The Story Behind Slush
This was originally published earlier this year and has been reworked and updated to mark the start of Slush 2014 today.
What started in 2008 as a local meet-up with around 200 Finnish entrepreneurs, has quickly established itself as the leading technology conference in Northern Europe and Russia, as well as becoming a focal point for the EurAsian technology scene to come together.
Last year, Slush was attended by over 7,000 people, 1,200 start-ups, 120 International VC firms and 350 journalists, with the World’s most influential media and investor firms present.
Despite the staggering growth the team behind the event are not too interested in these metrics and are instead focused on the value that the conference creates.
We spoke with Miki Kuusi, the CEO of Slush and he was keen to stress that the real value is not in the attendee numbers but in the value created for the attendees.
“Slush is a non profit event which originally started as a cozy local meet-up, as the bubble had just happened and we felt it was important to bring people together once a year.
We wanted to create an ecosystem, an atmosphere where people could help and learn from each other, and more than the numbers growing, this is what we are really the most proud of.
Our vision is to help small things become big things, not just domestically but internationally, and at the core of the event is the goal of helping startups meet the right investors and media that can help them go on to bigger things.
We do a lot of work in terms of optimising and analysing the data from the startups to do our best with matching them up with the relevant people and we work tirelessly behind the scenes to be able to do that successfully.
We believe that we are contributing to a culture change here in Finland the rest of The Nordics.
Five years ago, when you asked Finnish University students whether they would join a startup, only a few hands would go up. Today over half of them put their hands up, and they would rather work for a Rovio or Supercell than a McKinsey for example.
We don’t want to copy Silicon Valley, we should be proud of our own ecosystem here, the whole reason it is called Slush, is because it is dark, it is cold, but let’s celebrate that and show the world what we have going on here.”
“Success comes after you build something valuable, the numbers are not important”
Despite Miki’s insistence, it would be churlish of us not to recognise the incredible growth of the event in terms of the numbers.
From 2008–2010, the event grew slowly but surely, from a modest 200 people start to 500 in it’s third year. The event was presented as a local event, and as such was largely a gathering of Finnish entrepreneurs between this time period with only 20–40 startups represented. In terms of investors, there were a handful of angels, but practically no media.
In 2011, the event was refocused as an international investor event. This change in angle appeared to have an impact in terms of size and popularity, with 1500 people present and 150 startups represented. This also meant a rise in investors attending, with 15 International VC firms showing up in this year. Media coverage remained sparse, with predominantly Finnish Media present although there were a few attendees from International media present.
In 2012, although the event was still run by members of the community, the organisation of the event became more professional, as the growing size and popularity meant more energy, time and focus was required to make the event a success.
This certainly paid dividends, with attendees more than doubling from the previous year to 3,500 and Startups practically quadrupling to 560! This was the first year where the International presence really took off, with 41 International VC firms and over 50 International Media represented.
Then in 2013, as aforementioned, there were 7,000 attendees, 1200 Startups, 100 International VC firms and more than 350 International Media in attendance.
If the growth of the event follows the same trajectory then we can only begin to imagine the scale of 2014's, (Hearing 10,000+, have even heard 14,000 attendees mentioned!) but more importantly if the value continues to develop at the same rate then we can’t wait to see the impact of this year’s.
Have fun to all those who have gone, and for all those that haven’t, you can watch via a live stream here.
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