding shelter behind some constructions so that the wind wouldn't disturb the discussion. Some other time someone called early Saturday morning when we we're still partying the Friday night .. I couldn't even remember some of those calls afterwards (you know how we Finns drink) but friends always told they went ok. The now legendary 9-NET-9 wasn't profitable like most of our services weren't. As I mentioned earlier the deal with the telephone company was that they'd take care of the access and we the rest of the business. We were supposed to share the profits that the access would bring in - after all we'd have to take care of all the support and service development - but as we didn't have any agreement of that on paper it didn't quite turn out to be that way. We did get a fixed payment, 30FIM which is about 6$, for every user who had a mailbox and access to usenet news and irc servers plus the room for homepage on our server. It seems, however, that during the past years of net business (94-97) only charging for access has been really profitable for ISP's. We also charged the technology park a fixed monthly sum for access to our servers and administrating their own server. Then we were active in many kinds of projects and really enthusiastic about them but most didn't profit as they were supposed to. The monthly income kept us alive and travelling to install systems and teaching, organizing work-shops etc. was quite profitable. Still it took more than a year before any of us could really get paid for what we did. Even the three-four months year '95 I worked almost full-time didn't bring me any money but it was ok. No money, yes Honey! i used to say :) By then end of '95 the Internet Boom started to reach Northern Finland more than before and our services got more popular. Unfortunately we didn't have real products to sell and were not so good workers either. Studying and other interests took a lot of time and thoughts and as the company couldn't really pay for work no one could concentrate on it full time. There were also new people starting to work on the business. The technology park and some companies there were not always too satisfied with our service and hired some other students to work directly for them. We, for whom the net was almost like a religion and the company our own tribe or church, were a bit scared of that development. Fortunately also the other networkers in the area were our friends since there were not many, if any, Internet professionals in the area that would have not been on #oulu on irc and/or active with the OuluNet school network during the past years. So we approached those new people and asked them to join us, which they happily did, so we became a group of fourteen. Eventually those new people were to become the following two CEO's and the current core of the company but of course we didn't know it then. Apart from new workers we needed also money and especially someone with business skills. I can't remember how consciouss I was of that need but succeeded in finding a solution in the beginning of year 1996 anyway. It was quite a coincidence: I had been, actually for the first time, alone in Helsinki in october '95 for a party and went back there with some friends to spend the new-years eve 95-96. Then, after returning back to Oulu after a couple of weeks, I was spending my time at the university and working at the office next to it. One Tuesday afternoon I was browing through the national sfnet.(discussion).www.* newsgroups, a part of daily routine, and saw one message from some guy in Helsinki looking for "people who can write html" and a telephone number which to contact. I was tired and bored after working all day so I made a call, guess I was wondering about moving to Helsinki. It was quite surprising to hear that the person who had put the short message had such big plans. He was looking for the best people in the country to form a group and start making real business developing Internet services for companies. From the message I'd thought that it was only some boring weak html-writing startup but he was a real capitalist with successful running businesses already. I told him about our company and we decided to meet in Helsinki next Saturday. So I travelled back south again on Friday and was going to sleep overnight in an apartment of a friend of mine to be fresh in the meeting the next morning. The friend is actually one of seven of us young first OuluNet and netppl -people but he had moved to Helsinki that autumn to study law. He was (and is) still participating actively on the mailing lists and took/takes care of the law and other bureauchracy. Anyway, as I was arriving in Helsinki already he called me that there would be a party that Friday night. One other guy, actually an older brother of one other netppl-founder of my age from Oulu, was leaving to do his military service and had a farewell party before it. This friend I was going to stay with was there already when I was finally at the railway station in Helsinki so I had no other choice than to go there too. It was a great party but I didn't get much sleep .. and even those few hours were on the plain wooden floor because there was no furniture in the aparment. Next morning my phone rang. Luckily I woke up since it was the businessman I had the meeting with. He asked me to come to lunch in the center. The others were still deep asleep as I left. The meeting was a success. We ate well and talked constantly for about three hours about where the net business was going and what we - his contacts and resources in the business world and our group of experts - could do together. His idea was to found a separate marketing company that would market our products in Helsinki, where all the money and business in Finland is, and we could work on them where ever we'd like to (Oulu, that is) and get actually paid for it. His condition was that he'd have to own 50% of the company as it would guarantee we would work in a reliable way. He assured, however, that he would not force us to change the way we work - he said he thought we were like artists who couldn't really be treated that way without killing all the creative drive. I reported the results the same evening on the net for the other's to read. Of