Meet the Team Behind Paradise Tycoon — part 2: Executives
In the first part of our Meet the Team Medium series, we shared the company's background and track record. Now, let’s take a closer look at the faces behind the company. We introduce you to the C-level executives behind Paradise Tycoon.
Harri Karppinen — Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer
After spending his childhood playing games on C64 & NES Harri Karppinen knew games would be an important part of his life, and so in 2004, he began studies in Computer Science at the University of Oulu in Finland and only two years later co-founded his first games company. Harri has been professionally working on games & technology ever since. Before co-founding Empires with Timo, he was Fingersoft’s Marketing Director and launched games like Hill Climb Racing 2. Hill Climb Racing game franchise has been a huge success amassing 2 BILLION players. Harri has vast experience in developing server and client-side software as an architect and programmer, building business intelligence solutions, doing data driven user acquisition at scale, and lately solidity & smart contracts. When he’s not working on games he watches sci-fi and composes electronic, metal, and cinematic music.
Timo Juuti — Co-Founder, Chief Operative Officer
Any team stands to benefit from having leaders with different backgrounds. Co-Founder Timo Juuti makes a perfect example with experience in areas ranging from doing research as a PhD. in materials science to being a professional DJ / music producer and co-founder of the leading Finnish electronic music label. Since 2017 he has been heading the Empires Not Vampires and its subsidiary Youth Control Games studios now jointly working on Paradise Tycoon. Timo has led activities such as data analytics, game, and in-game economy design, business & marketing strategy, project management, licensing, and other partnerships. With digital entertainment strongly part of his entire life, Timo developed his first game in the early 90s at the age of 10. He spent most of his teenage years either composing music with MOD trackers or playing DikuMUDs. Nowadays, if Timo is not at the office building the next era of gaming he could be helping fellow media entrepreneurs or found DJing with his two daughters and playing synths with them.
Niko Alakastari — Chief Technology Officer
Niko Alakastari began information technology studies at Oulu University of Applied Sciences in 2008. Five years later Niko graduated from Oulu Game Lab (organized by the Oulu University of Applied Sciences) training program focusing on the gaming industry. During Game Lab training Niko was creating a mobile game utilizing augmented reality where players conquer areas in real life using virtual tagging, and NepCar -racing game. In 2014 Niko co-founded Frozen Vision games company. Frozen Vision published NepCar -racing, Gobblinz, and other mobile games first for the early Lumia (Nokia) mobile phones. With 10 years of experience in game development, Niko has specialized in user experience and user interfaces using Unity and C#. In addition to programming, Niko has coached new developers and worked on project management, and has been actively participating in Finnish games industry events like NGS, Slush, Nordic Game, Gamescon, etc., as well as Game Jams. When not making sure our players have the best possible user experience, Niko is likely playing World of Warcraft with his guild where he is one of the officers, or playing and analyzing new games.
That concludes our introduction of the core members, but we still have a lot of others equally important members to introduce. The Paradise Tycoon team is supported by a strong Advisory Board with a vast amount of experience in the blockchain space. We will introduce them in the next part!
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