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From Market Research Burnout to Behavix Co-Founder: Building the ResTech future
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In the fall of 2019, I had just quit my job, was as close to burning out as I’ve ever been - and I vowed to not work in Market Research ever again.
Over 10 years prior to that, I had started my professional software engineer career by applying to a small Finnish market research startup called Zokem. After Arbitron acquired Zokem in the early 2010s, I took a six-month sabbatical to explore South America.
During that time, Hannu had decided to start a new venture called Verto Analytics and asked me to join. I didn’t hesitate: having spent most of my money I needed a job and what would be better than to work with Hannu again.
At Verto, we accomplished remarkable things. We developed cutting-edge metering technology, built a substantial cross-platform panel, and secured some of the world’s largest tech companies as customers. I wore multiple hats – metering team lead, backend developer, DevOps engineer, data engineer, etc. But by 2019, I had hit a wall.
With my daughter just over a year old and my wife eager to return to work, I decided to take time off to be a stay-at-home dad while figuring out my next move. I explored opportunities at various Finnish companies and even contemplated starting my own behavioral metering company, but nothing felt quite right.
While I was still playing princess games I got a call from a new Verto CTO Surath Chatterji. After long and hard negotiations, he convinced me to join the team back and help out during the challenging COVID times with an aspiration for an exit in the near future. That started out a close to 5 year long journey together - now getting a new start at Behavix.
Although with Surath, we occasionally entertained the idea of starting our own company, when he finally started to execute his plan it wasn’t obvious to me whether I should join … or not! The timing could not have been worse - with my second child just a year old, and in the middle of a construction project of our new family home, I wasn’t sure whether I had the appetite for taking the risk of joining yet another startup. But knowing Surath, he doesn’t take no as an answer, so here we are and looking back, it was 100% the right decision.
Besides just revolutionizing market research and the normal business yada yada, this is what really excites me working in Behavix – this is the first time I have the opportunity to build an engineering function from scratch according to my vision.
I have been hugely disappointed with the low quality standards of today’s software and we work very hard not to be part of that trend. In my view, the main reason for the degrading software quality is the rise of high abstraction levels through a myriad of frameworks which sell the snake oil of ”this makes your development so easy”. This has created a large group of ”framework devs” who may understand the ins-and-outs of some specific abstraction but it is impossible for them to generalize their knowledge outside the given abstraction. Not knowing fundamentals makes it very difficult to truly debug, understand, and reason about code. In general, our software engineering ethos consists of more than one “unpopular opinion” (more about them later) but I feel they are fundamental for creating high quality software.
With that in mind, we have already assembled a small but extraordinarily talented tech team with a simple goal: automate ourselves out of our jobs. Daily business operations cannot have a single manual step. We’re not interested in manual processes or sending PDFs and CSV dumps via email – if an operation requires manual intervention, we consider it broken.
With our exceptional tech team’s dedication, Hannu’s unparalleled business instinct and Surath navigating between business, product and tech, I only see great success ahead of us.
Stay tuned … our story at Behavix is just beginning!

Co-Founder and Chief Architect