The Travelling Salesman "Burning Platform" Tour Ends Outside Nokia HQ
Yesterday Kristoffer Lawson of Holvi and Mike Bradshaw of Startup Sauna ended their "Burning Platform" tour of the Finnish cities that either have or once had Nokia offices. Nestled in a parking space between the highway and the Nokia Offices was the Travelling Salesman's Land Rover and portable sauna, proudly named the burning platform.
The goal of the trip was to preach the gospel of entrepreneurship and meet ex-Nokians who have dreams of building their own companies. My goal of being there was to hopefully see the cops show up (or at least the fire department), or maybe to see Nokia CEO Stephen Elop shake an angry fist out the window. Either would be a compelling story. The Kick Network guys are clearly more proactive journalists than I am, as they suggested calling the cops themselves.
Stories From The Travelling Salesman Tour (Video)
We've covered Kristoffer Lawson's Travelling Salesman tour here on ArcticStartup towards the end of last year, as he drove more than 13500 kilometres around the Nordics to find startups and network with them. He started off in Helsinki in October, drove through to Norway, visited Denmark, took the boat to Iceland and on his way back came through Sweden back to Finland again in December. I sat down with him and shot a video about some of the stories and incidents he came across. Also, it's worth while to note that the Nordics still are a very fragmented area in terms of growth companies.
They Were Wrong About Karlskrona
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Kristoffer Lawson, the Travelling Salesman. He's on a 10 000 kilometre drive to meet Nordic startups. ArcticStartup is supporting the project, by covering his travels and findings. This post was originally posted in the Travelling Salesman blog.
When pondering my travel plan I was told by a number of people, even Swedes, that there would be very little in places like Karlskrona. That I should stick to the big centers: Stockholm, Lund, Göteborg, etc. They were wrong, but proving that was to be a challenge.
Iceland Is No Mere Rock
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Kristoffer Lawson, the Travelling Salesman. He's on a 10 000 kilometre drive to meet Nordic startups. ArcticStartup is supporting the project, by covering his travels and findings.
There are very few countries I would consider living in permanently. Places that I feel I could end up calling a home. Iceland is now one of them. The arrival by Smyril Line ferry was immediately majestic with those eery misty cliffs rising gently above the sea as I approached bohemian Seyðisfjörður along that 20km fjord to eastern Iceland. It set the mood perfectly. This was to be followed by travel through boiling earth and volcanos to the heart of the Icelandic startup scene, Reykjavik, where my fiancée also had flown for an all-too-short visit to experience this mystical location.
From The Travelling Salesman
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Kristoffer Lawson, the Travelling Salesman. He's on a 10 000 kilometre drive to meet Nordic startups. ArcticStartup is supporting the project, by covering his travels and findings.
Well, the previous week started off even more interesting than the last for the Travelling Salesman tour.
After my capers with the Russian embassy I had quite a pleasant day in Oslo, meeting several people with a Trolltech background. Trolltech was the developer behind the now famous Qt GUI library and toolkit, which Nokia bought and which is currently being made into the next thing for Nokia phone development (whether it is on Symbian or Meego). As someone who has spent a while inside Nokia, it was interesting to see the level of independency that the Qt office in Oslo has. For instance, several of the people there were running Macs. I actually think this is extremely important to keep the identity of the teams intact, and motivated to continue with innovation.
Lessons From Norway
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Kristoffer Lawson, the Travelling Salesman. He's on a 10 000 kilometre drive to meet Nordic startups. ArcticStartup is supporting the project, by covering his travels and findings.
With another week on the road, I have to say that the exhaustion is slightly getting the better of me. While it has been a joy to visit this beautiful country, so many things have also gone wrong, from missed meetups to losing a fuel cap, that the stress is beginning to show. Oslo thankfully gave me a chance to recuperate a bit, for a couple of nights, but it also added stress of its own, as I will mention a bit later.
Tales Of A Travelling Salesman
Editorial note: This is a guest post by Kristoffer Lawson, the Travelling Salesman. He's on a 10 000 kilometre drive to meet Nordic startups. ArcticStartup is supporting the project, by covering his travels and findings.
I've now been one week on the road in my expedition to find the world's most arctic startups. I'll be honest: it feels like much longer. I am now on my way to Trondheim from Tromsø and have added over 2500 kilometres to the trip meter of the trusty Land Rover. It has given me a unique perspective into the lives of the real travelling salesmen. Each night I have slept in a different location. Each day I've driven for hours on end, with my life travelling with me. Weather conditions have varied from sunny and green, to icy, dark and snowy. I've crossed the Arctic Circle twice and even entered Sweden by mistake.
10 000km in T-Minus-Two Days
The Travelling salesman -project will start in only two days. We wrote about this ridiculously cool and ambitious project a while back in September. The kickstart of the journey will be held in the evening of the second day of Slush (21st of October from 4pm onwards), a web/startup oriented conference taking place in Helsinki. You can sign-up to the event in Facebook (disclosure: I will be on the panel).
