[NEWS IN-DEPTH] Interview with Slush CEO Andreas Saari on nurturing startups

핀란드 스타트업 지원의 선두주자 '슬러시' CEO 안드레아스 사리 대담

To give a boost to innovative companies, a global startup festival was held for three days this week in Daejeon, some 160 kilometers south of Seoul. Some 300 participants from Korea and abroad attended the event, including startups, investors and government officials from eight countries.
Among the startup supporters was Slush, one of the largest non-profit startup conferences in Finland. Slush has organized conferences in Tokyo, Shanghai and Singapore, and serves as a bridge between startups and investors to nurture venture companies.
During the three-day event, Andreas Saari, CEO of Slush, sat down with Arirang TV for in-depth discussion on how startups, including those in Korea, can prosper on the global stage as well as some challenges they face today.


Thank you Mr. Saari for taking the time to sit with us for this interview. I would like to begin with some questions here.

1. We heard that Slush is actually one of the leading startup conferences held in Finland. Could you briefly tell our viewers a bit more about Slush?

Sure. I think slush is a combination of two stories really, first started by a handful of Finnish entrepreneurs just to gather their friends together and then later taken over by students in 2011. Well, that's when it really started scaling into one of the leading events in Europe.
Today we are at a 2019 event which will have 25-thousand unique visitors including between three and 4-thousand startups about 2-thousand investors some 7,800 journalists.
More than 500 C-level executives from different large corporations. And what it really is a kind of melting pot. So it brings all of these all of these different people together along with academics and students actually. So the Slush, the thing that people usually recognize when they talk about Slush is a two day event in Helsinki. But that's not all of it. That's the crown jewel and still one of the biggest single gatherings and gatherings that we do.
But there's also more other events around the world and other different kinds of concepts and services that we do to entrepreneurs. But ultimately everything that we do has to help entrepreneurs one way or another.

2. As you said, Slush supports start-up companies. What was the reason or motive behind why this conference started?

I think back when Slush first started, it was born out of a need. It wasn't born because a governmental player or any large organization top-down wanted to have something like this but it was rather it was a group of students who realized that Finland had a couple of problems.
First of all we needed to create more jobs if we wanted to pay the social welfare system that exists in Finland because we have an aging population. Like many other countries as well. So we need more jobs. And the most likely place to create more jobs is to create more companies especially fast, internationally growing companies.
But to get there, three problems needed to be fixed. The first being just the overall attitudes in the Finnish society towards entrepreneurship. It wasn't really a popular option back in around 2010 or so. The second thing is that kind of the knowledge that is required for building a company like that or the skills or even the ambition weren't really there. Especially among young people. They didn't have too many examples and role models that had built companies but this has to look up to. But then slowly they started emerging. And finally the third problem, funding and availability of venture capital, wasn't really that great back then. So Slush set out solving all these all these three challenges.

3. Were there any difficulties in nurturing startups? What has been the biggest achievement so far?

Last year we had about 15,000 meetings at that event and kind of what then defines our success is how many companies get funded. How many companies get new clients or new partners. How many companies hire new people. So find new talent and kind of as we have been working on many other people beyond Slush have also been working towards the same goals in Finland and in the Nordic countries and in Europe.
The biggest bottleneck for growing companies right now is actually no longer venture capital, but it is more often even just talent. The availability of talent and the right kind of talent to it because when you start to have more and more companies who scale up a certain point you just need more and more people to work.

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