Bringing Icebreaker Pre-Founder Project Online
The Icebreaker Pre-Founder Project is coming up soon! We’re very excited to bring bright and diverse pre-founders together yet again to learn and work together on new startups with unique ideas and great teams.
We’re also happy to announce that like in spring, the session will be held online. While the pandemic has somewhat separated strong thinkers and dreamers from the companies and teams that could use their unique skills, we don’t believe this has to be the reality forever. We also believe that now is the perfect time to brainstorm your unique startup ideas with like-minded pre-founders and talented professionals. That’s why we originally started the Pre-Founder Project and now brought it online.
Let’s dive into what the PFP is about, why we launched it, and how we brought it to an online space.
What is the Icebreaker Pre-Founder Project?
The Pre-founder Project (PFP) was created as a way for pre-founders to connect, learn, and start building their own strong tech companies. Pre-founders are aspiring entrepreneurs and experienced professionals, who we believe can unleash their potential when given the right kind of resources, environment and people — that’s what the PFP is about. We believe the PFP is an ideal place to refine one’s idea, start a company or find an early-stage team to join.
Pre-Founder Project is a place for professionals from a variety of industries and backgrounds to connect with other pre-founders who have similar ideas and aspirations. In the program, these pre-founders are given the opportunity to network, work on their ideas, spar their ideas, get feedback and find a co-founder or a team to join. At Icebreaker, we want to be a catalyst for innovation, and we do this by providing insights and deep-diving into the startup ecosystem; how to build a company from an idea, how to validate your own idea, how to build a strong product and team; how to take that next step towards being a founder of a strong tech startup.
Why We Run the Pre-Founder Project
We believe that nothing should separate the pre-founders from the meaningful connections and feedback they need to jump-start their entrepreneurial careers. Not even a pandemic. That’s why we wanted to bring the Pre-Founder Project online. We wanted to gather these people together and give them a safe (virtual) space for learning, self-development and networking.
Moreover, the previous success stories that have stemmed from our pre-founder community demonstrate that these type of programs are needed in the current startup ecosystem, first and foremost to bring people together — be it face-to-face or virtually. We are extremely happy to have had our pre-founder community acting as an intermediary for these people to connect and found their companies:
Talbit
Kaisa Savola and Aleksi Meldo are the founders behind the visual goal-keeping and progress-tracking tool, Talbit. They’re alumni of the Pre-Founder Project; two pre-founders who turned to actual founders. The two sparred ideas in the PFP in 2017 and eventually decided to join their forces and found a company.
“I heard about Kaisa’s idea when I came to the Pre-Founder Project and believed that my own idea would have had some difficulties in its development, so I thought this would be a nice opportunity to join Talbit because I shared the same frustrations with inefficient personal development discussions in corporations.” — Aleksi Meldo, Head of Product, Talbit.
Emooter
Teemu Jäntti and Dani Pärnänen, the co-founders of Emooter, similarly met and exchanged ideas during one of our past PFP sessions. Emooter is an app designed to help teams improve overall mental wellbeing at work.
“I met Dani during one of the sparring sessions of the Pre-founder project. I had never taken part in startups and didn’t really know much about the startup scene, so I was pretty much testing the waters with my idea and seeing how it would pan out. When I met Dani and heard of his idea, I was interested. It started off as a dashboard for HR, but it quickly shifted as we started to realise what could be done.” — Teemu Jäntti, Co-Founder, Emooter.
Origin by Ocean
Origin by Ocean was founded by Mari Granström and Mikael Westerlund. The two met during a PFP session in 2018, and the rest is history:
“What happened was that Mikael was actually sitting in the seat in front of me during the idea presentation portion of the PFP. So when I got back from presenting my idea, he just turned around and says, ‘Oh, that’s an amazing idea. We need to talk’… We met on Monday or Tuesday after the weekend. We just started to talk about and build upon this idea.” — Mari Granström, Co-Founder, Origin by Ocean.
Since their first meeting in the PFP 2018, Origin by Ocean has raised €2M seed round, won Save the Baltic Sea award and received European Commission Seal of Excellence.
“I think in Finland the problem is that we tend to underestimate the differences we have in terms of expertise. You might meet somebody who could really provide a lot of value to your team and still think, ‘this person will not be able to help me’, but how wrong can you be? I think that’s really the speciality of the PFP when I participated.” — Mari Granström, Co-Founder, Origin by Ocean.
In addition to these stories, we have invested in five companies whose ideas have come to fruition because of their own agency for innovation and their own willingness to join the PFP. These include Osgenic, Sellforte, Puida, Aetlan and Adaptio. What is common with all these founders, is that they were all at one point pre-founders in the Icebreaker community.
Bringing PFP Online During COVID-19
Bringing PFP online during the pandemic was no simple feat, but we strongly believed that the pre-founders out there deserved an opportunity to connect with others and share their ideas. It is always a challenge to try and replicate a physical environment online and provide the same level of quality and value without face-to-face interaction. We gave the virtual PFP a try in May 2020, and the feedback was great. Now, we’re excited to run our second virtual PFP that consists of three online sessions; sharing ideas, networking and keeping the discussion running in PFP Slack; individual one-on-one calls with Icebreaker’s team and a few assignments such as working on your OKRs.
When it comes down to it, there are also many upsides to running PFP-like events online. First of all, online events are much more flexible, and we can accommodate more participants. Our applicant list for this year’s PFP is much more substantial than when the program was run physically, and we wouldn’t have been able to accommodate the number of people we can this year by going the in-person route. We can also host participants from all our focus regions, from Finland to Sweden to Estonia. Location isn’t a dealbreaker, and we can’t wait to see how diverse our upcoming group of pre-founders will be! If you want to be a part of that group, send in your application now!
