Meet Leo Holsti: The co-founder who went from circus school to keeping Valo Motion running

Not many COOs can say their career at a company started with a Facebook message that boiled down to: "Would you come work for us if I bought you a trampoline?"

Meet Leo Holsti, co-founder and COO of Valo Motion. He studied computer science, trained as a professional circus artist, and has done his share of bookkeeping, web development, customs paperwork, and product development along the way. Ten years after Valo Motion was founded, he's the person who makes sure the games our team dreams up actually make it from the factory floor to a play area on the other side of the world.

This is his story – from the very first trampoline prototypes to what he expects from the next ten years.

From circus school to the first trampoline games

Leo's road to Valo Motion didn't exactly follow a straight line. He studied computer science at what was then the Helsinki University of Technology (today Aalto University), then left to train as a professional circus artist in Lahti.

Around the same time, Perttu Hämäläinen – a familiar face from acrobatics training – had been chosen to lead game research at Aalto. Perttu had long been fascinated by embodied interaction and movement-based games, and he had an idea he wanted to explore: could you exaggerate human movement, or even teach physical skills, through play?

So he sent Leo a Facebook message.

"It basically came down to: will you come work here if I buy you a trampoline?" Leo laughs.

Leo joined the research group as a research assistant, and together they built the very first trampoline game prototypes. The code was completely different, but the core idea would later grow into ValoJump.

That's also where Leo first met Raine Kajastila, our co-founder and CEO, who joined the same research group. They ran studies on whether playing a game while jumping helped people learn trampolining. The honest answer: for basic training, it didn't make much difference. Promising, but the funding ran out, and Leo went back to his studies.

Raine stayed on – and as a lifelong climber, he started applying the same approach to climbing walls. His research spread quickly in climbing circles, and he secured funding for a year-long Tekes project within Aalto to commercialize it.

"Apparently I'd left a good enough impression that he asked me to join," Leo says.

At first, Leo worked on the pedagogical side of the climbing wall, building video-delay features and thinking less about the game itself and more about how this could actually teach people something. The company was officially founded at the very end of the project, in 2016.

It wasn't a safe bet. "We started without any outside funding, so those first months involved quite a bit of uncertainty," Leo says.

The founder who takes the ball nobody else has caught yet

When Valo Motion was founded, the roles fell into place fairly naturally. Raine, the father of the whole idea, became CEO. Joni Vähämäki, our CTO, coded the computer vision behind the products. And Leo?

"I've done a bit of everything. I'd studied bookkeeping at some point and run the books for small companies. I think I just ended up taking the ball on everything else," he says.

By nature, Leo describes himself as more of a generalist than a specialist – someone who's curious, likes to dig into things and picks up new skills quickly. Over the years, that has meant building Valo Motion's first websites, handling communication with production, and making sure devices actually reach customers with every customs form in order.

Some of those lessons have been more concrete than others. In the early days, a few countries' customs authorities still required carbon-copy forms filled in on a typewriter. New typewriters weren't sold in Finland at the time, so Leo ended up buying a second-hand one at a bus stop by Ring Road III on a dark autumn morning.

"Briefcase in one hand, a wad of cash in the other. It felt completely surreal... These days we can print the forms, luckily. But we still have the typewriter, just in case.", he laughs.

Today, Leo oversees much of what keeps the company running day to day, from sourcing, manufacturing and logistics to installations, operational processes and ERP. Over the years, he has also been responsible for areas like hardware development and customer success. As the company grows and dedicated teams take over different parts, Leo is shifting further towards systems, processes and what a COO more traditionally does.

"The role has always been in a bit of a flux. As the company changes, the roles change with it. I've often been the overflow – the person who notices that something needs doing and figures out who could take it on, until eventually someone joins who does it full-time."

"In a way, I've been Raine's right hand. He focuses more on the commercial development of the company, and I take care of the things that keep everything running."

From five people to fifty – without losing the "everyone helps" spirit

Ten years have taught Leo plenty about international trade, from EU trade agreements to electronics certification and safety testing. But the lessons he finds most interesting aren't about paperwork. They're about people.

“When you grow from a five-person company to a fifty-person company, you naturally don’t know everyone quite as personally anymore. Some colleagues might only know me by my title, so I have to think about how my words come across. Am I saying this as the COO, or just as a colleague sharing a thought?”

With a team from many different countries, there's another layer, too.

"People can have completely different assumptions. If someone says something in a certain way – are they angry, or are they happy? Once you learn to get past those things, a lot of the practical stuff becomes easy."

Still, when Leo looks back, he doesn't feel the culture itself has changed that much. In the early days, everyone did everything and everyone supported each other – and that, he says, has held up remarkably well.

"Of course we now have more people who specialize in one thing. But when we have a big trade show booth, you'll still find a marketing writer and a game developer there building it and carrying things – because they want to be there, not because someone told them they have to."

