The Startup Hunter Diary — A Month Long Trip Around Europe — Episode 23

Stockholm Music City

“Somewhere in Stockholm”

We were very happy with our first day in Stockholm, and the more we were seeing of the city, the more we were loving it.

After all it’s never easy to go somewhere for the first time and start meeting people immediately. But this was about to change…

When I was in Lisboa, the first person we met was Peter Fabor from The Surf Office. During our conversation he told us about the Startup Guide and its author Sissel Hansen. We didn’t manage to connect with Sissel yet, other than on Facebook, but when I told her about the next trip in Stockholm she introduced me to Oskar Wilkund. Oskar worked with her on the edition of the Startup Guide Stockholm, he is responsible for the Startup Grind chapter in Stockholm, and founded Coneqtify, among other things…

We joined Oskar for lunch in the co-working space he chose as his home base: Impact hub. We even got to meet and have a quick chat with the founder, whom told us about the social investment programs he built for the Impact Hub.

I say this very often, but we had a great time meeting with Oskar. I guess that means we truly met great people throughout our Start-up Hunt. But for real though, we couldn’t have wished for anyone better to give us a complete overview of the start-up landscape in the Scandinavian capital, after all he wrote the Startup Guide Stockholm…

Not only that, he also told us about the fundamentals to build a community: values, vision, and rituals.

And to make it even better he introduced us to all the people we wanted to meet! I told you, it couldn’t have been any better than that. Oskar, if you read me, thanks again!

As nice as he is, he nonetheless is a busy guy. So we let him get back to his work and we headed to the Stockholm University campus. We wanted to try to meet with SU inkubator, you would have wonder by now, that this is their incubation program and support of entrepreneurship for this university.

And, unfortunately, as it happened the day before, nobody was there. Well, we still got to see this nice campus, and their place is also quite nice, located in a stand-alone traditional Swedish house in the middle of the campus.

In Sweden, the education system is really important for the start-up ecosystem. They have amazing universities, great talent coming from all over the world, and they build solid programs to support young entrepreneurs, like SSE business lab, KTH innovation, SU inkubator, and more.

At lunch, Oskar told us about the Stockholm Music city meetup happening this evening at SUP46, and with Spotify as a special guest. So we decided to go give it a try.

I personally knew that Sweden was famous for its DJs, but they are also one of the leaders for the tech and music start-ups.

Actually music tech is the second biggest sector in Stockholm, just behind FinTech.

We got to meet with 2 cool music tech start-ups, one you may actually know because they got a lot of press lately for a nice Series A, SoundTrap and Pacemaker.

It was a great event, and we had a productive talk with the organizers, so hopefully we will see a lot of cool music tech start-ups in our pitch competition. But one thing would have been enough to make our night… We got to meet with the President of Slush, a really cool guy by the way! For those of you who don’t know Slush, Slush on you… It’s basically becoming the European SXSW. We want to go so badly. It is in Helsinki and it’s at the end of November: save the date!

Last but not least, Andrea Marino from Nova joined us at SUP46. We got connected to Andrea through Sophie. While in Italy for the Start-up Hunt, she met with his girlfriend who connected us to Andrea. I told you we were all about creating a big community… Nova is global community of millennial talents. Andrea was accompanied by Per Clingweld, who’s responsible of the strategy of Nova. Not only we are found of this kind of initiative, but Andrea is also a super connector. He helped us making the rest of this trip even better.

That’s it for today, we went for dinner with Andrea in the center of Stockholm to keep chatting about things and stuff and keep discovering the Nordic city.

Hop on the train of the most exciting start-up trip ever made, and travel with us! It shall be fun.

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