How Do You Set Up Operations In The US And Why? Interview With Microtask CEO
Microtask has been putting in a lot of effort in the recent year or so to expand their operations beyond the Finnish borders. They've been restructuring their business this fall by moving all Finnish operations to Tampere and focusing on setting up their US business on the other side of the Atlantic. We thought it might be a good time to talk to the CEO, Ville "Wili" Miettinen, about why they decided to move overseas and how it has gone for them so far.
Looking Past "Finland Post Welfare"
Students in Finland have come a long way in a few years. Last night, Finland saw one of its most impressive events in support of growth entrepreneurship - all organised by a small group of passionate students. What makes this all the better, is that the event was covered by numerous national media and the panelists at the actual event included the hotshots of Finnish business environment; a mix of very influential business people and a group of startup entrepreneurs. The event was called "Finland Post Welfare", questioning the things Finland should work on to sustain its welfare status. It was put together by Aalto Entrepreneurship Society.
We live blogged the event last night in English as the event itself was held in Finnish. As it's not the best use of anyone's time to suggest that you go through the logs - we'll do our best to summarise the event in this post.
Making Growth Entrepreneurship Political
Finland will be having its parliamentary this April. Naturally, entrepreneurship and welfare are on the agenda, but one aspect of entrepreneurship that has been missing is the lobbying of growth entrepreneurship. On 21st of March, Aalto ES will be putting together an event together with a whole bunch of organisations to promote growth entrepreneurship for the candidates running for parliament. The event is controversially called Finland Post Welfare.
Summary Of 2010 On ArcticStartup
Despite creating more clutter with yet another trend post for this year, I think it's worth looking back at some of the most read stories and biggest trends we've covered this year on ArcticStartup. Some of the most read stories are around Rovio, Nokia and Valkee. The most read stories this year were 7 Ways Nokia Can Win Again as well as Oh, Noes! Not Another Ex-Insiders Thoughts On Nokia! (Part I). Both of the stories received a lot of traffic from Finnish national press and thus were clearly the most visited stories in terms of page view.
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.
The Next 100 Million Euro Business Might Come From Bootcamp
Aalto Venture Garage is putting together a busy two week program they call Bootcamp. Bootcamp is to be held four times a year and it's an intensive program aimed at speeding up already existing early stage ventures. The first Bootcamp is to be run between September 17th and 30th. They are now accepting applications, but be quick - the deadline is September 8th. A mentoring program wouldn't be anything without high profile mentors and well enough, Aalto Venture Garage has managed to secure a good lineup of Finnish startup professionals. Mind you, the program isn't only aimed at Finnish startups - it's open for everyone around the Baltic rim.
Microtask Closes A Super Seed Round From Sunstone Capital
Microtask, a Finnish startup, has just closed a round of seed financing lead by Danish Sunstone Capital followed by a group of Angel investors (see list below). The size of the round is undisclosed, but the company told us that they should be able to get to summer 2011 with it. The round is their second seed round and it's structured as more and more financing rounds nowadays are: It's a seed round that's lead by a VC who has also committed to lead the A round next spring. Why do a VC come in so early in with a group of Angels? Because they want to make sure the Super Angels with minifunds are not eating their lunch, that's why. Even though Microtask news is positive and there exists hardly any threatening Super Angels in the Nordics, there is a lot of debate and tension about the general phenomena elsewhere. These tensions seem to be especially true in the US, where there's more investors battling for the best deals.
Government Backed Accelerators Chosen - March On Finland!
Vigo, a Finnish government run program to strengthen the currently rather dismal foundation of Finnish risk capital ecosystem and to create international venture accelerators and investors in Finland (see our previous story here), has come to an end and now it's time to see what we got. And it does not look that bad at all.
In total, three venture accelerators where chosen by the steering board, which was lead by Mr. Risto Siilasmaa, Chairman, founder and former Chief Executive Officer of F-Secure Corporation, Member of the Board at Nokia and a prominent business angel among other things. It seems that the Vigo steering board was looking into finding teams to cover various different industries and compliment each other instead of creating competition into the Finnish venture capital scene. They seems to have found three such 'mutually exclusive' teams to fit the bill, namely Lifeline Ventures, Lots and Veturi Venture Accelerator. Here's a short description of each in turn.
