Finnish Industry Investment Ltd is a government-owned investment company. It invests the proceeds accrued from the privatisation of state-owned companies in stimulating the growth and internationalization of Finnish businesses.
Finnish Industry Investment invests in venture capital funds and directly in growth companies, together with private co-investors. The targets are in all sectors. Capital investments are needed for financing the growth of investee companies, and for spin-offs, major industrial investments, and sector and corporate restructurings.
The investments of Finnish Industry Investment amount to MEUR 600. You can see some other key figures here.
There’s a saying that people come to our lives for a reason, a season or a lifetime. It’s my time to move on. I have been fortunate to have the amazing people at Nordkapp in my life for last year and four months. It’s mind boggling to think how far we have come with the company.
Nordkapp is on clear trajectory of growth and past the stage where it was a mere agency and currently leaving many companies in the dust that were not so long ago thought of as industry leaders. We worked hard to crystallize the focus, decide what market we are really in and educate the customer to see what we saw. Now it’s all executing to scale and making sure the organization can keep up with the growth. It’s not an easy job to be on the bleeding edge, but I have all the faith in the team I left behind to hold the fort and even though it was only a season I worked at Nordkapp, I believe they will be with me for a lifetime. Thanks guys!
What’s next? It’s time for me to spend my days with what I have used to do all my evenings and nights. The Nordic and Baltic startup scenes have come 0f age and we are determined to make sure ArcticStartup will evolve and ride the wave with the same determination we caught the wave to begin with almost two years ago. There’s much to do, not enough resources, too little time, and it’s coming 3000 km/h at us, but we are loving every moment of it.
I reiterate my friend who quoted Hugh MacLeod: ‘The Hunger will give you everything. And it will take from you, everything. It will cost you your life, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. But knowing this, of course, is what ultimately sets you free.’
I believe this quote sets the pace for me for some time to come.
Last week I got an email from an old friend of mine who’s in the process of setting up a new startup in the online media space.
At the end of the email my friend wrote this (partly in Finnish):
PS. Luin eilen gapingvoidin postauksen siitä nälästä, joka meidän kaikkien sisällä asuu. Melkein itkin – saattoi tosin johtua siitä punaviinipullosta ja cocktaileista. This is the shit:
WELCOME TO THE HUNGER
The Hunger to do something creative.
The Hunger to do something amazing.
The Hunger to change the world.
The Hunger to make a difference.
The Hunger to enjoy one’s work.
The Hunger to be able to look back and say, Yeah, cool, I did that.
The Hunger to make the most of this utterly brief blip of time Creation has given us.
The Hunger to dream the good dreams.
The Hunger to have amazing people in our lives.
The Hunger to have the synapses continually fired up on overdrive.
The Hunger to experience beauty.
The Hunger to tell the truth.
The Hunger to be part of something bigger than yourself.
The Hunger to have good stories to tell.
The Hunger to stay the course, despite of the odds.
The Hunger to feel passion.
The Hunger to know and express Love.
The Hunger to know and express Joy.
The Hunger to channel The Divine.
The Hunger to actually feel alive.
The Hunger will give you everything. And it will take from you, everything. It will cost you your life, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
But knowing this, of course, is what ultimately sets you free.
I don’t think I need to add anything to this. It’s all there.
This is a video that epitomizes our times. Not only the content and the explicit message but also the setting, the concept of TED, the medium and the experience. I’m happy that this is the signal of our day. Can’t wait for the next phase when the desire and the talk become action. Better start putting my money where my mouth is.
As you can see on the side of the page, I need your votes! Peter Robinett rallied the troops and submitted a SXSWpanel on the European startup scene, and we’d love your support so we can go to Austin next Spring and tell everyone what’s up!
There’s a strong Euro gang going. The panel includes Robert Gaael from Wakoopa (Netherlands), Alexander Ljung from Soundcloud (Germany/Sweden), Renato Valdés Olmos from Hello My Name is E (Netherlands), Bruno Pedro from Tarpipe (Portugal), Stefan Fountain from Soocial (Netherlands), Peter Robinett from Bubble Foundry (Netherlands/Silicon Valley), Matt Biddulph of Dopplr (UK) and me.
Here’s the spiel: US companies often know little about the European startup environment and the opportunities to be found there. Panelists will share both the highs and lows of their startup lives and will answer questions regarding funding opportunities, cultural idiosyncrasies, legislation and differences between Europe and America
As Peter stated “One thing we all agree on is that we want this panel to be a thoughtful consideration of how technology entrepreneurship happens in Europe today, rather than a session where people just complain how Europe is not Silicon Valley.”
