Earlier this year I participated in the Finance Innovation hackathon in Oslo. Our team came up with the winning idea that we like to call Bridgely. Part of the prize for winning were free tickets to Slush. Slush is an event I had never heard about before but maybe I should have. And that’s why, me and the team from the hackathon headed to Helsinki, Finland to see what it was all about.

Before Slush even started there was lots of information about different things to do around the event. Slush provides a matchmaker that I could use to set up meetings with people looking to invest, recruit or just discuss ideas. I tried to make the most of this and booked 15 meetings during the event. Two people canceled but I had expected more to do this. Some incredibly interesting people did however meet with me and I learned lots of new things. I felt that even if I had purchased the Slush ticket myself it would still have been worth the money. The only real problem I faced was that every hour was booked with maybe 3-4 different things that I wanted to do from 8 am to 3am.

A robot that serves beer, a wall of donuts and satellites in space

One of the more exiting experiences happened when me and one of my friends got invited to the Reaktor x Supercell afterparty at the Reaktor office in Helsinki. There I got to see and try a beer from their beer serving robot. They also had a wall filled with fresh donuts that you could simply just take and eat whenever you felt like it. The most interesting thing that I saw was their Reaktor Hello World satellite which they had just recently launched. What is shown in the picture is a replica without all the internal gadgets. It was really interesting to hear what it took to launch a satellite for the first time. There were a lot of challenges and they seemed to have learned a lot along the way.

Slush 2019

As I said, I plan to attend Slush again in 2019. If there is one important thing I learned from Slush 2018 it is that I should try to leave some room between meetings. I sometimes had 4 meetings in a row and it can make things a bit hectic. This is because you have no time to run between different meeting areas.

I look forward to seeing some of those I met this year again next year. I am sure I will make many more new connections in the future.