HISTORY

In 2008 a university professor in Helsinki told his students that becoming an entrepreneur is the worst decision you can do. At that time, finnish mindset wasn’t an entrepreneurial one – taking risks or giving a shot at your idea wasn’t respected. A group of students from Aalto University decided that it was time for a paradigm shift and embarked on a trip that would shape not only Aalto University but the whole of Finland.

They decided to visit MIT and Bengt Holmström, a nobel laureate and a professor at MIT.  They grasped onto a lesson from the professor – act on what you learned. They decided to start Aaltoes, to create a grassroots movement around entrepreneurship.

In just a year’s time, they were given an old warehouse, that over the years has been transformed into a top co-working space – Startup Sauna, formerly known as the Aalto Venture’s Garage.

In 2010, we kickstarted the Startup Sauna accelerator and Summer of Startups. 
In 2011, Slush was organized the first time by Aaltoes and has evolved from a get-together of a few hundred to Europe’s largest startup event, hosting 17500 guests and funding hundreds of startups in 2016.

Junction Hackathon was organized the first time in 2015. The idea was to build a community around the people who are at the centre of building the products of tomorrow – the programmers and the designers. Junction 2016 was Europe’s largest hackathon with over 1300 participants and 300 unique projects.

Both Junction and Slush have grown into their own companies, still in contact with Aaltoes.

PRESENT AND THE FUTURE

Our main goal is pure and simple  – build the next generation of entrepreneurs. Over the years we’ve done this by building events targeted from the new university student to those who are already running their startup.

An event like Fall Up, brings together over 2000 students interested in entrepreneurship, and has inspired students to keep striving and reaching for bigger goals and showing that tremendous success comes only by working harder than your competitors.

We encourage people to take on their new ventures. To help startups seek further we have established series of programs, which the best of have been combined this year into Kiuas. With Kiuas we want to give startups to form their teams, and ultimately turn a validated idea into the first paying customers.

To differentiate you and your product, you need distinguishable design. That’s why this year we’re organizing our first design sprint – Dash. Our goal with Dash is to give designers a change to stand out and surpass their skills to make finnish design even more known around the world.

Contributing to the startup ecosystem of Finland is also our priority. That’s why this year we started an event series called Helsinki Tech meetup to enable the creation of a viable resource to any entrepreneur – connections.