It’s been a busy year, and we’ve achieved a lot so far. Last week Aaltoes reached a new milestone as the new board was elected. With a good mix of skills and a lot of new energy, we’re sure you’ll be hearing from them soon!

-Aaltoes now has one-year under its belt and with a new team its important for us to start refining our existing concepts and make things happen. With an excellent base built in 2009, we can now truly begin to focus on directing our efforts towards the students of Aalto University and the aspiring entrepreneurs within them summarizes Jens Sørensen, the new chairman of the board.

What will Aaltoes then do in year 2010?

-There is no one most important thing we will be pursuing next year, since everything we do plays its own very important role. But that said, we must put as much effort as possible into our Ventures Track, and getting ideas turned into action from its participants. My personal goal is that in one year every student at Aalto University knows about Aaltoes, what we do, and why we do it, Jens promises.

It’s still a few days now until we return from Christmas holidays, but don’t forget that Aaltoes is on the look for the new team 2010 as well as new startups . Everyone from the new  board can be reached with e-mail firstname.lastname@aaltoes.com, so don’t be afraid to contact them.

-We’re always open, and we want to hear your ideas and see them happen. Whilst catalyzing start-ups to the best of our ability, next year is also all about culture change, Jens concludes.

Who’s who in the new board?

Jens Sørensen Jens is a currently completing his bachelor’s degree in Finance at the Aalto University School of Economics. Aside from aspiring to be involved with innovative start-ups, Jens loves music and skydiving.

Santeri Everi Santeri studies business technology at Aalto School of Economics. With a background in student union activities , Santeri is also a skydiving fan.

Olli Nuutila Olli studies naval engineerin at Aalto University School of Technology, but is also one of the founders of Arctic Alarms, an Aaltoes catalyzed company producing design smoke alarms.

Ville Simola Ville is an entrepreneurial minded chap studying management at Aalto School of Economics and working on several entrepreneurial projects. His vision is to widen people’s perspectives on entrepreneurship by adding entrepreneurial acts to part of everyday life. Villes motto: screw it – let’s just do it!

Mikko Ikola Mikko is easily inspired, very entrepreneurial and likes to strike to opportunities and crazy projects. Past few years he has been active in TKY student union, associations and Data guild at TKK.

Lauri Hynynen Lauri studies at Aalto University School of Business and he has been doing stuff related to the events and the website. He has also co-founded one startup and now working on a new one.

Tapani Alasaarela Tapani, PhD student from Aalto University School of Technology, is a young innovative scientist with very entrepreneurial attitude. Tapani is always yearning to learn more and trying to improve things for better.

The former MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos visited Aalto Ventures Park on Tuesday. Speaking to a crowd of hundreds Mårten underlined the role of failure and long-term perspective.

- Shoot for the stars! Even if you fail you land on the moon.

One of the things Mårten pinpointed was that everything in life is useful, whatever you do.

- The biggest problem is that people don’t aim high enough. Scaling doesn’t mean you expand from Lappeenranta to Helsinki. On the other hand people are easily too modest. Quoting Kawasaki, don’t worry, be crappy.

Mårten remembers fondly time spent in Otaniemi.

- Inexperience is a great aspect to have as a student entrepreneur. Only failure will produce success. If Aalto University fails for the first ten years, I’d still consider it an important thing. Here´s to a lot of failure!

Showcasing the successful entrepreneurs

The exhibition “Uuden Vaurauden Vaikuttajat” features portraits of succesful Finnish entrepreneurs shot by photographer Peter Forsgård.

- One common nominator for all the entrepreneurs photographed was that they all were great listeners.

The project to profile top Finnish entrepreneurs is still on-going and will eventually feature 40-50 portraits, complimented by a wiki. The exhibition will stay in Aalto Ventures Park, please feel free to pop by.

/L.

Aaltoes Talk with Mårten Mickos from Aaltoes on Vimeo.

Photo exhibition

Feedback Please!
Ladataan…

Year 2010 looks like an exciting year for Aaltoes. With the building blocks in place and a bunch of new people bringing in their energy, anything can happen. On Tuesday the Ventures Park was filled with buzz as some 30 aspiring board and team members discussed what Aaltoes did in 2009 and more importantly, what will it be doing in 2010.

The new board will be elected on December 15th. If you have friends who would be interested in joining, please invite them to Nolla this Thursday to hear out more.

