(disclaimer: this is just a small fraction of the FINN story) 

This is a very short summary of my journey in FINN and Schibsted, and it is just a fraction of the FINN story. I mention some names in the text, my intention is not to leave anyone out, but you should know that I have appreciated everyone that I have learned to know over the years.

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Before I start the story I would really like to thank my wife, Unni, for the support all these years making it possible for me to be part of the FINN journey, and now she is the one that pushed me the last steps to take on a new challenge in Nettbil.no. Her reasoning was “I think you should do something that I know you really enjoy and think is fun”. ❤️

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1996 – the beginning

In 1996 I was 29 years old and had just been employed by the Consultancy company Avenir.

We had a project for Storavisene (Aftenposten, BT, Stavanger Aftenblad, Adresseavisen og Fedrelandsvennen) called Visavisen (show the newspaper), the main project was to build a tool that, in short, could add search terms to images (which was images from the classifieds section in the newspaper). The goal was to publish this on the web and make it searchable. 

I together with Per Eirik Marton and Per Christian Engdahl, was “thrown” in to make the web solution that displayed all the ads on the web.

None of us had the experience of developing for the web, so we started with reading «learning Perl in 21 days» (which was about the timeframe we had to deliver the solution as I remember it 😉 ).

It was a steep learning curve with fun learnings

• We tried to use recursion to read all the ads, not a good idea. A rewrite was necessary in the mid of the project. So while I presented for the customer how far we had gotten, Per Eirik and Per Christian was starting from scratch and re-writing for their bare life. Maybe we could call this early days refactoring.
• This was about the same time we discovered that it was possible to inject code through the URL because of our use of regex in Perl, a powerful feature which really can backfire 🙂

Per Eirik and I did the “hilarious” choice of changing from Perl to Server Side Javascripts (was run on SUN machines), it was easy to code and again we had short time, but we reached our milestone and was ready to launch june 1998 if I remember correctly.

What we didn’t know was that someone had ordered radio commercials. 

We launched the service and as the commercials were running the servers started to lock-up and we had to restart pretty much continuously.

Aftenpostens eager server technician Jan Magne Kjerstad tried to help, yelling “do you need more iron” (meaning should I order more servers). Well, I think we did get more servers and more memory, but our solution was to create a task that restarted the servers as soon as they locked and it worked 🙂 

Curiosity 1

Now a days development teams deploy their code “whenever they” like. In 1999 the procedure was the following:

At the Avenir office in Pilestredet: Copy the code to a floppy disc
Walk 5 minutes to Aftenposten in Akersgata
Ask for someone to let us in to the servers
Copy the code from the floppy disk to the servers and restart
Walk back again

2000 – FINN.no is re-launched t

Finally in 2000 the newspapers with Aftenposten in charge established FINN.no as a company with Terje Seljeseth as the CEO and they were building FINN from scratch again.

I still worked in Avenir and we got the project and had we had approx 3 months to deliver. 

My very good colleague Baard Baardseth came on as the project manager. We did deliver again using server side javascripts (!), but we had decided, when we started, that we wanted to rewrite it in Java as soon as we had launched. 

I have to mention Tine Reuterdahl, Eyvind Larre and Eivind Askland – thanks for all the fun we had at work for many years.

We launched the new FINN site march 19th 2000.

FINN served all with the name Finn in Oslo breakfast and an invitation to come to a launch party at Grand Hotel in Oslo.

They were picked up in limousines and Morten Abel was playing at the party.

The party ended with a laser show in front of the parliament and there were also some projecting of pictures by Nerdrum on walls on the east side of Oslo.

Below is an article from the day after the launch. Great fun with the comment from the Swedish doctor that said, while she warned about the dangers with internet

“…sitting in front of the screen can make you dumber” – Citation Christina Doctare

I haven’t been able to find comments on the Nerdrum projections in any archives, but I am pretty sure that one of the newspapers commented it this way: “Voldtekt av det offentlige rom”.

