RunToShop Closes Financing Round
Taneli Tikka, the CEO of RunToShop, has just announced on his blog that they have closed a financing round with RunToShop. The investment round was lead by VeraVenture, the Finnish gov't investment fund. Taneli writes that this is their largest round yet and together with VeraVenture, there were 8 business angels additionally in the investment round.
There is no disclosure on the sum invested, but since RunToShop is able to go through all of next year easily and be backed for the internationalisation of the company - it can be can be considered to be a relatively high one. Together with the announcement, Taneli tells that RunToShop is now hiring concept designers and developers to help them take the idea further.
Despite the economic downturn, this is a very welcome investment round to spark up the entrepreneurial scene here in the Nordics. Perfect proof of the fact that, just as Joi and Saul told earlier, even in difficult times venture capitalists and investors do business.
Joi Ito Is Still Investing, Despite Downturn
I had a chat in LeWeb with Joi Ito of Neoteny. He is also the CEO of Creative Commons and on board of numerous companies and non profits. Joi, like other investors in LeWeb, are still investing despite the downturn but like he said - it's easier to make out the better companies from the noise in times of economic crisis. He also has some tips for Nordic and Baltic companies, so do have a look.
More foreigners to Finnish workforce - it's up to you
Ville Vesterinen wrote about the need to re-evaluate Finland's immigration policy to create some real carrots to get foreign workers to come to Finland. He referred to Joi Ito's post about IT eventually equalizing GDP per capita in the future. The workforce issue has been touched lately in the gaming industry news as well, as Neogames published their report on the Finnish game industry's educational needs.
I think SMEs can do a lot themselves as well to get foreigners excited about working here. First of all, there is a whole bunch of good foreign students out there, many of whom are eager to work and show their skills if only given the chance. Of course hiring students is also pretty cost efficient. Second, if you happen to build a reputation good enough to lure some professional from abroad to Finland, the chances are she will draw in also other fellow countrywomen over time. I've seen that happen, in a somewhat large scale even. That's really valuable when the available professionals in Finland are as limited as today. Often they also bring their spouses along who may be skilled in some other area, so other organizations may benefit as well.
In my opinion it's also very good to strive to get foreigners along in the startups early on. It's quite tricky a task to try to build a truly global product or service if you only have people from a single continent, let alone from one country. In some cases you can surely offset this by having beta users, but sometimes you just want the insight in-house, along with the respective networks you can tap into. Also, the sooner you (really need to) start using English as the true company language, the easier it gets to get other nationalities along, and the lighter it makes the document translation burden later on.
Official policies are little use if the companies themselves don't take on the opportunity. So, do yourselves and Finland a favor and hire foreigners! That's my 2 cents.
