Miika Huttunen, what is the renaissance of entrepreneurship?

This time in my podcast I had the pleasure to have an inspiring conversation with the (now former) CEO of Slush, Miika Huttunen. In the episode we discussed Miika’s broad view of the startup and founders world. Miika has a lot of experience in supporting early stage businesses and matching investors with the right startup teams.

This year SLUSH was a turning point towards impactful world

Renaissance of entrepreneurship means looking for a change in founders’ diversity and the willingness to seek for real progress in all fields – especially seeing all tech and talk of it shift into actions and improvements. For Miika entrepreneurship and owning something means owning the consequences of your own decisions – both good and bad ones. Secondly entrepreneurship means solving problems that matter.

I would love to see more of those crazy visionaries”

The teams are getting more efficient and versatile especially in the Nordic countries but the innovative founders are the people who also get the technical people on board.

Level of ambition of the founders has increased. We have seen more role models like Supercell and Wolt that encourage new people to join entrepreneurship. Also the whole industry has matured. At SLUSH there are founders from many countries and they differ from each other. Many European founders have to be global from day one as the market in Europe is quite scattered but then in the US the internal market is so big that the founders don’t have to think global right away. Also there is a difference in culture. Something that can feel like lying in Nordics is just marketing in the US. On the other hand Nordic founders are great at never giving up.

How do we ensure that we have more entrepreneurs in the future?

Rolemodels
Hiring potential to bloom
Success creates success

Start a gaming company or a company that solves climate change?

Entrepreneurship is a great tool to solve big problems. Firstly there is a monetary incentive that motivates entrepreneurs to solve problems and secondly it doesn’t actually matter what the company does, as all companies have an impact on the big problems. Companies pay taxes, employ people and at the end people behind the company learn how to scale a global technology company. With that knowledge later on they can invest in companies that solve the big problems or start new ones. In a way entrepreneurs rehearse themselves. That is why time is needed for people to learn and gain expertise on how to start a company.