We were early out with mobile solutions. The first time we had to borrow a new phone from Telenor to be able to show our solution. Eyvind was master at this and Roar Johansen made sure that we made a solution for Palm (AvantGo) and for Roars iPac 😂.

2002 – going international

This was the start of a long career with and in FINN, I was employed in 2002, with the task of being part of a team bringing the commercial idea behind FINN and the technology out to media houses in Europe. The initiative was led by Robert Steen. 

We quickly made new sites for thisislondonjobs.co.uk. and several other thisis-sites.

In 2004 we started our work with Fish4.co.uk. Baard and I spent many nights at Novotel Hotel in Hammersmith (a roundabout in West London).

We worked close with great people like Jonathan Turpin, Doug McCabe, Ian Carman, Russel Scott, Phil Radden, Paul Bellamy and Suzanne Leslie (sorry for those I haven’t mentioned).

I was programme director when we launched Hebbes, Willhaben, Kalaydo, Secundamano and more. I was also responsible when we closed everything down after some years. Halvor Igesund joined as the project manager for this. Sporty, since it meant that we where closing down our jobs (it went well :-), we got new ones in FINN)

Curiosity 2

In 2008 FINN.no won a price by Dataforeningen for being the best online service. I was accepting the price on behalf of FINN and this is what the IT newspaper wrote as caption to a picture that was taken;

”KOSER: Statsråd Liv Signe Navarsete koser med Eirik Morstad Håsten i Finn.no som vant for beste nettjeneste.” 

IDG/Computerworld

In english this is something like this 🫣: “Cuddles: Prime Minister Liv Signe Navarsete cuddles with Eirik Morstad Håsten in Finn.no who won for best online service.”

I haven”t been able to find the image again, maybe the minister got it classified 😬

2011 – FINN motor

In 2011 I took on the job as Product Director of FINN motor a position I had until the end of 2022. In this period I worked very close with Arild Nilsen, Bente Werenskiold, Anette Syversen, Eddie Sjølie, Matta Sloreby, Alexander Arvidsson and Henrik Roshauw and a lot more of course.

This was a period I learned to know the car business in Norway (that will be another story I think 😆)

I’m especially proud that we made Smidig bilhandel, with Magnus Ryhjell at the steering wheel in the start (before he became Daglig Leder at Norboat) and then Didrik Lund has run the project all the way so that we now run a considerable amount of cars through our transactional journey in FINN.

I am also proud that we took on challenge from our sales department a made market analysis and price tool for cars. Terje Dahlgren was key in helping the team make the right functionality.

2023 – Nordic Marketplaces and Nettbil

In the start of 2023 we re-organised into Nordic Marketplaces, I moved out of the motor vertical. In my new role, Lina Lindfors, has been my companion in technology, together we have managed product & tech teams located across Stockholm and Oslo. She has been a great “partner in crime”, we connected quickly and I must say: “she is usually a step ahead” :-).

I was planning to stay in this role, but suddenly an opening came as CPTO in Nettbil.no and my interest in cars became too strong. I thought the role description fit my CV perfectly and luckily Laila Dahlen thought the same and now I’m about to start as CPTO in Nettbil.no. trying to build on the good product that Anders Espelund, Eirik Thorsen and Thomas Hage has created. This is my next chapter, still in Schibsted. Looking forward to work with all the talented people in Nettbil.

Thanks to all I have worked with during my years in FINN, both the ones mentioned and all not mentioned (your are not forgotten, but this story would have been a critically long if I were to mention everyone :-)). Maybe I will write a new fraction of the story another time!

Oh! One last thing, a rumour says that there are still code that I wrote in early 2000 in our plattform. If anyone of you that are building our new NMP platform finds it, please remove it, it has done its job 🤣. Thanks!

Oh 2! I have posted this on my Photo-site – feel free to look around 😉