course the whole deal sounded promising as we were in financial trouble and didn't have any resources for anything. Only selling the majority share sounded problematic. Since the beginning all we ten had owned equal shares, 10% each, which was for us a natural and a democratic way to organize the company. One vote per person - that's how things work, we always thought. But we were facing a dead end and this man's promise of good global/international contacts and resourses was promising. He, being about 40 years old at the time, had been working internationally most of his life and also also got his education for international marketing on the other, the business side of the Atlantic ocean. The CEO decided to meet him as soon as possible and so we went back to Helsinki again. Things worked well. We really felt good together and were surprised how well this man could understand our spirit and think of how we could work. Almost like he had always been one of us - perhaps he should have. After the long discussions we had at his house we felt like going for it. There was only one change in the original plan that our brilliant CEO came up with: he suggested that perhaps there was no need for a separate marketing company but the man could invest straight to our business and start working in tighter co-operation with us in the same company. This was a totally new thought for everybody but finally, after a good night sleep and [harkinta], we decided that it'd be the solution we would propose the others . After discussing the matter back home in Oulu we invited the man to meet us there, had sauna together and were planning the future together. He and the other new people we'd asked to join earlier would become shareholders so that he'd get the 50% he insisted and the rest would be shared among us. Everybody felt that it was a beginning of a new era. We had told him everything and he, as a hard-boiled business professional, could point out the mistakes we had make and describe several solutions we should consider. He also had some customers with projects and international partners ready waiting. The spring 1996 and the following summer was the time when all those promises started to come true. Like the seeds had finally started to grow. I was spending half of my time in Helsinki and some of the others travelled there more too. We also started our first project there. It was actually really a good one: The customer was the best known auction house in Finland that sells high quality antiques and fine art plus even valuable old car classics. They were about to modernize their information system and digitalize the whole process of making the auction catalogue. The catalogue is central in their business: it has to made in time and well since most people make their buying decisions based on the pictures where the quality of the print plays a central role. Putting all the information together is also a hard process. Demanding customers make it even more difficult as they quite withdraw their items away or bring in new ones to sell at the very last moment. The traditional photography and print methods are so slow that the auction house can't adjust to customer's needs so they hoped that the digitalization would be an answer. Another company was working on the database and digital imaging so that our task was to participate in that process to create the on-line version. Our goal was to do it so that the same database and same pictures that the new system would use to publish the paper catalogue could be used to automatically create an interactive the web-version of it. I was responsible for our part of the project (at the age of 20) and this time we were in no hurry since we had time the whole summer. On the whole the project went well, or at least better than usually, since we had failed to keep the deadlines quite often before. One of the older guys back in Oulu built the database-interface for the web and it worked well. We could also get the system process the images that were created for print to be suitable for the web with little trouble. The interface and the search engine for the on-line catalogue we're also ok and finished in time - it was pretty neat to search for all silver rings you could buy with less than 5000FIM or check how many classic Ferraris the company had sold during the years. The only trouble was the overall graphic design of the site: the customer wanted to have all kinds of information, like their history etc., on the site and gave as the texts as we had agreed. We had asked them who would make the graphics and the design that would be needed to make the site look well and they had promised to deliver them. In the end they didn't - it turned out that they had misunderstood our question and gave us only the paper catalogues to show as what the style was supposed to be - so we had to do the design ourselves and they were not willing to pay for it. I can't do professional graphics myself and we had no money to pay anyone so it was a severe crisis. Finally, after two weeks of panic as the dead-line was coming close, the CEO made the graphics and the whole design himself in one night with my assistant. The result was, especially at that time when a lot of web design was really poor, quite good and the customer was astonished because it was so much more than they had expected. The project was finally successfully over, except that the pages were not technically finished so that some other people had to go through them back in Oulu. The CEO and I had to travel elsewhere to teach already and so that we didn't have the time to finish them and that caused some quarrel. No one of us got paid of the whole project. The database designer did the web engine as his masters to graduate from the polytechnic. We did our parts for fun and to learn and just because we had to. The company didn't charge enough so the income covered only the expenses - travels, telephone calls, secretary's salary and other running costs. Of course it was quite sad but at least we had managed to finish one real project and got good publicity from it. Before the work in the spring we had been to Stockholm in Sweden (my first time there) to present the plan for the bigger auction house there that owns this Finnish