Here’s an interesting development in the media landscape. Politico is one of the more vivid examples of media going towards a vertical niche with much lighter cost base vis-a-vis the dying giants like WSJ and NYT. Interestingly Politico’s model also reports on everything related to the given niche in almost real time with a passion that is very hard to match by bigger operations. I doubt this model will ever have revenues that scale, but that’s not the point. Interesting and promising nevertheless. Reminds me a lot of another media experiment much closer to home. wink wink.
Here’s a very good piece on Politico in Vanity Fair (Incidentally Vanity Fairs itself is a prime example of quality journalism that just works in this day and age). And here’s another interesting piece on TechCrunch by Paul Carr of a model that’s being tested.
Media is in crisis. Not because of lack of quality content, but because of lack of models to monetize the quality content. This financial crisis in media, if not reversed, will eventually lead also to lack of quality content when the media houses cut the number of journalists they are able to keep on their pay roll to produce quality investigative journalism.
There are number of reasons for this, but the biggest one is the conquest of Free. Free has became the dominant price point in an increasing number of product categories and it has severe implication in all of them. Free is almost a synonym to digital content, but it also creates havoc in the physical world. Among the hardest hit is the media as we know it.
This development has number of consequences, which not only lead to destruction but also innovation. One of the negative attributes of Free is that it works only to one direction: Once people learn something is free you can almost never start charging for it again. The other night Teemu Arina invited me to join a friendly small group of people to listen Adam Greenfield’s presentation. Adam talked about The elements of networked urbanism, of which he also discusses in his books that is about to come out soon (You can find the table of contents of his book here, and pre-order it here). I enjoyed the talk tremendously and hope more people would get to hear Adam’s insights. During his talk Adam also addressed the problem of Free and how it becomes more pervasive by day: As long as there are free options of a given product or service, people don’t care how much worse they are compared to the paid ones, even if they are next to useless, but revert to the free time and again. Surely there are exceptions to this, but whether we like it or not (and I don’t), this is the trend we are witnessing. A race to the bottom of a kind. You can see some of these dynamics in play with for example iPhone apps.
Now, I believe we will soon start to see radical solutions to address the problem of Free that are not advertising based.
By working at ArcticStartup and trying to figure out how to develop it further, I am thinking about media as a business constantly and here’s where I see the possibilities to broke from the curse of the Free.
ArcticStartup is not my first media startup as I have also co-founded Turnleft Guides, Europe’s first free city guides. Turnleft operates currently in several central-European cities from Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels to London and Berlin. It’s a small yet very agile operation. The venture has evolved as time has passed as most startus evolve. Initially we started as a free ad supported magazine called Stirred Up (RIP), closed the business and redirected our resources (mainly our own time) to Turnleft Guides with much of the same team. Now the business is a hybrid of on-demand media publishing and consulting services, namely neighborhood, city and country branding. I don’t talk much of the business as I am not operationally involved anymore, but I still contribute to the strategic direction the venture pursues.
After a year with ArcticStartup I am now thinking the revenue models that could work with ArcticStartup. However, this does not mean that we will pursue any of it, or that it’s the smartest thing to do for this particular media. For us, keeping the structure light and growing slowly has been the best option so far as we really try to further the cause more than anything else. But the point, I believe, is valid. We should start seeing the media as a channel that even though operates in the center of attention, is only facilitating the other services that produces the real cash flow. More importantly, this means that the quality media shouldn’t actually even aim to explicitly bring in the money. The obvious solutions for the model include various market places where you go from real estate search to job listings. But why to stop there? I believe a quality media could drive valuable attention and more importantly lend its credibility to all kinds of services, including consulting from A to Z, research, product sales, training services and events.
Admittedly there are already medias that operate this way, but I believe this could be taken much further to work for the big media. Think New York Times or Financial Times (FT) big.
What if FT would not only provide financial news, but would also tell it’s clients what bits are important for their business and how they should respond to those news to make their businesses succeed. Not only give customized media, but accompany an expert to interpret the news for the client as well. A service contracts where they would advice foreign ministries on their foreign policy media strategies, run training for new officials on how news media will react to different policies, how it resonates with the greater public and how to handle a crisis management communication when a disaster strikes. In a similar manner, I’m sure San Francisco Chronicle (see video below) has tons of latent and build-up knowledge of the city which they could use to build a useful service on, say a consulting arm on urban economics or start a Cafe chain which would aim to be the best place to consume news with a quality cup of coffee. Get a speaker series going, fill the cafes and create a channel to publish and discuss these news online. Or something completely different but equally novel and ingenious.
If that sounds too wild, you can take for example Monocle. A brain child of Mr. Tyler Brûlé who was also responsible for Wallpaper’s success. Monocle’s print product might stay as the brand’s flagship product well into the future (and it should), but increasingly the brand is collecting it’s revenue streams from other sources like The Monocle Shop, which is continuously expanding it’s offering and lately opened it’s first physical store. This is clearly a beneficial symbiosis for everyone involved. Ad to the mix Mr. Brûlé’s design agency, Winkreative, and it starts to seems that the media is supporting the product line and the service arm just as much as the product line and services are supporting the media.
