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If you weren’t one of the 13k attendees at the 16th edition of Slush, the startup event which draws the best-known founders and investors to Helsinki each winter, you missed the usual god-awful weather outside, dark-as-a-club lighting inside and endless side events around the main agenda.
Hot topics onstage? AI (obviously), Donald Trump and EU Inc. Hot topics backstage: which European LLMs will die first or be bought by a US tech giant? Why is all the food at the venue (as one journalist put it, ‘almost inedibly’) vegan? And who’s going to General Catalyst’s winter ball at a castle?
Most investors I asked had spent a good chunk of their Slush in meetings with founders — although I heard plenty of groans about last-minute requests for catch-ups, and requests from founders who didn’t match a fund’s thesis (readers, do your research!). The matchmaking app did have its moment though; there was a fund leaderboard showing which investors had responded to the most messages on the app. Winner: Hoxton Ventures, with 432 ‘meeting actions taken’ and a 91% response rate.
Some investors passed on the price of a ticket and instead holed up in a hotel in central Helsinki and took meetings there. Others bought a whole lot more — booths in the investor lounge cost around €5,000, we’re told — while some VCs went even further: Accel had its own tent.
Founders said they braved the cold for networking more than the panel conversations; one suggested the entire event could have been focused on meetups.
“I’ve had about 10 useful conversations each day,” said one founder — who, admittedly, had started lining up his meetings weeks in advance. It’s a great place for building relationships, said several others — but not the right place to come to if you’re desperate to close a deal. “I saw a lot of founders running around like headless chickens,” said one entrepreneur. Other founders also bypassed Slush and chose to hang out in Helsinki to network.
Other tips offered up for future founders heading to the event: go with a group of other founders, whether as part of one of the many government delegations (India and South Korea had stands, while the Endeavor group from Greece chartered a plane), or just organise a WhatsApp group with a bunch of people you know. It’s a good way to get yourself invited to all the side events.
I also met a handful of scaleup founders who were over from the US to scope out expansion opportunities. One was getting cold feet after hearing about Europe’s worker rights — “You can’t just fire people!”. The American contingent made up 8% of the VCs at the event, 11% of the LPs and 5% of the startups and operators.
Notable absences: Harry Stebbings didn’t make his fireside chat; OpenAI didn’t show up for a breakfast on regulation with Finnish President Alexander Stubb and several European MEPs; and LPs were, GPs complained, few and far between. (There were 270 listed on the app, out of 3,300 investors.)
Notable presences: Johannes Schildt of healthtech Kry turned up in Helsinki on Wednesday night just for a dinner and networking; Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky was flanked by fanboys at VC firm Visionaries’s after party; and a certain high-profile exited CEO-turned-venture partner got rather grumpy when asked to queue with everyone else on the guestlist to enter that same party.
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Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/slush-2024-finland-startup-review/