Travelling Salesman Project - One Hell Of A Journey
Kristoffer Lawson, co-founder of Scred, came to talk to ArcticStartup sometime in the spring time about a project he had been thinking of pulling through. After the meeting I couldn't quite grasp the breadth of the journey and project he had been talking to us about. Now that it's public and he's about to set on his journey - I'm thrilled to say that ArcticStartup has partnered with Travelling Salesman, aka. Kristoffer Lawson, to promote his trip in our media. The project has a website, but he'll also be blogging with us and giving us updates on how things go.
Are Web Conferences A Waste Of Time?
There has been lively discussions of whether the many web conferences are really the most effective use of time for a startup. Similarly many people see the value in these conferences very differently, for example people from the United States tend to spend most if not all their time networking in the lobbies and hallways, at least more so than the Europeans are used to. We, the Europeans, on the other hand, tend to pay equal attention to the speakers at the stage.
At ArcticStartup we believe that meeting friends and strangers, as many as possible, is the best way to spend your time in these conferences. But that's just us. Thus, we wanted to know what other startups think and decided to ask a group of Finnish startups, who travelled to the LeWeb with us, what they think. Here are some perspectives:
Live From TechCrunch Brunch
Reporting live from TechCrunch Brunch in Helsinki the morning following Slush. The theme for the morning's panel discussions are the implications of regionality and unique features in the Nordic startup scene.
The event was kicked off by Mike Butcher from TechCrunch UK and Ville Vesterinen from ArcticStartup, chatting a bit about Slush, its background and the Nordic startup environment in general.
The panelists (from left to right in the picture below):
Kai Lemmetty, Founder of Floobs
Janne Waltonen, Marketing director Fruugo
Mark Sorsa-Leslie, Managing director of Hammerkit
Jussi Laakkonen, CEO and president Everyplay.com
Leo Koivulehto, Co-founder and chairman, TripSay
Mike set the scene asking how the panelists see the startup scene in the Nordics, whether the environment is going to stay a tough place to do a startup due to relatively high living costs, difficulties with angel and VC funding etc. A few highlights below.
Mark stated he moved from the UK three years ago, and has been impressed with enthusiasm people have, the great engineering skills, and the passion to get things done in a practical manner. Janne continued the people in Nordic countries are quite modest, which is somewhat hindering international expansion
.
Janne mentioned the Nordic market's been traditionally about local startups thinking of local markets (Swedes being maybe somewhat different), which should end. As Janne put it, we really have all it takes if we have the will to take over.
Peter Vesterbacka commented the downturn is a perfect time to start a company as you have less competition and could be able to take over a lot of the potential customers in a swift. Furthermore, it's perfect to start in the Nordics, as "if you can make it in the slush you can make it anywhere". The current global economic environment it's actually not even that much different from the "normal" challenges up here.
Mike commented in London the startup world is focusing nowadays on revenues much earlier in the game. According to Janne startups should start marketing as soon as possible, and not really wait until their product is "ready". Traditionally the startups have relied perhaps too much on virality (beta invites etc.). Janne compared his experience between Fruugo and two Swedish startups he's been in, and noted Fruugo has really concentrated on not showing anything in public before they are sure their technical back-end is top notch, whereas the Swedish ones were really open since the beginning without even much knowledge about the technical side.
Stephen Lee from Muxlim added, as an American who's lived in Finland for 10 years, that the governmental systems supporting startups are built around the concept of startups having to prove themselves in Finland first, before getting further money to go abroad. According to Stephen this model doesn't really work anymore, and the organizations (and startups) should turn their focus on going global from the beginning.
Jussi answered arguing the Finnish game industry has gone global since the very beginning. Nowadays the industry is healthy and buzzing with 50+ companies with over 90% export ratio, so it's been proved already we can make it from here. Jussi continued the process for pitching a game concept to a games publisher is really similar to pitching a company to VCs, so there are people who have been pitching successfully and know their stuff.
The second panel focused around the topics of finding funding and how to cope in the downturn market.
The panelists (from left to right):
Helene Auramo, CEO and partner of Zipipop
Heikki Mäkijärvi, Venture parter of Accel Partners
Mohamed El-Fatatry, Founder and CEO of Muxlim
Joakim Achrén, founder of IronStar Helsinki
Kristoffer Lawson from Scred
The panel kicked off going through the current status of the startups - Scred and Zipipop are bootstrapping and looking for funding. Mohamed told Muxlim got very well seed money from Finnish angels, which are quite active and willing to help, but for big rounds the money is difficult to get and momentum can be lost. Muxlim run through 500 international VCs in 6 months, and finally landed with one from Sweden.
