Start with the business
Understand the customer, the economics and the constraints before deciding what to build or change. The interesting constraint is usually operational, not technical.
About
Commercial judgement. Technical depth.
Vanaheim is led by people who have spent more than two decades founding, building and operating technology businesses. We still work directly on product and technical decisions.
Who leads the work
Operators, not a panel of advisers
Vanaheim PartnersVanaheim is led by operators who have co-founded technology businesses, led product and engineering teams and served as CTO. That work spans the first decisions about a product, the architecture behind it and the commercial and operational questions that emerge once people use it.
Today most of our work involves software that does things on its own behalf. We design and run those systems in our own companies before recommending them to anyone: the roles are separated, the boundaries are written down, and a person stays accountable for what goes out. We develop products through Vanaheim Labs and remain involved in Inkl’s product, technology and commercial operations.
A working knowledge of privacy, data governance and commercial law informs how we approach product design and business decisions. We work alongside specialist advisers when a matter requires legal or licensed financial advice.
Track record
Selected experience
Selected businesses we have helped found, build or operate. These are professional roles, not a list of Vanaheim Investments holdings.
G
E-commerce software Gate13 Co-founder
An early Australian software-as-a-service e-commerce business, building tools to help merchants sell online.
E
Audience measurement Effective Measure Co-founder & CTO
An audience measurement and analytics platform serving digital media and advertising markets, including the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia.
G
Streaming discovery & data Gyde Co-founder & product lead
A streaming discovery business that developed into a metadata and availability API, helping organisations connect audiences with film and television content.
N
Analytics & data platforms Narratiive Co-founder & CTO
Digital audience measurement and analytics, including the development of a cloud-native platform.
I
Digital news & publishing Inkl Director and operator
A digital news business connecting readers with journalism from leading publishers. We work across product, technology, commercial strategy and the systems behind its operations.
Working principles
How we approach the work
Read the code and the numbers
Good advice depends on knowing how a product, a workflow or a system actually works. We go into the repository and the model rather than relying on a description of them, because that is where the two stop agreeing.
Run it ourselves first
We build the systems we recommend and operate them in our own businesses. What we know about what works, what breaks and what it costs comes from having lived with it, not from a vendor’s material.
Keep responsibility legible
Design systems people can understand, review and operate. Where software acts with autonomy, separate the roles, make the boundaries explicit, size the review effort to what could go wrong, and keep a person answerable for the outcome.
Let’s talk
Let’s compare notes.
If our experience is relevant to a decision you are making or a product you are building, tell us a little about it.