Building The Next Chapter For The Maria Hospital
Early Days — The beginning of a startup house
In early Spring 2016, the world looked bleak looking out through an old smudged hospital window in central Helsinki. Construction trucks and helmet wearing workers hustled around the yard. We had just started a project taking over the 130-year old Maria hospital with the aim of populating it with tech startups and other tech community people.
Things didn’t look good for the newly founded not-for-profit operator company. The renovation budget was tight at around 20€/sqm, while the only proper business profit & loss excel sheet, built by a venture capitalist being supportive of the baby project, showed the operator company that it would be out of money within the first 6 months.
The goal was to build a home base for the startup community in which to gather. A mass of tech startups, venture capital funds and other startup community players had been ushered for past 3 months to release their offices and move to the old hospital.
We were still optimistic. The expectation from the building owner City of Helsinki was for Maria 01 startup hub to take over 3300 sqm of the old main building and pay rent. We wanted it all.
The mission was simple:
Step 1: Attract a critical mass of startups and local venture capital companies to bring the place to live.
Step 2: Make the environment enjoyable and supportive.
Step 3: Establish activities for tech talent, investors and corporations to network when looking for the next new in tech.
Recent estimation says around 100 promising startups are founded in Finland yearly with the total population being 2300–5000 companies depending how you define the category.
The existing old Maria hospital held roughly 20 000 sqm of space, meaning 200–300 early-stage startups could fit perfectly. Some of it was pending full renovation. It still sounds doable, we said to ourselves:
“A weird and funky tech club for people who build software businesses was born. A kind of hands-off incubator where founding teams want to start their companies at. A sort of poor-man’s Sand Hill Road.”
Maria hospital was re-birthed in a short time. Yet we have never been more busy.
Looking at the past 2,5 years, both the failures and successes, we can proudly say something went right. We have seen funding come together for the Maria companies. We have been there for company shutdowns. The first alumni have moved on from Maria to larger fields to roam. The old main building still has a lot to work on, while the recently opened Building 5, allocates the Games Factory, and Maki.vc is finding its foot on the campus.
There’s a lot of room to improve on all aspects, so we are staying hungry, both questioning our incubator model and practice. After our first year and a half of operations, it still feels a bit fuzzy. We were learning everything from scratch. Renovation was a constant burden and companies kept moving in all the time. The first website launch for Maria 01 was built by stealing and smashing together tag-lines from our dear old Nordic colleagues Founders House and Sup46. We still owe them for showing us the way.
2019 means for us an expansion year. All the existing old Maria hospital buildings will be put into use. We’re also getting better at interior design and hacking together old property infrastructure. Slowly.
The Next chapter: From a house to a campus
Today feels like the beginning of the next chapter for the historical project.
While working on operations, the City of Helsinki worked on the wider city area development and background work was moving forward building by building to the land area below the old Maria hospital buildings.
In the fall of 2017, the City of Helsinki opened a search for a consortium — that would be able to build new on the southern part of the campus. The search was concluded for now, with YIT — a major property developer & Keva — a Finnish public pension fund, proposed by the City to explore constructing an expansion part to the existing home base for startups.
The announced development project, if successfully put to action, will mean that Maria hospital will remain a construction yard for the next 4 years. It’s a big undertaking.
Yes, it will take a while, until the whole campus is ready.
Yes, we’ve never been more excited about the progress. We’re starting to work together with the project to make the campus whole. It will also mean we’re able to fulfill our original dream. The mission just got a bit larger.
Out of the thousands of startups in Finland, only a few hundreds have built their company to 30+ employees and achieved later stage growth, yet international capital continues to come in. We want the future campus to be a home for tech companies both in their early-stage and later-stage to form a network of talent fueled by proximity and common culture.
The Maria tribe can build bridges globally, change careers for professionals and build the new generation of technology.
Capital, customers, development teams all follow, if the core is solid. The whole campus allows room for approximately 5000 talented people. There is a very long trip ahead to make all this happen.
Maria exists to provide the best environment for young tech companies
With this new development, I believe it’s time to affirm the old focus we started with. Maria hospital, both old and new, is built by the community for the startups.
The view of the world behind this, is simple:
- All growth companies are built by entrepreneurial founders: Everything starts from there. There is no other path to innovation, new products and services. New companies entering to the market start with the right incentives to make something happen and distribute it wherever they think their customers are.
- Founders are dependent on their early team: A good growth environment requires only talent. Everything else is secondary for a working startup campus. The future Maria hospital should be an area that attracts the right talent and where that talent can do their best work.
- Building a tech growth company requires a dynamic set of skills and mindset: It is a career choice. There is no direct pipeline for picking the talent straight out of universities and large incumbent organizations. Thus, in a forming startup ecosystem, the right talent is valuable. Maria campus needs to be an institution, where talent can build networks, spread knowledge and move fast.
- Entrepreneurship is contagious: Successful startups are built by generations of companies that preceded them, especially in areas where technology is not yet mature and timing is not there. The future Maria should stay accessible for people to get that spark and founders to be initiated.