Here are some of the frequently asked questions for those who didn’t make it:

What is Aaltoes?
Student run organization promoting entrepreneurship and helping students to set up companies within up coming Aalto University in Finland. More? See the slidedeck or contact anyone from the board 2009. P.S AES is now Aaltoes, same thing, different abbreviation.

What does board membership require? What does it include? How many board members are selected?
Aaltoes is a registered association, so that brings some requirements for the work, but otherwise the board is free to choose the way they organise themselves. The rules state that the board should have 4-10 members and that all boardmembers need to student of Aalto University.

The board 2009 had some basic roles laid out (IT, accounting, school-relations etc.) and met almost every week. In 2009 99% of the effort was put on executing, and 1% on administrative stuff, but the board 2010 might face different challenges.

We are looking for an enthusiastic team that understands that Aaltoes is essentially a startup. We need people with different skillsets and a drive to redefine the role of entrepreneurship in universities. The plus side? A rollercoaster year full of new connections, mentoring,  trips and possibilities that would be out of the reach otherwise. Ask for more info from the board or team 2009, we’d be happy to share.

What is the difference between a team member and board member?
Only slight differencies – the board meetings are open to everyone and traditionally the team members have been very independent in organising events and taking initiative. Board members of course have a little more responsibilities in coordinating things and they f.ex represent Aaltoes to the media.

What happens to the 2009 board and team?
We’ll all be around, no drastic changes. This means personal mentoring for the new board, but also participating in the everyday activities just as this year.

Who can vote for the board 2010?
Registered members. If you haven’t yet, go register at http://aaltoes.com/aes/members/

What other ways are there to participate?
Form a company. See our existing startups in http://aaltoes.com/aalto-startups/ and join the crowd.

How do you help startups?
Change the culture and introduce the resources: in practice organising events, providing a community of likeminded people and, in the future, guiding the ideas to Aalto Ventures Park to become real businesses.

What plans have you for the year 2010?
Tons! Our notebooks are filled with ideas, but we want the new board to also have room to make their own decisions. Some gossip: gaming-industry event, social entrepreneurship event, entrepreneur in residence for Aalto VP, 24h camps, student guide for startups… And what do we wish for year 2010? Growth (and exits) for our startups. Forming new startups and helping them grow is our only reason of  existing. Next year we’d love to see the Aaltoes accelerated startups hit it big time.

More questions? Shoot!

Couple weeks ago Twitter showed it’s power once again. Few active startup founders noticed that Eric Rise is going to visit Oulu, Finland and took action immediately to get him to meet the startup scene in Helsinki. If you’re not familiar with the name Eric is the father of Lean Startup methology and also the man behind wildly popular Startup Lessons Learned blog.

Yesterday I got a word that Everyplay, Floobs and Arctic Startup managed to get him to Helsinki and he’s giving a workshop on 10th of November. The event is targeted only for entrepreneurs currently running startups and this means mainly CEOs, CTOs and founders. There’s limited amount of seats and price per ticket is 20€.

Luckily the editors at Arctic Startup  were nice enough to share few tickets to be given to Aaltoes members. Here’s how you can win one:

• Comment to Twitter “Aaltoes goes to Silicon Valley. Updates @ http://aaltoes.com RT and win tickets to see Eric Rise http://bit.ly/J9twf” and post a comment to this page with your Twitter account

or

• Share Aaltoes Stanford trip page in Facebook to your friends with note “Aaltoes goes to Silicon Valley. Spread the word and win a ticket to see Eric Rise http://bit.ly/J9twf” and post a comment to this page with your Facebook account

We’ll select the winners of those who participated before 29th of October 23:59 (Finnish time)

We’ve now started counting hours (about six) until our departure to Silicon Valley. Kristo, Krista and the team have done a great job in booking interesting meetings and visits, such as Y Combinator. In the web team we had some spare time, so we decided to re-theme the site a bit. From this page you can follow our journey, comment on blog posts and watch videos. The schedule is going to be very tight, but we’ll try to find some for updating.

Enjoy!

- Lauri & Jori

We experimented with new way of gathering ideas from the community to fuel the planning of Aalto Ventures Park. The platform was web based and provided by UserVoice.com. It all started when we asked people at the MIT lecture over a week ago to brainstorm what Aaltovp could be and what it could include. This was really helpful for us coordinating the planning and we wanted to get more ideas.

