I tend to agree with Allan here, that critical mass of startup projects, mentors and money is very much required.

Ragnar Sass from Pipedrive have said based on his Angelpad (US accelerator) experience > it's impossible to create a good accelerator in Baltics, because we do not have enough entrepreneurs with decent track record of exits or success to mentor young entrepreneurs. Bad advice is sometimes even worse than no advice.

But there are also opposite opinions:
- EAS/Tõnis Mäe > it's better to do something that not doing at all
- Toivo Annus/ASI > we should have 2-3 accelerators in Estonia, so that they would have competition and stronger/strongest will win

I think it's very good to have this discussion and hear variety of opinions from all sides.

I think Allan has a very good point here and even if there has been efforts on Pan-Baltic co-operation, they remain more as efforts. Our model has been to try to involve as many as possible people and initiatives in our Warmups (regardless of nationality) and, for example, for the latest Investor Breakfast we invited over 50% non-Sauna companies.

Before we talk about Pan-Baltic co-operation and as we have been working with many different partners, the local ecosystems should really share their goals and efforts and get that local co-operation working. Otherwise it takes _a lot_ of effort in first founding out the local players, who likes who and who talks with, who plays with whom and then trying to have them all co-operate. The lovely thing is that so far, at least we how feel, that we've been able to achieve something on this part.

Now the other thing is of course the famous of questions of us bringing startups to Helsinki and being too Finland-focused. That's not our point and we do that because we have the premises here and have managed to gather extensive local support and, at the same, have done measures to involve the partners in the whole region. All in all, the teams spend here 6 weeks and then they're off!

In terms of Slushes and those, I personally feel that as long as we can give the reason for talent and investors to visit our region at least twice a year to see the whole dealflow in one place at a time, we've reached the goal. A question is that how personal such connections with investors and other parties are? To get the investors here, I had to personally spend hours and hours on Skype to explain what the hell is Startup Sauna and assure them that they'll see some decent dealflow. I'm happy to introduce these contacts forward, but as you might understand, I need to be sure that the startup is legit.

In terms of stuff like Steve Blank week, Kristo worked on the initiative for half a year and that one became a personal connection too. He did bring him to Estonia and after that to Russia, so some means of co-operation exists.

There are two options that I see for the future: 1) may the one win who does the best work. 2) we start working together and come up with something truly Pan-Baltic :-)

Oh, and TC Baltics is a great example of gathering the people from the region together. Can't wait to see you all there!

None of the Northern European countries, except Russia, seems to be large enough by itself to bring together a critical mass of good early-stage teams and experienced coaches (with actual exits/IPOs under their belts). Also, it's difficult to run a for-profit seed program in the area, as gathering those coaches requires a lot of goodwill.

Startup Sauna visited some 15 cities in Northern Europe last fall, with a warm-up event organized in each city together with a local partner. Out of the 300-some teams that applied, 18 made it to the program - over half of which from outside of Finland. Sauna's completely non-profit and has no national ambitions towards what the teams do after the program.

What I mean to say is that we've tried to create such an accelerator that Allan is talking about here, but it's very difficult to get a real collaboration working between several countries - we've even heard the argument that Sauna's trying to 'steal' teams from other players.

We really tried last fall to get a cross-country collaboration going, but as it got ridiculously difficult to balance between the national aspirations and doubts that emerged, it was decided to just focus on making the program the as good as possible and let the startups decide for themselves.

Any ideas how to get a collaboration going would be more than welcome, as we're not seeing this regions potential reach its full extent currently.

I see the point, but wouldnt things naturally go to the direction that many starts, one or two strong ones stays and creates this picture? I think diversity and initiatives should be encouraged, so that different perspectives are put into action and lessons learned to contribute to a better conclusion.

Isn't it similar for any growing market. First, growing need & high competition, then emergence of few top players and finally consolidation.

Still, it would be very sad if governments pored too much money into national initiatives, but later would be very slow to adapt to the market.

Also, it is a question of whenever market here is big enough, but also if we have enough talented people? Governments have to ensure that emerging hi-tech companies have access to the engineering, scientific and design talent that makes the companies competitive. It would be great if we saw more initiatives on this side of the problem, as well.

I agree with Martin except on one critical point. It is really the combined skill sets and capabilities of mentors that matter, and you can easily build (happens often) a group of mentors that look great on newspaper, are all highly successful (as measured by Allan's criteria) and yet lack the most basic skill sets and capabilities (internet distribution, data, design, ecosystem understanding and access etc.) with relevance for e.g. modern internet businesses whether targeted for consumers or businesses.

Building a group of mentors from people that are prominent but lack the basic understanding how things work, is not only totally useless but can be extremely dangerous for first-time startuppers.

well, *some* competition is good :) and over time it should all shake out, and it seems that currently the rivalry is "friendly".

StartupSauna is _currently_ emphasizing the fact that they *coach* rather than *mentor*, but how useful that is to a specific startup depends on that startup I guess.

Also, I don't think this is restricted to our region, I see a similar pattern i the USA (city specific programmes starting).
The other thing is that with more programmes running folks should be able to "fail cheap" (as they discover earlier in the startup's life the problems).

The reason I'd rate Startup Sauna above the rest of the accelerators in the Nordics / Baltics is that a company can be founded in Finland and stay in Finland through exit. How many start-ups that were founded in a Baltic state kept the locus of their operations in that country through exit? Almost none. A great example of this is ZeroTurnaround: as soon as they took money from Bain Capital, everything except dev moved to Boston. Also, Finland has big tech companies that have already established a pool of experienced, international labor -- it's much easier for a company to scale its work force during growth mode in Finland than it is anywhere in the Baltics.

Could Startup Monthly Vilnius http://vilnius.startupmonthly.org/index.html be one of the acceptable solutions?

in addition to Edmundas comment, here is the video presentation on Vilnius Startup Monthly - they partly answer some conserns - by targeting Baltics and Scandinavia for teams and bringing Americans with plentiful exit experience to Vilnius:
http://youtu.be/P5jBUpTGut0
what do you think of it?

I agree with Allan that the word "accelerator" became buzzword and is overused, but at least in Lithuania I see a big positive effect from that.

With millions of money Government puts into entrepreneurship and innovation programs, those private accelerators even at the small scale show much better results and has a positive effect on the community. They create the pipeline for growing critical mass of different "wanna be entrepreneurs" and gives basic skills and motivation to apply further. I would call it pre-accelaration process, which in my opinion is necessary in all bigest cities, where we have technological universities, or stronger techno-communities.

The market will penalize the "accelerators" without any result.