As a company grows, it’s natural for teams to become more focused on their own areas, Leo acknowledges. But keeping that sense of togetherness is something the team continues to prioritize. Part of the reason the spirit has survived may be that none of the founders are entrepreneurs at heart.

"None of us wanted to run a company for the sake of it. We wanted to make these experiences and these products – the company is just the means to do it."

That also means the founders stay hands-on.

"For better or worse, we've always had our hands in the mud. If something needs doing, I'll go and do it like anyone else. I'd like to think that sets an example – everyone helps each other out here."

250 million views – and the moment that mattered more

Some milestones arrive with a bang. Shortly after Valo Motion was founded in 2016, Leo got a call from Raine on a Saturday morning: is our website up? Late the previous afternoon, a video of the climbing wall had been posted on the company's Facebook page. By the time Raine called, it had a few million views.

Buzzfeed and others picked it up, it repeatedly hit Reddit's front page, and in the end, the team counted over 250 million views.

"That's when you know you've done something right," Leo says.

But when he thinks about the moments that have really stayed with him, they tend to happen at trade shows – where you can see people's joy up close. One of them is from the very first time ValoJump was shown at FIBO, a large fitness trade show.

A visitor who used a wheelchair came up and asked if he could try the game. He ended up bouncing on the trampoline from a sitting position, propelling himself with his hands.

"Just that pure happiness of getting to jump and play a, in a way, very silly trampoline game. That simple joy is what makes this worth it."

Landing a big deal or getting a new product out the door feels good, of course. So does pulling off a stressful setup in the US when nobody knows where the truck with the equipment is. But for Leo, the biggest sense of success always comes back to the same thing.

"Selling our 500th or 1,000th device – those are great milestones, but they mean less than seeing that someone actually had fun. Metrics matter, we have to follow them. But metrics are just how we measure how well we're doing, because we can't stand there counting smiles."

And as he puts it: if all you wanted was a job, there are easier and less stressful ones out there.

Serious about fun – and why "good enough" isn't

Ask Leo what makes Valo Motion Valo Motion, both as a business and as a culture, and he points to one thing first: the drive to do everything as well as possible.

"We might make choices where we say: okay, our margin is smaller, but this is better. We put a completely disproportionate amount of resources into making products that are actually good, and we fine-tune details in ways I don't think many would."

For Leo, quality isn't a sales argument. It has value in itself.

"We don't do things well because it sells better. Doing it well has value of its own. Even if we could make something that sells just as well for less, we want to polish the end experience as far as we can."

The second ingredient is the people. Many here live somewhere in between disciplines – which fits a company whose products are, after all, both games and exercise.

"Most people here have a pretty broad curiosity. We have lots of different people with different interests, skills and passions – and combining them creates something more than anyone could do alone."

That brings us to one of Valo Motion's values: Serious about fun. With a circus background, Leo admits he has opinions about the term – but the idea behind it is simple.

"It has to be fun, but that doesn't mean clowning around. Everything we do, we do seriously. We try to do it well, we take it seriously – but we're having fun. And the end result always has to be that someone has fun: us, our partners, and the end customers."

At its core, the company's goal is to create new experiences that bring joy and movement into people's lives.

"Movement is at the heart of it, but it also has to be fun. And everything has to be done with real care and conviction."

The next ten years: more surprises, same core

So what does Leo expect from the next decade? He's sure of one thing.

"There's going to be an almost endless pipeline of surprises, changes and tricky situations, because that's what life has served us so far."

And he's not exaggerating. From the pandemic to shifting global trade conditions, Valo Motion has navigated its fair share of unexpected turns – including some very positive ones. At one point, demand exceeded expectations so significantly that the team sourced every available unit of a particular projector model in Europe, with additional units flown in from other parts of the world to keep up.

"Over time, it's become part of our DNA: a surprise comes along – okay, fun, what do we do now? Then we just look for the next creative solution."

Though, he adds with a smile, a couple of stable weeks a year wouldn't hurt.

As Valo Motion continues to grow, the way the company works will naturally evolve. For Leo, what matters most is keeping the same creative, hands-on spirit that has shaped the company from the beginning – a place where people feel encouraged to experiment, bring ideas to life, and build something new together. And he's confident that spirit is here to stay.

"The basic drive to make things we think are cool, that bring something new and some joy into the world – that won't change."

If anything, that's what he sees everywhere he looks in the company: people who aren't content with "done", but keep asking what the next new thing could be.

"Everyone wants to do more, to do better, to find what comes next. That constant search is part of the process – and I expect that to continue too."

Ten years in, and the trampoline is still bouncing.

P.S. When he's not keeping Valo Motion running, you'll most likely find Leo on the water. He and his wife own a sailboat – and while he'll happily tell you that owning a boat makes no sense, tinkering with it is half the fun.

‍