It didn’t take long as in the day after the lecture our enthusiastic teammate, Linda, started to talk about and browse different tools what we could use for online brainstorming. We had discussed different patforms and idea collection tools in the past (including UserVoice) but it didn’t really went anywhere as all the products out there where costing too much. But now we had a mission and after few hours after Linda started to talk about it we had integrated the service under aaltoes.com.

Soon after the launch ideas and votes started to arrive and now a week after we ended up with total of 25 new ideas and 174 votes! This really helped us and I’m sure there will be similar projects in the future where we’re needing your help. The idea site is now closed but we will investigate what would be the best solution to take advantage of similar solutions in the future projects and operations.

Thanks for everybody who helped us and it’s still possible to send ideas via comments or personally in the events!

Aaltoes Pitching attracted some 100 people to listen to the ideas and executions of future startups. We had a great array of ideas ranging from dictionaries to mobile reminder services. The winner, Language Café, captivated the audience with a strong social message: connecting elderly people and foreigners to actively learn languages and improve their social connections.

The Stage auditorium was full and packed as the thirteen contestants pitched their ideas. The Jury included names such as Marja-Reetta Paso from Veturi Growth Partners, Antti Kokkinen from Blue Run Ventures, Teemu Seppälä from Tuli funding and serial entrepreneur Taneli Tikka. One of the main take backs for the presenters was for sure the feedback from the judges: pertinent insights and suggestions to take the ideas forward.

Stefania Passera from the winning team Language Café pitched with enthusiasm and clarity their concept: introducing a new language learning method to connect elderly people with expats and exchange students.

- We are a team of students with different backgrounds who participated last summer in the Murjottelu–programme and developed concepts on the theme how to keep seniors active. Our coach Anssi Tuulenmäki suggested that we should take part in the pitching competition with this idea, Stefania explains.

The Jury saw a lot of opportunity in the idea of Maria Ullner, Stefania, Reetta Maila, Sami Norovuori and Riku Nagasaki and felt that development of the business idea in Talkoot would really take it further. The team has however been proactive about developing their idea.

- We actually did field-tests already last summer. We invited some exchange students to Ateneum Café to work with seniors – it worked like a charm! We had prepared some memory games, discussion topics etc. in case the conversation was about to end, but that was not a problem, Maria and Reetta smile.

Next AaltoesPitch is just around the corner, so if you’re still interested in coming to Stanford, please register your idea here http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHJKam5rbERHeEEzUExxZzA5NDJIYWc6MA .  It’s worth joining also if you have a startup or an idea and need some team members.

Winning pitches: 1) Language Café – Stefania Passera P, 2) Late No More – Antti Virolainen, 3) OCR Based Dictionary – Haritash J. Tamvada, 4) Cur?ous – Sachin Gaur 5) Digital Receipts – Sivakumar Karuppusamy

Video was filmed and produced by CityVice.

The Aaltoes team is working hard to make an unforgettable experience for Aalto University students and startups. We have over 40 participants signed up and Arctic Startup is joining us for the trip.

The participants are entrepreneurs who are using the trip as an opportunity to benchmark their products, gain insights for business planning, meet people and make valuable contacts.

Seeing how business is done in the buzzing Silicon Valley business environment will be exciting and educational. The trip will include visits to local startups, as well success stories. We will meet local VCs and lawyers, and some successful Finnish entrepreneurs in the area.

The trip is important in many respects.  Taking Aalto University students to see how one of the world’s best university technology ventures programs works will show us how things could be done, and be a lesson in what we need to do to change the university’s culture.

Aaltoes is using the week to build our relationship with our Stanford University counterpart BASES. We will workshop on how to get students involved in startups, and what kind of needs student entrepreneurs have and how to best support them.

Of course there is also time to relax and socialize, the week finishes with the biggest party of the year, Halloween, and we have many mixers and dinners were we will get to meet entrepreneurs and students.

The programme  is due to changes, the most recent changes can be seen at the Google Calender

MONDAY
Technology and Teams
How the Stanford’s Technology Transfer system works and how the university supports students’ entrepreneurship ambitions.

TUESDAY
Startups
Visiting Berkeley University and upcoming startups.

WEDNESDAY
Angels, VCs and Lawyers.
What it really takes to get funding for your ideas. Meeting VCs and lawyers to get a look inside their business.

THURSDAY
Big companies, exits.
What international success looks like.

FRIDAY
Summing it all up.
Visits to Y-combinator and other interesting forms of support for early stage startups.