Welcome to Slush 2022

Eerika Savolainen (0:00)

Hi all, and welcome to the special episode of Slush Podcast.

My name is Eerika, I'm the CEO of Slush, and I'm here in the studio together with Mikko, my colleague.

How are you doing today?

Mikko Mäntylä (0:09)

Thanks, Eerika. I'm doing really, really well, excited for the upcoming days. So as Eerika said, I'm Mikko, Mäntylä's president here at Slush. And ahead of this year's event, we wanted to record a conversation that provides everyone who's joining us in Helsinki with a bit of the backstory and context behind the event you're about to attend. You know, after all, this year's event will be the 14th Slush, the first one having been organized in 2008 It's also an event that Eerika, our team and I have spent the past 12 months building, yet we only get to have each of you here for a few days. So it's easy to miss out on part of the narrative and some of the details.

So whether you're on a plane from Los Angeles to Helsinki, a ferry over from Tallinn, or you've just settled into your hotel room in downtown Helsinki, we hope you'll find this an interesting story to listen into, and hope that, having listened to it, you get a little bit more out of your time here in Helsinki.

But Eerika, what do our guests have in store once they arrive here?

Eerika Savolainen (1:07)

In a few days, you're in for the most relevant slush to date. At the core of Slush is a conviction that better tech will create a better world. We captured this belief in our theme, that is the break of dawn.

It's a claim that we will look back on the 2020s as a period of time when an incredible number of important world-positive technologies were created, and to ensure that this version of the future indeed becomes reality, we believe in bringing the right people together under one roof. And that is why Slush 2022 is all about relevance over scale. So not how many people are here, but who's here.

Mikko Mäntylä (1:38)

Exactly. So while Slush is smaller than it once was, the number of startup and investor tickets put together is actually higher than at any previous event. And we've worked really hard to ensure that within those groups, it's the most relevant investors and startups that are present.

But we'll tell you more about that later on.

Eerika Savolainen (1:55)

In this episode, we're going to dive deeper into why Slush exists and why you should get excited about the upcoming event. You're also not just going to hear from the two of us, as we'll be joined by a few super exciting guests. First, Miki Kuusin, founder and CEO of Wolt and the very first CEO of Slush. Then we have Amin Hassan, a three-time Slush volunteer. And finally, Claire Gusko, a founder of One5, a company developing clean and circular packaging materials and having a product showcase in our startup studio.

But yes, before we dive into how Slush 2022 looks like, I think we should spend a moment to understand the history. So, Mikko, as our house historian, would you like to tell us how the past decade has looked for Slush?

Mikko Mäntylä (2:34)

Yes, it could be more than a moment, but I'm happy to. So, yeah, for the start of this story, we have to go back to the year 2008, which is the year in which Slush was founded. And Slush was founded by five Finnish serial entrepreneurs into a sort of version of Finland where the startup ecosystem was extremely small. And so these five founders basically just wanted to create a gathering for them and their peers to get together once a year. And that's what they did in 2008 They gathered 250 people and basically continued doing that same thing for the next couple of years, the 2009 and 2010 events. But then in 2011, something happened that is extremely formative for Slush's ethos and the event it has become.

So these original five founders all had got busy building their own companies and initially contemplated to just stop Slush.

However, at the 11th hour, they actually found a group of students at Aalto University who had just founded an entrepreneurship society called Aalto Entrepreneurship Society. And they took Slush, they took this whole thing and they gave it over to that group of students to basically see what they could do with the event. And that, I think, has cemented in Slush ethos that this is an initiative by and for the whole Finnish ecosystem. It's not anyone's own company. This is something that consecutive generations come together to build and then give over to the next one.