Slush 2018

I recently visited Finland to attend Slush and talk to some foreign investors about our funding round in January 2019. It was my first time at the tech conference, and I had a blast: The event is jam packed with networking opportunities, the quality of people you meet is stellar, and Helsinki is just a lovely city (if a bit cold).

Event Highlight

In my devcom post from August I praised meettomatch, an event networking service seen at most conferences nowadays. Slush offers its own matchmaking solution however, and it was rather disappointing. While you can set up a detailed profile and scan people better than on most other platforms, the app doesn’t notify you when you’ve received a message meaning you have to constantly monitor everyone manually.

There was also a system failure on the first day which caused the app to not specify your table number, so you had to ask a volunteer where your table was before each meeting. This is prone to human error, as you can see in the picture below. The person we were supposed to meet is in the first cabin from the left. We were escorted to the the cabin next to it. Suboptimal experience, but at least we got a funny picture out of it.

But that’s not to say it was all bad. As mentioned before, the quality of meetings was really high and most of them led to promising follow ups. Seeing Starborne strike people as not just a cool game, but a sustainable business strategy was amazing, and I have high expectations leading into 2019.

Food Highlight

This one goes to Social Burgerjoint. It offers a great variety of burgers at a fair price and is located very close to the main station, so it’s a great place to get some food before you head downtown.

That’s about it I think. See you next year!