6 takeaways from Slush

This article is written by Ragnheidur H. Magnúsdóttir, Innovation enthusiast, and one of the founders of Nordic Ignite.

Here are some of the takeaways from Slush this year.

Focus

Slush is huge! There is absolutely no way that you can see and take part in everything: Conference, meetings, side events and the booths. What I did was to focus on the meetings with startups and investors, saw a few talks and met a lot of people at the side events. That turned out great, and now I have a lot of interesting new connections.

Matchmaking app

I have never been to an event that gave as much opportunity to get connected with people. The Slush app made this possible and it all worked out, but this app needs to be repaired a bit before next Slush. There were some errors here and there and some difficulty with knowing the table numbers for meetings, but I’m sure they will fix it!

Vibrant energy

Helsinki is very dark at this time of year, very dark. Instead of making this event bright and happy, like I imagine some would do, they made it dark and vibrant with laser lights all over and you can feel the excitement in the air. This is exactly how it should be since a lot of startups and scaleups use this event as a start for something new and everyone seemed to be embracing the darkness.

Get to snow us

I must say that I was impressed by the event “Get to snow us” hosted by Business Iceland and Iceland Innovation. This was a Slush Side event for those wanting to meet the main players from the Icelandic startup ecosystem. There was a record breaking number of Icelandic startups (60) taking part in Slush this year, and this was the place for investors to meet and talk to them. I’m absolutely sure that there were a lot of good connections made during this event and it was the start of something fruitful for a lot of Icelandic startups.

The investors

What surprised me the most is that it was not easy to find the investors in the Slush conference hall, that was at least something entrepreneurs told me. It seems to be a known fact that it is more likely to meet investors at the side events in a more relaxed atmosphere. There you have it. So if you need to get to know a lot of investors, you should check out the side events and have the courage to start a conversation.

Regarding the female investors in the event. I was told that only about 1% of investors in the event are female investors which is absolutely not good enough in my opinion. I truly hope that the Slush team will somehow put an emphasis on female investors next time.

Prime minister's interest in technology

The CEO of Slush, Eerika Savolainen and Sanna Marin, Prime minister of Finland, talked about Europe, governments and entrepreneurs on stage and I was happy to hear Sanna Marin’s emphasis on working on the vulnerabilities that Europe has, for instance regarding energy, medical supplies and technology in the future. She said rightfully that we live in a digital world and if European countries will not invest in new technology, digital solutions and technical knowledge in Europe, we will have vulnerabilities in the future, if there will be a crisis concerning this. Really good point and something we should all think about.

All in all, Slush was fun and I got a lot of new insights. Hope I will be back next year.