By Johanna Lemola

CEO Riku Mäkelä’s first year at the helm of the Slush mega-event for startups and investors validates the success of the global approach, which was cooked up in Helsinki.

Riku Mäkelä has a vision and a mission: to encourage entrepreneurship.

Mäkelä says, “I want to make the best, super-talented young people with outstanding ideas realize that they can achieve something great, and change the world, by becoming entrepreneurs.”

He adds a warning, “It’s extremely hard to realize your dream by linking yourself to some existing structure.”

“Entrepreneurs are people who can detect problems in the world and are convinced that they can find solutions,” Mäkelä asserts.

One of Finland’s foremost spokesmen for entrepreneurship, Mäkelä sets an example with the Helsinki-based non-profit Slush, which he has led as CEO since the beginning of the year.

Slush is today one of the world’s foremost efforts to inspire entrepreneurship and to help startups to grow.

Seeing needs, going after solutions

Slush was started in Helsinki in 2008 by Finnish entrepreneurs as a Finland-focused meeting of a couple of hundred people to solve problems faced by the local startup scene.

Under Mäkelä’s leadership, Slush continues to focus on the same challenges: how to secure venture capital funding, how to recruit the best talent, and how to create networks to provide startups with vital peer support.

But to have the weight to provide true solutions to the challenges, the approach is now global: Slush seeks to attract and link the best firms with the best investors from anywhere in the world.

Numbers show what Slush does to find solutions: the 2015 event, held 11–12 November, attracted 1,700 startups from close to 80 countries, 800 venture capital investors and 630 media representatives. 1,500 volunteers came from 50 countries, and the same number of students attended. The total number of attendees was 15,000, and they came from all continents and represented more than half of the world’s nations.

Mäkelä explains that Slush helps startups with funding, recruiting and networking not only during the event but throughout the year between events. The event gives many valuable visibility in the media.

In the past 1.5 years, startups attending Slush have secured 350 million euros of venture capital funding from investors they met at the event.

“There are now many new startups in Finland that are recruiting on a large scale,” Mäkelä points out, underscoring the importance of Slush for its home base.

Going global with a touch a Finnish madness

How Slush got there is a story of determination to grow, utilization of what you have, and creative madness.

Some of the assets first utilized by Slush were the successes reaped by Finnish startups. When Slush put itself on the growth track in 2011, Angry Birds was already in international headlines, and the rest of the Finnish mobile games sector was on its way up. “Come here to see it!” Slush announced to international investors.

“We started with international investors, who attracted startups from other countries, who again attracted more investors, and more startups came. We managed to create a virtuous circle,” Mäkelä explains.

Slush has turned the event unforgettable to visitors in many ways. Organized by Slush itself and partners, these ways have included media interviews in a Finnish sauna lifted up to 200 metres’ height and in a metro rail tunnel under construction.  Some Slush 2015 attendees got the jitters on a sauna boat that nearly sank in Helsinki waters from the weight of the party.

“Experiences like these are a guaranteed way to make sure that stories of the event will circulate, from Silicon Valley to other tech centres of the globe,”Mäkelä says.

Why and how Helsinki?

Some have questioned, how can Helsinki produce such an event of mega proportions as Slush, unmatched by any similar event in Europe?

Mäkelä does not see the point of the question. “Why not Helsinki – and Finland? Why not a hundred of similar undertakings?” he challenges, suggesting there is no reason why Helsinki and Finland could not produce, and keep producing, major ideas, ventures and firms of global importance.

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Photo Jussi Hellsten / Slush 2015

Slush rocks Helsinki Convention Centre

Laser lights guided the audience through the venue. Sound effects set the rhythm on the main stage, which saw a succession of speakers with star power address thousands, often many of them standing left without a seat.

Slush filled Helsinki Expo and Convention Centre to the brim in November 2015, repeating the previous year’s success of the event to attract tech enthusiasts from all around the world. The two-day conference has developed into one of the must events in the world for startups and investors.

Action on the main stage – Silver Stage – was complemented by more on three other stages. On Green Stage, innovators introduced their ideas and products ranging from health to environmental technologies, destined to make the world a better place. On Pitching Stage, creators and owners of new ideas presented themselves to potential investors. Black Stage hosted presentations of an array of new technologies.

Food trucks parked indoors fed the crowds. Hammocks and rocking chairs offered some rest to those with a tech overload.

New business was generated in private get-togethers and in one-on-one meetings between entrepreneurs and investors.

The closing party at the Convention Centre was joined by super-sized characters of Supercell’s hit mobile game Clash of Clans, while bands entertained the audience far into the night.

Slush sets the scene for a large number of satellite events and meetings held before, during and after the conference dates, keeping many international visitors in Helsinki for the better part of the week.

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“Entrepreneurs can save the world”

Neil Rimer (left), Ilkka Paananen (middle) and moderator Miki Kuusi at Slush 2015
Photo Jussi Ratilainen / Slush 2015

Slush 2015 highlighted its effort to link the best firms with the best investors by pairing on the main stage Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen with Neil Rimer, a co-founder and partner in Index Ventures. Index, a global venture capital firm focusing on information technology and life sciences companies, made a major investment in Supercell in 2013, spurring the growth of the gaming startup. Today Supercell ranks among Finland’s most highly valued firms.

Rimer and Paananen discussed the potential of entrepreneurship – for the world and for Helsinki – and addressed the importance of cities for entrepreneurs.

Rimer declared, “Whatever the challenge, there’s an entrepreneur somewhere out there who will solve it,” underscoring his conviction that entrepreneurs can save the world.

When questioned about his dreams, Paananen envisioned, “My dream is that the next Google will be born in Helsinki.”

In a blog posted the same day, Rimer claims that cities, not countries, are best-placed to spur innovation. He writes, “Entrepreneurs thrive at city-level – often in neighbourhood clusters within cities – and it’s these, rather than countries, that are the relevant entities when it comes to optimizing for innovation and startup activity.”

Rimer goes on in the blog post to introduce recent research by CITIE (City Initiative for Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship) focusing on Nordic technology hubs. He notes that Helsinki is the only one of the hubs to be rated a Tier 1 or “Front Runner” city, alongside with such technology hubs as New York City and London.

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