one. They thought it was an interesting plan but didn't believe that we (Finns) we're needed for them to accomplish the same. Actually they said that they were already about to publish something "the next Thursday". Several months later in autumn when our work in Finland was published with a lot of interest from even the international press - I believe that the service was the first full on-line auction catalogue with database and search capabilities and nice pictures in the whole world! - the Swedes had still absolutely nothing. If you know Scandinavian history (or current ice-hockey) you might have a clue of what this meant to us ;) The autumn after that auction house summer was to witness even a better project with even more work, publicity and no pay. The Swedish royal family was coming to visit Oulu and the town wanted to get everything out of it. Our CEO was involved in the planning and - being the amazingly creative propeller he is - came up with great ideas, found the partners and convinced the representatives of the city to go for it. So worked like hell most of the August and when the royal came we had just finished everything - in fact just the same morning after a 28 hours day of work - to be ready for the show. The result is still present at and was a good example (and one of the first in the world, I believe) of how modern Internet communication services combined with mobile digital technology can be used to share important events with people across the world as they happen. The site functioned as a press center for the international media and was also the fastest news channel for the public. We had borrowed to digital cameras from Canon and the hospital in Oulu that the photographers were using. The pictures taken were transferred immediately from the field from the back seat of a taxi using a laptop with a GSM-datalink to our office. There they were photoshopped and published for the press to use and people to watch with short explanations of what was going on. Best quality pictures were 1200x800 or even larger so they were good enough for the print media to use. Some places the royal visited had video-cameras installed so that we could send their stream live on the net too. We had also a digital pocket camera and we were using them ourselves, some pictures I took of the princess Victoria arriving to the technology park were published in real-time too :) Of course today with all the media giants using the web extensively to report the Olympic games all that is nothing new. Back then, one and a half years ago in the far north of Scandinavia - in the middle of nowhere, if you prefer - it was quite an achievement for a bunch of youngsters. The one coordinating the work that day the royal visited was 23 years old at the time and later became the next CEO of Net People. I was nineteen myself like most of the technicians taking care of ISDN and videoconferencing systems, the CU-SEE-ME link, the outgoing MBONE-feed and the basic web services. The girl (there is one in the group! :) finishing the pictures for the press was eighteen. All world top professionals I'd say. The middle-aged man who had bought the half of the company was sitting in the office in Helsinki, 600km (400 miles or so) away and happy to follow everything on the net. All that was '96 and before. By the end of that year and during '97 then the company has organized, established and gotten serious on the whole. Business has slowed down and is quite boring compared to the crazy early times but at least the ones working nine-to-five every day - instead of 30 hours a day and then disappearing - get paid and can live a normal life. The customers can trust on them. The current (third) CEO has a family with a child and the workers have to pay their rents so they can't do it just for fun anymore like I (we) always did. There's still much of the spirit left. Most of the founding members of the society (it wasn't really a company in the beginning) are somewhere else: the first leader, creator and spirit maker CEO moved to countryside and is working there on his own projects, some of us young are busy studying other things (law, sociology, languages, cultural studies) in other parts of the country or abroad, some professionals have changed to different companies for better pay or different work etc. Many of the originals are, however, working full time now. I think that, combined with the newcomers, they together form the core of about eight active people at the office. And naturally also we who are away, only for a while I hope, still hang around on the net as always. The main product is our own package called Net Access which is a basic service for people and companies to use Internet from home and/or office with a modem or an ISDN connection. We have our own modem pool now which brings in the basic income from about 1,500 customers. There are also some cable modem users. The server services are ok, for example the whole an.org is on netppl's systems in Oulu which I happily use from all over the world every day. Some people are working on projects, mainly building websites sometimes combined with more advanced database facilities. The biggest challenges in the future is to find a new business model as the whole service-business is changing. Although the good local service is a strenght globalization seems to be necessary. A long-term strategy has been to form good partnerships and try to move out from the tiny markets in Northern Finland (only some hundreds of thousands inhabitants there and tightening competition) for the global markets. This is one reason I've been travelling and meeting ISOC people and why I came to live here in Amsterdam which is about the best place for international business on the continent. I also hope that the soon-to-be-born Finnish chapter of the Internet Society will help us to take this step. Otherwise the fight is lost and we will die away as the old world (telcos, big media, IT corporations etc) is taking over the net as is establishes to be just a regular part of the society. Then those delightful memories of the past years will be nothing but an useless effort - but there's nothing I hope more than to show the world that it was only the beginning. Revolution! Or at least a good life.