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Ignite Updates & more!
Roope Ripatti
June 17, 2024
Wow, the first 2 weeks of Ignite went by fast…
As many of you know, my full-time gig is to be one of the two directors of the Aaltoes summer program Ignite. Together with Matju (the second director), we had 1 goal this year. Make great founders.
On the surface, this should be easy. Teach them to validate, prototype, and make business canvases, and bam, you have great founders. We soon realized that it was quite a bit harder.
We interviewed many YC founders as a part of our trip to the US and one theme was prevalent in all the conversations. The program of YC provided very little value, the connections of YC provided ~20% of the value, and the bulk 79% of the value came from (and this is a real quote by one of the YC w22 founders) “us having impostor syndrome every day when working with the other batch founders who were smarter and better and us trying to keep up with the pace of others”.
In a nutshell, together with Matju, we realized the biggest impact we could make on the quality of the batch we would run would be the people we would be able to find in the application pool.
This also means that we now have the first bits of data on how we succeeded. And I’m excited to announce that we have gathered one hell of a batch! Already half of our teams have gotten their first customers with just 2 weeks of work.
The commitment we’ve seen from the teams is beyond exciting. The first week, first coding allnighter. Thursday BBQ and a conversation turn into a fix for a bug → The team returns to the coworking space and fixes it before returning to the BBQ.
But to not make the batch cocky, this is just the first 2 weeks, and in startup milestones, they have achieved practically nothing. There is tons of hard work, failures, and celebrations still in the future of these teams. If you want to come and see how the first 2 weeks extrapolate to week 10, we have some open slots on the guest list for the Demo Day.
Super secret Demo Day Signup Link
“Saturday-Sunday night is when great startups are made”- Batch Founder
Fuck shit up!
- Roope Ripatti
Exciting news
Apple intelligence promises a lotEven though we should always take pre-launch news with a huge grain of salt, the Apple Intelligence news makes me want to switch to the Apple ecosystem. I’m hyped for Siri to finally not suck and to see apples UX approach to AI | Y-combinator venturing into politicsThis blew me away big time. |
More exciting (pre-)seed rounds from Finland
“Maki.vc and FOV Ventures co-led a $2.7 million pre-seed investment round for Distance Technologies, a startup developing glasses-free mixed reality solutions. “
In a nutshell, the founder of Varjo and their former CBO started a new startup creating a new kind of XR experience with technology capable of turning any glass surface into a display.
Go show them love on their LinkedIn and check their website!
Upcoming stuff
Today! | Tue (usually, I don’t include events from outside the capital region, but I need to show some love to the LUTES summer program demo day!) |
Early access to Ignite Demo Day tickets only for Founders Fuel people 👀
(7.8.)
Your weekly read
if you did not yet read it, read my long ass text from above!
Last words
If you got this far, I have a request for you!
Reply to this email and tell me what you would like to hear more/less about. Any feedback on the newsletter is super appreciated!
I’m thinking about including more updates on the Ignite teams, would you like to hear more?
-Roope