Meet Ville Parviainen Co-Founder and CTO at eMabler

What do you do at eMabler? 

The official title for me is CTO. I have been the person to design and implement our first proof of concept and production systems, that we run for our customers. Initially, I wanted to create a platform where the integration aspect was taken into consideration from the start.  We saw the growing potential of bringing EV charging as part of the existing IT infrastructure and wanted to design a system that could easily accommodate that and also scale fast. 

Today we have a team of developers working on the platform and constantly looking for new talents to join the team. On my typical working day, I host a daily with the development team in the morning. Then try to read thru emails and handle any urgent matters. Afternoons I try to reserve for coding and working with the rest of the development team on architectural or design matters. Usually of course this typical day is not so typical anymore because of a customer meeting, service ticket, sales case, strategic planning etc. But this of course makes being a co-founder in a startup fun. You get to see all aspects of running a business. 

Ville, what is your background? 

I have studied at the University of Tampere for a degree in computer sciences. During my studies from high school, I have always worked part-time. Initially, I started as a cashier at a local hypermarket. Moved from the checkout line to sell home electronics on the same hypermarket chain. Then during my studies at Tampere University, I started helping in the computer sciences department as a part-time teacher, running the exercises on several different programming courses. Looking back on teaching I can say that has probably been the best way to learn things. When you teach it to someone else you also learn a lot yourself. 

My first actual full-time job in the field of computer sciences was also in Tampere. It was a company called Sofia Digital. We made different kinds of software for the broadcasted digital television field. Example user interfaces to digiboxes, testing services for the same devices or what I focused more on was DVB-H technology that was supposed to revolutionize television on mobile devices like phones (this did not happen). 

After Tampere, I moved to Järvenpää where I still live and started working in a bank then called Osuuspankki today only OP. There I started as a Systems Specialist but worked my way to be an Application Manager. My responsibilities were in document creation and archiving as well as with other smaller common services. During my several years at OP, we grow our digital document archive to be a backbone of the banks current business systems. We started with a few hundreds of thousands of documents stored and I believe now the number is in several hundreds of millions. 

From OP I did some consulting work in a company called OpenText. They are a multi-billion-dollar Canadian company focused on Enterprise Information Management. We helped some private companies as well as Finnish Governmental projects on their Digitalization hurdles.

We have met with Juha when he hired me to work as a Head of R&D at Ensto Chago for Electric Vehicle Charging. This transition for me has probably been to most exciting career change, if not counting becoming an entrepreneur. At this point, I had pretty much only done software for a full-time profession. But had always been interested in electricity. Working with Ensto thought me the electricity and manufacturing part which has been interesting for me. Combining the so-called real world with your software is just a cool thing. 

At Ensto I run the R&D for EV Charging for several years, then moved to run the whole software development of the company. 

And today we are running eMabler. 

How did you end up working for eMabler?

With Juha the co-founder of eMabler while working at Ensto we saw the everyone is pretty much offering the same thing. A monolith system that tries to do everything. We saw that in long run this type of approach cannot be sustainable and there needs to be a way to share and work together rather than silo up.  

We wanted to build an open API First platform and work together with different stakeholders to bring the best possible end-user experience to EV charging.  

The other big booster for me on eMabler has been that I wanted to become an entrepreneur. I had always worked for someone else, and it was tempting to try out to work for my own company. Also working with Juha when we started planning this company fortified the idea in my head that this is the right choice to learn new things in my career. 

What is it like working at eMabler? 

It has been what I expected entrepreneurship to be, hectic, hard, and frustrating. But then again also rewarding and interesting. 

I get to decide for myself how to solve problems how to implement the technology, how to arrange support etc. But then again, I get to decide all that and more myself. It has been fortunate that we have found great colleagues to work with us at eMabler. And I’m sure that we will find many more. 

We have also learned the benefits and drawbacks of working remotely because of the pandemic. The first months after we started we did not even have an office to go to. Luckily for especially me, my view is that most of the SW Developers enjoy more working from home because they can concentrate better without interruptions. But I do need to admit we do also enjoy seeing each other face to face and exchanging some thoughts on work and other interesting topics. 

What do you do when you are not working? 

I spend time with my wife and two sons aged 6 and 9. During summer I try to play as much golf as there is time. We also enjoy mountain biking with my older son. With the family, we like to rent a cottage or just spend the weekend in a hotel during the pandemic somewhere in Finland by when we can we also like to travel abroad. 

I also started learning guitar a few years ago and that has been my relaxation method since then. The other one from last summer is coaching my younger sons football team. That clears the mind when you have to focus on getting 30-40 six years old to follow our head coaches instructions.

eMabler 

Based in Helsinki, Finland. We believe that eMobility is the way forward, having worked in the industry for over a decade and we see a great boom in eMobility. We’ve also seen many platform providers develop closed ecosystems and realized that there’s a need for a more flexible solution that focuses on end-user experience.

That’s why we decided to build an open platform that lets you integrate your EV charging data into any existing systems, please contact us.