Founders Fuel - planes, cars and growth squads

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Roope Ripatti & Lilya Lagerbohm
November 11, 2024

What was the best part of your weekend? A lot of Helsinki-area techies were hacking away at the Cable Factory attending Junction - the tech hackathon that has been organized since 2015 in Helsinki. 

Overall, the fall season feels very much like startup scene season in Finland with hackathons happening, SILTA batch ongoing (SILTA’s spring batch is open for applications now - link below!), and Slush just around the corner (next week!). Below you can find some good startup stuff to fuel your engines for the week ahead!

- Lilya Lagerbohm // the one that wrote about Pet Rock’s marketing magic a few months ago in this newsletter. Pitching in for Roope who’s recharging from Junction ;-)

Exciting news 

Meet the Finnish Growth Squad

The Finnish Startup Community has been pushing for more startup-friendly policy-making in Finland by defining 10 suggestions for the new ‘Growth Squad’ (fin. Kasvuriihi) to implement to improve Finland’s economic growth.

The coolest future cars+planes could come from the Nordics

Finnish-Estonian startup Verge making the coolest electronic motorcycles (if you ask me) on earth soft-launched their new ‘Donut Lab’ for developing “electric mobility across industries like automotive, aviation, robotics and more”. Now we’re talking!

SILTA spring ’25 batch is open for applications

Ready to spend 3 months in the Bay Area to grow your company? Read about SILTA and apply here:

Upcoming stuff

Thu 14.11.

Your weekly (rabbit hole) read

Data is king - whether you think so or not. Regardless of what you do, you’re generating/gathering data of some sort. Make the data work for you! Sequoia has put together multiple posts about the topic, start here by reading any one of them (list at the bottom): https://medium.com/sequoia-capital/data-informed-product-building-1e509a5c4112 

Shall we treat you to some Slush tips?

Final thing: how many people here are going to Slush? Reply to this email if you’d like us to put together a hacker’s guide to Slush for next week’s Founder’s Fuel! Other subscribers naturally can not see your reply - just us editors - so don’t be shy :-)

-Lilya