Oscar has years of experience within venture capital, private equity as well as being an active member of a variety of boards. He has strong abilities to assess when to act as a supportive sound board for ideas and when to be an operatively active decision maker, whether it may concern an early-stage start-up or a larger company.
His previous experience was running an Helsinki based Incubator. He managed startup incubation, investor relations, and fundraising strategies, playing a pivotal role in the growth and success of numerous early-stage companies. He is an expert in financial analysis, but sees people as the ultimate indicator of a good investment opportunity.
He would always rather invest in goodhearted people rather than a great idea. In fact, he usually looks for people willing to grow into a role over many years of cooperation.
Topias Soininen is a seasoned entrepreneur and investor, combining a rich background in product and business development with a keen eye for innovative startups. As a Partner at Villagecape Ventures since 2019, he has managed a diverse portfolio of over 30 startups across various stages, demonstrating his commitment to nurturing mission-driven enterprises. His entrepreneurial journey includes founding Playven, a sports-related SaaS company acquired by Playtomic.io. Topias’s leadership extends to different board roles in showcasing his versatility across industries.
Topias excels in areas like marketing, product development, product-market fit discovery, customer discovery, and business strategy.
Jesse is an investor with an entrepreneurial background. He was the technical founder in a SaaS management software & marketplace for racket sports. He built and ran the company in the US, and ended up merging with a Spanish company, Playtomic. At Playtomic he lead product development, built modern frontend development teams and was involved in many M&A deals from evaluation, due diligence to integration post-purchase.
Jesse has been there in the early days with no team, hired, built and reorganized teams and been through the transition to a hyper-growth scaleup. After Playtomic he built projects for modern remote hiring platforms, ephemeral staging deployments for microservice architecture and worked as an EiR for a corporate venture building.
At Failup Ventures he is passionate about helping founders take their early-stage companies to the next level. He leads Failup's US operations and is based in San Francisco.
