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
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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.

ArcticStartup and Digibusiness Helsinki Region are organizing a trip for Finnish startups to LeWeb which takes place in Paris on 9th and 10th December.

LeWeb is the brainchild of Loic le Meur and his wife Geraldine le Meur. Loic is also steering the much talked about startup Seesmic. LeWeb is currently hands down the biggest and most talked about startup event in Europe that features many of the world famous anti-heroes and heroes such as Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Dan Farber of CNET News, Steve Gillmor of The Gillmor Gang, Om Malik of GigaOm and Robert Scoble of Fast Company along with hundreds of startups.

A group of Finnish startups will invade LeWeb with a massive Sauna Truck. Yes! You heard right, a Sauna Truck! The hottest Finnish social media startups, metaphorically and literally after a few hours in the sauna truck, will combine their efforts at Le Web’08 in Paris in December. The trip is a continuum to a successful joint business trip to the Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco last April.

The Finnish startup mafia will arrive in Paris on Monday December 8th and the Sauna will be open for press, bloggers and industry leaders already in the same evening. If you’re a Finnish startup and want to tag along contact tommi.rissanen [at] culminatum [dot] fi. There’s still room for a few so hurry up!

Hope to see you all in the sauna.

Photo by wili_hybrid (CC:BY).

Currently, the most talked about startup event in the world is the TechCrunch50 being organised in San Francisco by Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch. Mike Butcher wrote an article in the UK version of TechCrunch about the non-existence of European companies, compared to Israeli startups (there were 5 Israeli startups present).

Now if we look at this from a Nordic and Baltic perspective - the only Nordic company we could find in the participation list was Burt (Sweden). While the investments required for such a trip is high, I was wondering if it really is worth the money for the European companies or do they already receive enough visibility here in Europe?

I know the Israeli companies in general are pushing more aggressively to the US market, while European startups can somehow still manage locally here in Europe with its 300 million domestic market. So there are differences in strategies, but I’m throwing the ball to the entrepreneurs - what do you guys think, is it worth the money? or do we need something like this in Europe? Or is there an explanation I’ve missed for Europe’s absence (could it be that many applied, but did not get through)?

Xiha Life, a Finnish based multilingual social network, got mentioned yesterday by both: TechCrunch and Mashable (here and here respectively). Regardless of the quality of traffic that a company’s web page receives when it gets TechCrunched or mentioned by any other major news service this gave Xiha Life a welcome publicity boost in the US market

The main reason of this sudden interest towards Xiha is its public launch in US, which took place yesterday.The second and we believe equally compelling reason is their new Music section, which will challenge other social networks going after the less known artists who are determined to climb to the mainstream from the long tail, thus competing with the likes of MySpace.

Xiha has more than a decent user base for an organically grown social network from the Nordics: 500,000 monthly users worldwide. We wish the best of luck to Jani and rest of the Xiha Life team in conquering the rest of the world’s multilingual population.

TripSay, a Finnish social travel service that gives its users destination recommendations based on other users’ travels whose profile matches theirs, launches for the public tonight at 12am (Standard GMT+2; Summer GMT+3). Already earlier on they got TechCrunched among other news.

The service has clear and intuitive design and all the features that you’d expect from a such service, thus everything seems to be in place as long as the idea in itself will work. The make-or-brake question is whether TripSay can attract travelers beyond the web savvy kind that sign up to anything and everything new just to try it out and the travel industry professionals looking to fill their own guides.

In the larger sceme of things the success of TripSay like travel services depend on individuals’ desire to share their travel insights. Not purely locations where travelled, but real insights. In other words, whether such social travel services will take-off comes down to travelers’ ability to see more value in the service than they do in the Lonely Planet brigade after the initial Wow. It’s a debate worth having: Whether people in general want to share the real gems home and away, and whether the frequent travelers want to channel the entire Ryanair or EasyJet fleet to that little cozy street cafe that has the best cinnamon rolls in the planet where they like to visit every time they fly via Budabest. In the short term perhaps for while, but long term is tricky.

The service might be good at recommending you destinations (which is nice in itself), but I personally want to know what to do and where to go when I get there. The point is this:  Photos (think Flickr) might increase in value when shared with a close circle of friends the more they comment on them, but a small cafe or a restaurant let alone a secret powdery slope in Chamonix or Whistler hardly will in the same manner; you need the critical mass to benefit from the TripSay’s service since not all your friends have travelled where you’re going and when opened up to the larger public the venues only move from authentic and cozy to touristy and over crowded. Can TripSay draw a balance between not too much and just enough?

If TripSay can pull the trick and get people to come back to share their insights, I will never use Lonely Planet with it’s dedicated editors again. As an enthusiastic traveler myself I am eager to the see the kinds of locations it recommends to me and how the service manages to attract people to do exactly that.