Diving in at the deep end: Slush 2022
Slush — “the world’s leading start-up event”, talked about by anyone and everyone in the month of November… and totally unknown to me until about three weeks ago. I recently joined Pi Labs’ investment team, and having previously worked in real estate research, almost everything was new to me. Two weeks into my time in venture capital, Stefania and Hugo plunged me into the deep end, taking me to this year’s event.
For the newly initiated, Slush feels like a bonanza of investors, start-ups, meetings, speakers, pitches, side events, afterparties, after-after parties, and so on. In short, if FOMO were an event, it would be Slush. My first lesson (thanks to Stefania): you need to decide on your own objective for the event. Otherwise, it’s easy to get swept up in the sheer number of events going on at the same time. My second lesson? Finding the way of speaking to founders that works best for you. I’ve seen our principal, Hugo, manage the extraordinary task of bouncing from one conversation to the next in the dynamic environment of an event space. For me, I found that my style was best suited to the one-on-one conversations made possible by the event’s schedule and setup.
At this point, it would also be amiss not to note the controversy around this year’s Slush Pitching Competition, which awarded €1m to a Russian talent immigration-linked start-up. However, this decision has since been revoked.
Who needs Berghain?
The main event — a two-day conference held at Helsinki’s Messukeskus convention centre — started with an energetic opening show, complete with lasers, a DJ, and fog machine. The energy carried on throughout the event, with the entire venue soaked in darkness, broken only by the occasional laser show announcing the next speaker.
Ready to drink the slush and be inspired by the host of high-profile speakers, I headed to the main stage, hoping to be presented with a vision of a better world. After all, if the tie index — the notion that more ties are worn during a recession — is anything to go by, the abundance of hoodies and jeans suggested times are better than ever, right…?
The bad news is….
First up: Doug Leone, partner of Sequoia, telling the crowd that the current situation is “more difficult and challenging than either 2008, which was really a protective financial services crisis, or 2000, which was a protected technology crisis.” “Here”, he told the audience, “We have a global crisis”. Against the backdrop of the recent FTX news, he candidly shared that “for the next three to six months, we’re going to dream a little less”.
Concerns around the economic environment — how to raise, scale, or even just survive — in a downturn, certainly marked many of the conversations at Slush. With founders in particular, the question of when things will get better came up time and time again. Whilst Leone doesn’t see a recovery in the next 12 months, the sentiment across Slush was largely one of uncertainty. Indeed, global VC investment (and within this, PropTech VC investment) has slumped in 2022, as Dhruv Gupta, Senior Investment Associate at Pi Labs points out.
Nevertheless, there was also a sense of measured optimism. Niklas Zennström, founder of Skype, gave an honest account of his own failures during past downturns, signalling that whilst down rounds or similar action carry stigma, they may be useful tools to persevere.
And if after all this you were still unsure about the future, you needn’t worry — Google handily provided tarot card readings.
One last thing
Whilst there is still more to be done, it was encouraging to see an increasingly diverse range of speakers, featuring inspiring women from Sanna Marin to Huey Lin. Despite (or perhaps because of) its club-like atmosphere, Slush provided a bustling place to see new and old faces, creating space for both the light-hearted, and the more serious conversations. We’ll be back!
Interested in joining our team? Keep an eye on our social pages for updates on new and open roles 💼
