Ignite is coming to its end

Author

Roope Ripatti
August 06, 2024

Hey everyone!

I’ve been off for a few weeks, but now we are back! Since last time there have (again) been new interesting developments in the AI space, some irrelevant investor drama in Silicon Valley, and a masterclass of what not to do with your seed money from “friend AI” an AI companion necklace.

But before we dive into all that, I want to hype the latest batch of Ignite for a second. I’ve written about Ignite a couple of times before, but this time I want to talk a bit about the success of Ignite teams.

Before I can jump into the cases, I want to talk about how we define success in Ignite. Surprisingly it’s not just how much $$$ you can have on your pitch deck or how many upvotes you got on your Product Hunt launch. We are a human accelerator first and foremost. We believe that we create Finland’s greatest founders, not Finland’s greatest companies. This means that even if the company the team is building in Ignite does not work out, at least the founders have learned the skills to succeed with the next one.

Historically this has been the case. The first batch of Summer Of Startups (Aaltoes summer program before Ignite) had co-founders of Smartly, Wolt, Blok, and others working with other ideas.

This is why also “failed” startups are a success in our books. If you have taken an idea from 0 to “failure”, you have learned everything that idea has to offer. We often joke that we don’t care if you drive at a wall or through a wall, as long as you do it fast. To

This Wednesday (Tomorrow!!??!) we will host the demo day to showcase all the successes and failures that we’ve had in the batch. Come take a look at how the teams have faired and what new companies have been founded in Otaniemi!


- Roope Ripatti

Exciting news 

Meta announces a new video AI model to segment video!

I don’t know if they are poking fun at Sam Altman with this, but Meta launched SAM2 (Segment Anything Model 2).

My mind is racing a bit on all the possibilities this offers!

Ignite featured in media!!

It’s fun to look at how our board of Aaltoes last year talked a lot about “earned marketing” aka media publicity. We ended up agreeing that it’s usually not the best case if you need to hunt down journalists instead of them coming to you.

That’s why it’s been super fun to get interviewed by Yle (not yet published), Länsiväylä, and MTV (Huomenta Suomi 6.8. SO TODAY!)

Go check them out!

Länsiväylä article (Only in Finnish)

Upcoming stuff

Wed 7.8.

Sat 10.8

Your weekly read

Y-combinator video about cargo-culting in SF. Cargo culting is the activity of copying an activity without knowing why that activity is being done. Something I’ve also seen plenty in Finland.

Go hear more about cargo-culting in startups
YC - Cargo Culting

Come to demo day!!!!!!

-Roope