Clearly there are problems to this model, the biggest being the fear or even possibility of loosing the objectivity of the news that a given media produces. But there are ways to design the required checks and balances we need to ensure the quality of the news stories. Making the editorial team fully independent without an obligation to adhere to any financial goals (this includes page views), while at the same time having a well functioning consulting and training arm. This does neither mean journalist should do anything but what they are already doing, namely quality journalism. What it means is that journalists would just have an army of professional consultants/product managers to accompany them as an independent unit under the same umbrella brand. The synergies would come from a brand that has been build over decades, thus the operation would be a mere brand extension. Well designed transparency with the help of an educated public is also surprisingly good at recognizing if a media is leaning too much towards the owners interest. It’s challenging, but at the end of the day it’s really a design problem and there’s a lot of room for innovation. Just like designing visual user experiences for the media channels, the media as a business should also be designed keeping in mind what Eliel Saarinen said: “Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” …or a media in a globalized service economy.
This is certainly not for every media, but it could work for some. It’s a painful idea or even unthinkable for some, but change is never easy. This solution, for those that it would work, would not only bring in much needed revenue, but would also free the medias from trying to build yet another walled garden now inside say a device like iphone or Kindle that they could charge for. This would be very short sighted. With service arm to bring in the money, a media could be able to focus to make its content travel and get spread instead of focusing protecting it.
Just as Clay Shirky pointed out “There is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke”, but I believe for some a service dimension can be a solution. This is undoubtedly a difficult solution for the most traditional of the media to even consider, but in extraordinatry times we need extraordinatry solutions.
This Tuesday we held our 5th ArcticEvening event in the cozy premises of Dubrovnik Lounge & Lobby in the heart of Helsinki. The events are slowly becoming the corner stone of the community or the ’social network’ of entrepreneurs we are so eager to bring together across the Nordic and Baltic countries. In effect, they are the offline part of an online community. I believe this is essential for the community to find each other and get to know each other on a more concrete level, so that it will eventually result in more partnerships, more co-operation, more startups, and eventually more success stories. Here’s the spiel I wrote about the event over at ArcticStartup:
ArcticEvening is where everybody at the local startup scene meets each other.
Its aim is to bring everybody together to discuss new ideas, experiences, challenges and developments and above all share knowledge in the Nordic and Baltic startup community.
Come and enjoy a laid-back evening with an entrepreneurial group of people. An event for those interested in startups be you an entrepreneur, technologist, lawyer, angel, VC, accountant, salesman.
The crux is on the first sentence: where everybody at the local startup scene meets each other. Here by local I mean the whole of Nordic and Baltic countries. We have still quite a ways to go but I think we’re well on our way and are already bringing people from Finland to Estonia, people from Sweden to Finland.
Here’s a post on the first OpenCoffee evening that I organized in Helsinki right after I had moved back to Helsinki. Little after I met Antti and Miikka who had already the ArcticStartup blog up and running. This is where it all started and as Bart told to the audience last Tuesday at Dubrovnik: He met his co-founder at Cafe Luft, a small bar in Kallio where the event was held, and now Bart & Co. are well on their way building the next big thing. What goes without much attention, but what I believe is an important part of the event is its context. It’s woven deep into the urban setting and always held in one of the comparatively small bars and cafes of a given city. This has always been the case here in Helsinki, it was the case in Tallinn and it will be the case also in Stockholm when we go there next month. I believe this is imporant.
Having the event in the heart of the city in comparatively small venue gives it a familiar and easy to access context. By not having it in an a bigger arena is central to the culture* we are trying to build: Entrepreneurial mindset, or more concretely ideas on building something new that will change the world for better, should be part of a normal night out with friends at a bar for a given group of people. Entrepeneurs should know where to find the like minded people and where, if you’d eaves drop, you’d constantly here new ideas to build something great. Big ideas, dreams, and road maps to start building on them should be the constant back ground noise in these venues. This is what eventually makes the entrepreneurial culture what it is. Not only that, it will also contribute to building a more lively city.
A healthy city is a lively and buzzing city. I hope and believe ArcticEvenings are a building block, even if just one, building such cities around the Northern Europe by bringing together this lively community**: The urban entrepreneurs. Ideally these people see their city as part of the ecosystem that they can build their organisms on. Here by organisms I mean the businesses that are successful because they add value to the ecosystem and are thus sustainable. This sustainability is also called being profitable. Even if their business is global, the people and the day to day running it, especially in the early days, have a physical location that ideally makes those long working days bearable. I hope this is where ArcticEvenings can come in and find their place: Be the local (Helsinki – Stockholm – Tallinn – and more) network of friends and peers, before the team is strong enough and the venture is mature enough to take on the world.
