Softlandia
About Us
Meet the Softlandians
If you want to get in touch, head over to the Contact Us page.
Over ten years of versatile experience in software and product development.
Software & cloud architectures, greenfield projects, open-source.
Past: OptoFidelity, Eatech / Etteplan, Symbio
Over ten years of experience in software development, data science and algorithms.
Past: Delta Cygni Labs, Tampere University
Over six years of experience in professional software development, data science and algorithms.
Past: Artific Intelligence, OptoFidelity, Insta DefSec, Tampere University
Over twenty years in management of tech companies.
Past: OptoFidelity, Nokia, Neogames, Sales, marketing, business development, serial entrepreneur & business angel
Previously Mr Makkonen worked as the President of Voyage Solutions in Wärtsilä and CEO of Reaktor in New York.
During his previous career, Mr Makkonen has had the privilege of working with prestigious organizations such as HBO, Procter & Gamble, Virgin, Dow Jones, Viacom, Samsung, and Michael Kors.
Over seven years of experience in software and product development, software architecture, large scale test automation systems and open-source development.
Past: OptoFidelity
Over six years of experience in software development, software architecture, data engineering and machine learning.
Past: Unikie, Bitwise, Intel
One year of experience in software development. Over a decade of versatile experience in journalism, communications, content creation and project management.
Smile & Deliver
Smile and deliver is something we want our company to be remembered for. Being nice and making things happen.
Softlandia was founded to be a for keeps workplace. We, the founders, want to work in the company for decades and want all future employees to feel the same way. It's our responsibility as founders and management to make Softlandia a simply beautiful place to work.
What Makes People Smile & Deliver?
One of the most important factors for a great workplace is psychological safety.
Harvard Business Review writes about psychological safety: "positive emotions like trust, curiosity, confidence, and inspiration broaden the mind and help us build psychological, social, and physical resources. We become more open-minded, resilient, motivated, and persistent when we feel safe. Humor increases, as does solution-finding and divergent thinking — the cognitive process underlying creativity.
We find this profound, and it is one of the building blocks of our working culture. We have woven the essentials of psychological safety into two of our values: smile and deliver. These are the things that we want our team to represent, and the things we continuously seek to become better at. If you want to read the whole story about psychological safety, visit HBR website.
Smile. For us, this means good behavior, being nice to our teammates, being optimistic, finding solutions, remembering all the positives, and representing that all around. But it also means that there is room for joking around and general merriment. It's just simply great to have a laugh at work.
Deliver. Delivering what the customer needs. Deliver it on time. Deliver on the expected level, and sometimes beyond. For a service company, delivering is key. In order to succeed in meeting the customer's needs, you need to understand what is needed and understand it on many levels. Thus, delivering starts with understanding. But it also encompasses time management, good communication and swift execution of tasks.
Our third value, Desire to learn, means learning on both the individual and the organizational level. On the organizational level, it means, that we reserve time and opportunities to learn in all areas where the individuals’ interests and our company's needs meet. In this, we are inspired by organizational scientist Carol Dweck, known for the Growth Mindset, from Stanford University.
The last value relates to Feedback. A person has to be able to accept feedback in order to learn. Taking feedback, and really listening, is sometimes hard. To make it easier, we, as team members and individuals, need to focus on giving feedback. Feedback must be a part of our every day and it must be relevant. In some areas of work, feedback needs to be organized in a certain way in order for it to be meaningful and produce results.
These few lines try to describe what we, as a team, want to be. As a young company, we are just starting to build on our values. There is a lot to be done but we take our values seriously from day one.
