I'm a French entrepreneur, who moved to Finland in 2004 to specialize in mobile and online business.
I’ve been asked by Nerdstalker to make some videos of the startup scene here.
I’m going to make a series of video interview with different startups, both young and “old”, to present them to a US audience.
The idea for now is that I want to cover only -startups- (eg: young tech companies) that are international or interesting to foreign readers (maybe we can extend that later :) .
If you’ve got any requests or suggestions, feel free to contact me!
MySites speed should be back to normal now!
As I explained earlier, MySites has been getting considerably more traffic lately.
Many people have been asking me why the site has been so slow. The reason is that we weren’t ready to grow so fast.
We didn’t expect things to grow at that rate., and no matter the effort, traffic grew faster. Sorry about this.
We took the decision to slow down most of our Chinese traffic, so that our Western users get the same experience as before.
The last post I did about this was on January 10th. Here is what it looks like until January 31st.
Lessons learned:
- You always think “it’s a good problem to have”, until your users can’t get to the page and you’re not delivering them the service they expect.
- Internet growth can be unpredictably fast.
This weekend, I was at Global Game Jam.
It’s a worldwide event, in 40 countries, where people get together in small groups, and have 48 hours to create a game from scratch.
Here is our game:
You can download the game here.
This morning I received an email from a student who’s enthusiastic about his new startup. He asked me about what to do in San Francisco.
I forwarded him a list of events to follow, and a video presentation about what I’ve learned during my trip there.
Since this advice doesn’t get old, here’s a link to the video :)
Here is a quick overview of the hits on MySites, from August 2009 to January 2010 (though January is not over yet). As you can see, we’ve been growing substantially for 3 months now. Here’s your “hockey stick” :)
This is due to a few factors:
- MySites hosts some of the most popular Google Chrome extensions
- partnership with Xihalife
- significant increase in traffic from China
We’re hoping that with the announcement of our new design and new advisors joining us (more on that soon), the trend will accelerate.
EA is offering Medal of Honor Airborne with every purchase at the EA store.
Thing is, there’s one game you can buy for free, and then get this game for free.
Use this tip now before they fix it :)
Steps:
Go to the EA Store.
Search for Battleforge
Click buy
At the next page, it offers to get Medal of Honor Airborne
Click buy
Get the EA download manager (needs a user name etc, it’s like Steam basically).
Merry christmas!
Oh, Google Wave.
It’s a new era of collaboration, workflow 2.0, it’s changed my life and it will make your life wonderful. *
I have 7 invites left, so send me a message with your Google Email, and first come first served!
(* none of this is true).
I fucked up! Some of you were trying to reach me in the past 2 days, and my “contact me” link was broken.
It’s fixed now, so if you go to this link, you can reach me by email.
I’m happy to follow up on the story from before, or whatever comes up to your mind.
I read earlier today a blog entry by Antti Villponen from ArcticStartup, which raised an interesting point about growth entrepreneurship in Finland. Only 3% of businesses in the country are growth businesses (eg +10% growth per year). This is insufficient to drive an economy.
Earlier, I might have said that Finland needs more access to capital to help entrepreneurship. However, since my recent Silicon Valley trip, I’d have to say the problem does not lie there.
Finland has plenty of capital. For example, public efforts from entities such as Tekes and VeraVenture pour several millions in projects. Consider that Y-Combinator has invested in ~150 startups, for a total sum of less than $3M since its creation.
So the issue is not so much the lack of money, but how it is spent. For a fraction of the money spent in Finland, YC has been able to create Reddit, Dropbox, Disqus, Parakey (sold to Facebook), Justin.tv. You can find a list of Y-Combinator startups and successful exits here.
Why is that? I think we should blame both startups and the government.
Decisions from Tekes are often made by people who have not been entrepreneurs or CEOs themselves. Their experience is very generic, and usually only in Finland. In addition, the application process is very tedious, as it can take up to weeks to simply apply for this money. Lastly the process involves having to plan very detailed processes for several months in the future, which, in the age of lean and adaptive startups, is rather counterproductive. So this process creates a strong mismatch between the funding side and what the startups need.
Of course, Tekes is not a specialized entity, unlike YC is. While I understand the value Tekes for R&D of large projects, it is an inadequate tool for stimulating growth entrepreneurship. The Vigo program seems like a step in the right direction, though I deplore the lack of an Internet-focused accelerator.
Another large problem we have is internationalization. Not enough startups are aiming to be international from day one. Not enough have international team members, or experience dealing with foreign cultures. Alarmingly, most startups here are reluctant to look for funding in other European countries, let alone the US.
There is this underlying idea that starting in Finland is a safe way to test the market. I disagree. Finland is not a test market for growth businesses. The efforts that need to be made here, the barriers to reach the consumer, are equally high if not higher than to reach users in another Western country. To put it differently, if your business has an international scope, you should be international from day one, not just “maybe later”.
Lastly, I would like to stress that funders do not have enough access to information about the startups in the country to make decisions. There is too little public information about the business angels here and how to reach them. There are very few business angel networks, and they are too difficult to reach. There are too few international VCs scouting the market. It would be helpful to see efforts to bring more of them at regular events here, the same way VCs go to Y-Combinator to find their next Google.
I sincerely hope we can make the system here more efficient. If we don’t, it would mean that most companies will either lack proper chances to succeed, or have to move abroad. In any case, the biggest loser will be the Finnish economy.
Last 20 links I’ve read