*By entrepreneurial culture and mindset I don’t mean just building a business in a narrow sense, but creating something new regardless of what you’re passionate about, be it music, food, books or design.
**I want to emphasize that I don’t want everybody starting businesses. Entrepreneurial community should be just one of many groups of like minded people that are constantly active in the city space. It’s the variety that make a lively and great cities.
Thomas Friedman, a New York Times reporter and an author, writes how US should invest in and bet on potential the future successes instead of bailing out the dying Detroit car manufacturers. You don’t need to be rocket scientist to come to this conclusion, even though nationalistic feelings can make even the brightest of us make ill judgements when local jobs are on stake.
Regardless, that was not the issue that made many in the technology industry rise to the barrikades. The devil was in how Mr. Friedman proposed to do the investing in to the future success stories. He went on to suggest that the US government should give the bailout money directly to the top venture capital firms instead of to the dying auto industry whose own short sightedness have got them in trouble.
You want to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money creating jobs? Fine. Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because their partners — university endowments and pension funds — are tapped out, and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way. If they go bust, we all lose. If any of them turns out to be the next Microsoft or Intel, taxpayers will give you 20 percent of the investors’ upside and keep 80 percent for themselves.
A prominent New York venture capitalist and a blogger, Fred Wilson of Union Square Partners, responded strongly this this suggestion and explained how the well meaning intention what seems the sensible and smart thing to do in the times of economic hardship and illiquid markets, does not actually work at all. He explains how top 20 firms in the venture capital business are actually the least in need of extra money:
The venture capital business is an asset class where the top 10-20 percent of the firms make 80%+ of the returns. That’s how its always been and that’s how it will likely always be. It’s because the best entrepreneurs want to work with firms with reputations for making money, making connections, recruting top talent, and getting the right exit at the right time. And those are the top 10-20 percent of the firms.
So Tom’s idea, while it looks good on paper, is a dream. The top venture firms don’t want, don’t need, and are never going to take government money. The same is true of the top entrepreneurs.
The worst firms, on the other hand, will gladly accept government money. And that is what is going to happen with all of these government efforts to pour more money into the “innovation sector”. That money will go to bad investors and weak entrepreneurs and management teams for the most part. It’s a problem of adverse selection.
Does part of this sound as familiar to you as it does to me. If you live in Finland as I do, it just might. Here the situation is different, but still so similar. The government helps out by giving money to programs and institutions, which many times are created just for the purposes of directly investing in new ventures, creating a new catchy acronym or a traning program, or giving out cash based on what sector you operate in. This is done to create thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem, which is great. Really is. But the way you do it makes all the difference. In the most extreme cases these semi-governmental institutions or programs evolve to milk the government’s own programs, and subsequently the startups learn to milk these semi-governmental institutions. This could create more companies, but it is unlike that it will create the healthy competitive entrepreneurial ecosystems that are filled with strong growth companies (and where bad ones die off, thus potentially enaling the human- and capital resources to be reinvested in new, potentailly more successful, ventures) ready to take on the silicon valleys of the world.
To be clear, I am not saying every program is ill deviced or that industrial cluster building is a bad idea from government’s part. Nor am I saying the government should not correct the market in situations where it does not performs in the best benefit of the society’s long term prosperity, like in the case of very early stage startups run by students just out of college. Here government is on a right track. There are many outstanding examples for example by Tekes, which has been crucial for many Finnish success stories to materialise. What I am saying is that devicing a blue print for a working entrepreneurial ecosystem is a trickly business and the eventual incentive systems should be very carefully build. I don’t know the right answer on how to do this, but I have a few ideas where to start. 1) Just as when building a company, one needs to start with the right people, the best people that can be found. These should ideally have experience from government and from private sector to know how to work with both sides. 2) Go iteratively and measure where possible. 3) De-emphasize planning and support doing 4) and communicate successes to make it desirible for others to follow the example. Not the way goverment normally operates? Perhaps, but there’s first time for everything.
Joining the Investment Council of Finnish Industry Investment
I’m happy to announce that I have joined the Finnish Industry Investment Investment Council.
Finnish Industry Investment Ltd is a government-owned investment company. It invests the proceeds accrued from the privatisation of state-owned companies in stimulating the growth and internationalization of Finnish businesses.
Finnish Industry Investment invests in venture capital funds and directly in growth companies, together with private co-investors. The targets are in all sectors. Capital investments are needed for financing the growth of investee companies, and for spin-offs, major industrial investments, and sector and corporate restructurings.
The investments of Finnish Industry Investment amount to MEUR 600. You can see some other key figures here.