More than 17,500 people went to Helsinki, Finland for the annual Slush event that gathers startups with investors, and this year there were more than 2,336 startups present, 1,146 investors and 610 journalists, made possible by the great organizing team that was supported by over 2,300 volunteers as well.
Slush CEO, Marianne Vikkula and President and Executive Producer, Nicolas Dolenc opened the first day of the Slush event with welcoming remarks coupled with jaw-dropping displays of fire eruptions and leaping flames.
Throughout the event, ingenious speakers wowed and impressed the packed crowds gathered within the six themed stages. Some of the founders, CEOs, and partners that spoke were: Lowercase Capital’s Chris Sacca, Spotify’s Daniel Ek, Sherpa Foundry’s Lisa Barnett, Kleiner Perkins’ Arielle Zuckerberg, and StackOverflow’s Joel Spolsky. Prestigious appearances were also seen on stage at Slush, when the Crown Prince of Norway Haakon and Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands bestowed their presence among excited guests.
A jam packed schedule of events one after the other and to make it more interesting, this year Slush Music had a separate venue. It was extremely interesting to look at the music industry this close with meetings with artists like Imogen Heap, who is a tech entrepreneur and investor herself. Yousican created the greatest impact as they were able to attract almost every participant there was. They must have distributed around 10,000 ukuleles. People were in line to all three days to grab hold of one and in return got to know everything about the company.
There were startups and established companies alike having the same platform. I personally found VR to have the most number of companies and still wondering if VR is actually the technology of the future but only time will tell.
I had the privilege to respresent Stagecast and KTH Innovation with the team at the Stockholm social event and experienced live pitches from the greatest of the industry.
According to Atomico there are 4.7 million professional developers in Europe compared to 4.1 million in the US as Slush and Atomico published an extensive study on the current state of European tech.
Overall the experience at Slush 2016 was humbling, eye opening and gave me a realization that even though running a startup is a difficult job yet it is exciting outmost of all I just loved my display card which I am definitely framing 🙂