Jyri Engestrom Ph.D

Jyri Engestrom Ph.D General Information

Biography

Dr. Jyri Engestrom is a Co-Founder & serves as General Partner at Yes VC. He serves as Partner at Lifeline Ventures. Dr. Engestrom co-founded and served as Chief Executive Officer at Jaiku. Jaiku which grew into the leading European mobile social network and pioneered the sharing of location information, status updates, and activity streams on smartphones. He serves as a Board Member at Centered and Primary.Health. He is also an Angel Investor. He serves on the board of the Rare Cancer Research Foundation. He served as Advisor at True Ventures. He served as Board Member at Para. Prior to Jaiku, he worked at Nokia and holds patents in remote content delivery, content prioritization, and RF-tag-reading capabilities in mobile devices. A sociologist by training, he coined the term "social object" to refer to photos, links, and other shareable Web content. After Google acquired Jaiku in 2007, he was responsible for mobile applications and Google's efforts to become a social destination on the Web and mobile. He left Google to found Ditto.me, a mobile local recommendations business, which was acquired by Groupon in 2012. At Groupon, he served as the Director of Product Management responsible for Breadcrumb by Groupon, an iPad point-of-sale system that replaces traditional cash registers at restaurants and other local businesses. Born in Helsinki, Finland. He is the Co-Founder of Drone Games, a programming competition advancing the ethical use of autonomous flying drones, and Sesat School, a micro-school in San Francisco. He holds Ph.D. in Management from Lancaster University, a Master's in Social Sciences from the University of Helsinki and a Degree in Communications from Université de Montréal.