Nov 16, 2015

SLUSH 2015

If you are not familiar with SLUSH, it's a sort of a startup event. Or I guess at least originally the idea was to gather together startups and investors. And it's still a lot about that, but it has expanded into something huge. Not only startups are interested in being there, but also many established not-anymore-startups like NOKIA, Samsung, GE or F-Secure. Also the set of speakers includes people like former president and Nobel price winner Martti Ahtisaari, president of Estonia and prince of Sweden.

The size of the ~2 day event was around 15k attendees. I included the approximation sign, because two days is far from the whole truth. During, before and after SLUSH the Helsinki region is filled with all sorts of side-events. So it's actually a really great situation to have a product launch. I think at least Comptel, Nokia and F-Secure took advantage of the situation.


I participated in SLUSH as a representative of my company. We were not looking to sell the company, nor to acquire any others. But we are included in the Merit Project along with other Finnish maritime companies. So we had an own stand alongside Eniram, Arctech, Ixonos, Aeromon and others. Honestly there weren't many potential customers, but the emphasis was in trying to suck the most out of the inspiring atmosphere. :)


In the beginning everything was rather shocking. Dim lights and huge laser beams crossing the ceiling. So many companies represented that one got disoriented almost right after stepping in. And due to the fact that I represented my company at the stand and because the event all in all was huge, I didn't watch many of the presentations. But I can recapture some that were most memorable to me.


Risto Siilasmaa told about NGP, Nokia Growth Partners. It's a 700M$ venture capital. Now I have to admit that I'm not that familiar with venture capital companies, but my impression was that they most give 'just money'. Interesting in this NGP concept was that in addition to the investment they also offer a lot of their own contacts, experience and wisdom to the startups. That might be a huge advantage compared to 'just money'.


Then I watched Dyan Finkhousen from GE talk about Open Innovation. I think it was Lean Startup where I read about GE's approach to having separate units that are fully autonomous. They can operate in the new environments without the inertia of the big company. But on the other hand they can also benefit from the 'big shoulders'. I think that's really interesting. There are other similar examples about these sort of intrapreneurs. From Finnish companies Reaktor Ventures is operating similarly.


Ilkka Paananen told that the bar of success has raised significantly during the last five years. Before Angry Birds it was huge to get million downloads. Now with hundreds of millions or billions of downloads it's hardly worth mentioning. He also got big applause for saying that he believes the next Google could come from Finland.


I'm not sure if that is likely, but the atmosphere of SLUSH was such that anything could be expected to happen. I guess many startups could find their investors from the event, but for me it was a source of great inspiration. You are allowed to think big, currently there's venture capital for good ideas and there are no limits. Digitalization is regardless going to happen and it's going to change everything.

(In addition to following the official program I did get some low-quality selfies with various people I admire. One I missed... Daniel, the Prince of Sweden, maybe next time. :) )

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