Aaltoes » GEW2009

Five favourites: Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar and MIT100K

Lari — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:32:57 +0000

Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar is a weekly speaker series that brings together people from business, finance, technology, education, and philanthropy to share their insights with aspiring entrepreneurs from all over the world. The absolutely engaging speeches dive deep in the different aspects of entrepreneurship, whether in the field of biotechnology, music or software. The speakers include big corporate names, but also serial entrepreneurs, researchers and startups. You can subscribe to the podcasts with iTunes or RSS or just browse the different categories including product development, team work and social entrepreneurship

Another great entrepreneurial resource from the grand universities of US comes from MIT. The MIT $100 challenge is the premier university-run entrepreneurship competition in the world. The year-long competition provides a lot of material for entrepreneurs in Finland: be sure to check out the MIT 2009 pitches

Aaltoes recommends:
STVP Ecorner Venture Capital Teaching Guide
MIT 100K 2009 Practice your Pitch Resources
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, especially Carl J. Schramm, Tina Seeling, Tom Kelley, and Vinod Khosla . Or share your own favourite in the comments section!

This is the third post of our Global Entrepreneurship Week Five Favourites -series, exploring some the entrepreneurial inspiration available on the Internet.
See the previous posts at
1/5 favourites: Y-Combinator and Startup School

2/5 favourites: Startup Lessons Learned

Five favourites: Startup Lessons Learned

Lari — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:14:41 +0000

A great source for continuous insight is Startup Lessons Learned, a blog from Eric Ries. Eric’s posts and lectures are a great mixture of engineering practices and management frameworks.

He offers hands-on advice on issues that almost all startups, whether in tech or not, will eventually face. These themes are for example rapid experimentation, making actionable metrics and finding the true causes of failures with the Five Whys -method. Agile development and the lean thinking/manufacturing are well known concepts in technology companies, but Eric does wonders in introducing them in the practical context of a startup.

The Lean Startup community includes all sorts of useful resources for starting entrepreneurs: you can for instance visit Lean Startup wiki with e-mail lists, case studies and tools, follow the hashtag leanstartup in Twitter and buy (or borrow) Steve Blank’s book 4 steps to epiphany to find out more.

Our friends at Arctic Startup, CityVice, Floobs and Everyplay published just the lecture Eric Ries held in Helsinki last Tuesday. It’s a must watch for everyone.

Aaltoes recommends:
Eric Ries What are lean startups?
Eric Ries What is customer development?
Steve Blanks must read books Books/blogs for Startups
A podcast version of a similar kind of speech can be found from the STVP Entrepeneurial Thought Leaders -seminar.

This is the second post of our Global Entrepreneurship Week Five Favourites -series, exploring some the entrepreneurial inspiration available on the Internet. See the previous posts at
1/5 favourites Y-Combinator & Startup School

Five favorites: Y-Combinator & Startup School

Lari — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:23:43 +0000

Paul Graham, one of the founders of the startup incubator Y-Combinator, is undoubtedly among the key persons of Silicon Valley. Described as the hatchery for hackers and the American Idol of Silicon Valley, Y-Combinator aims at helping early-stage startups succeed. The idea is not only about investment: the main focus has always been in helping to develop the initial idea into a real business. Y-Combinator accepts also foreign startups and the application rounds are held twice a year. For our startups, we recommend browsing through the impressive Y-Combinator library list at http://ycombinator.com/lib.html

Visit the School for Startups

Ever wondered how Zynga founder Mark Pincus would guide you in choosing a board or how Gmail got started? What advice could Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson give to your company? Y-Combinator hosts every year a one-day Startup School with proclaimed speakers. All the speeches of Startup School 2009 can be found at http://www.justin.tv/startupschool, including speeches from for example Jason Fried (37signals), Biz Stone (Twitter) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

Aaltoes recommends:

Aaltoes interviewing Paul Graham
Paul Graham A Student’s Guide to Startups
Paul Graham How to Survive Fundraising
Paul Graham The Hacker’s Guide to Investors

Have a personal favourite or something to add? Please share in the comment section!

This is the first post of our Global Entrepreneurship Week Five Favourites -series, exploring some the entrepreneurial inspiration available on the Internet.

It’s Global Entrepreneurship Week!

Lari — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 09:31:26 +0000

Global Entreprereneurship Week is celebrated in Nov 16-22. People across six continents are coming together to generate new ideas and to seek better ways of doing things. Aaltoes is proudly taking part in GEW this week.

Global Entrepreneurship Week starts today. A lot is happening during the week: Thursday is all about practical insights into law and on Friday we’ll be sharing the lessons learned from Silicon Valley. In addition, this week we’ll be posting some great resources for future entrepreneurs here in the Aaltoes blog. There’s a ton of inspiration and hardcore knowledge available, so stay tuned for some eye-opening presentations. Other events taking place this week are the GRR courses Dragon’s Den pitch competition (click for invitation in pdf-format) on Wednesday and OpenCoffee meetup on Thursday.

Visit also GEW Finlands official website at http://www.yrittajyysviikko.fi as well as the twitter feed. Another great way to join the activities is to follow the live.gew2009.com website, where videos around the globe are uploaded continuosly.

Challenging everyone to make saving money more fun

One of the most exciting projects of the GEW week has to be the Global Innovation Tournament, organised by Stanford Technology Ventures Program. GIT is a fast-paced competition in which global student teams have about eight days to create as much value as possible from a mystery challenge. This years challenge – make saving money more fun! GIT is a great way to see the entrepreneurial problem-solving skills and can-do attitude in practice, be sure to check out the submitted videos from the participants at the website. Local winners will be announced during Global Entrepreneurship Week and global winners on Dec 3.