Regarding the economy, Heikki from Accel Partners encouraged startups to look critically their business in the current economic situation - if the customers are not buying, it may be worthwhile to stop and rethink the business plan, rather than waiting for a sale or better times. They've had very good experiences of startups finding a great business model by refocusing this way.
Heikki also commented they are being more careful about the investments currently. He argued in the early stage companies the team is the most important thing, so that the investors can trust the team knowing what they're doing. Heikki also went on explaining one notable difference with Finnish startups compared to Silicon Valley is in the executive team. The ideas are typically good, but the executive teams are much more juvenile than in the Valley, whereas the board is typically very experienced. So Heikki would rather see people like the board members doing the execution, mentioning he'd like to see people learning business in big global firms, and then establishing startups in their 40s. He explained while you can build a good startup regardless of your age, in the end it will take great skill in execution to take a startup from 5 Million to 10M, and futher to 50M in revenues.
Scred's Kristoffer Lawson On Seedcamp Experience
Even though Scred is surely familiar for most of our readers I had a chat with Kristoffer Lawson of Scred since I promised earlier on that I'd interview all the Nordic & Baltic startups that'll apply to Seedcamp.
I ask Kristoffer for a quick pitch and then talk more generally about the experience in Seedcamp just before the final pitches to the room full of investors on Thursday morning. Good luck guys!
Scred's Seedcamp Interview Trip
Editorial note: We're publishing Kristoffer's report from Seedcamp as they made it to the semi-finals for screening. Depending on the feedback we'll see if we should make this a habit in the future as well. Please let us know in the comments. Thanks to Kristoffer for an excellent report!
On the left two founders from Uniki, Teemu and Tuomas from Scred and Adil and Anthony from Entrip.
Last week we got fantastic news. Scred had been shortlisted as one of only about 40 companies to be interviewed by Seedcamp's distinguished panel — a group of prestigious international VCs. Considering that several hundred companies, from all around Europe (and even some from outside) had applied, this was huge for us. In fact Scred is the first Finnish company to make it that far, and was one of only two Nordic companies present.
Scred explores new business models
Scred, a Finnish community-oriented cost balancing tool, which initially focused on balancing debts and shared expenses among a group of friends announced that they are looking into new possibilities to leverage their back-end infrastructure.
Scred has partnered with Alternative Party which will be held in Helsinki in the coming October. Scred built an inexpensive bespoke ticketing service for the party with which you can reserve, buy and print the tickets straight from the web. Tickets are also machine verifiable which is more than many other service providers offer.
Kristoffer Lawson from Scred told us that the new service is currently not available for 3rd parties, but that they they will see how the first deployment will go and add some features before deciding whether it's the right path to take. According to Kristoffer tickets can be currently bought via PayPal and 'couple of banking services', but the credit card option is on its way.
The party in itself is the second largest 'demoscene-party' in Finland after Assembly. Alternative Party aims to mix demos, music and art. Unlike Assembly, Alternative Party's focus is more on artistic shows and activities and there is practically no gaming.
There is starting to be a lot of activity in the e-commerce infrastructure space coming from Finland. Scred seems to be gradually heading that direction and Fruugo is looking into becoming the “trusted 3rd party of ecommerce". Based on Fruugo's still mysterious website we will find out what they will actually offer in more detail later in 2008 when they're planning to launch. This is something that might also be of interest to Scred since after knowing what Fruugo is aiming for Scred can better adjust their product offering to the market.
Scred organises Night of Code
Kristoffer Lawson from Scred has told us that they are organising a Night of Code this Friday (25th) down at the Cable Factory. They are inviting all coders and designers to come down and share ideas what they are working on at the moment.
The event will start at 3pm and end around midnight. There will be no marketing pitches, no advertising or anything such - pure coding and sharing of ideas. If you're interested, sign up to the event in Facebook or Upcoming. More info on Scred's blog.
Scred.com opens to public
Scred, or Street Credit, is a consumer service created by a Finnish company Fishpool Creations where a group of friends can share costs for commonly purchased objects on a trip for example. Kristoffer Lawson, the CEO of Scred says that they have been using various
versions of Scred internally for years. The service is now open for public after a brief public beta which started in 2007.
After you register with the service, you are able to create your own pools - or groups for your you and your friends. You can use them for certain trips for example. Add all the receipts of that trip to the service and it will calculate how much each one owes each other after you've come home. The service even supports multiple currencies which helps groups of friends travelling in different countries. Quite a simple idea, but still capable to wreck relationships - just as Kristoffer states in their press release.
I find the idea very interesting and worthwhile. However, the UI still needs some tweaking for the masses. It still reminds me of the late 90s and open source software UIs that are still present to this day. Despite the shortcomings in the graphical side of the service, the idea is simple enough to catch on. They also have a JAVA-application for mobile phones where you can record your receipts on a day-to-day basis even when you're offline.
A great idea that surely has unrealised demand. Good luck to Kristoffer and the guys at Fishpool!
