ACES profile: Finnish student brings entrepreneurial fervour to university

To hear Kristo Ovaska tell it, the Helsinki School of Economics came perilously close to snuffing out his entrepreneurial dreams. “It hammered the enthusiasm out of me,” says the 28-year-old Finn. The son of two entrepreneurs in fashion and design, he had entered school with a goal of starting a company. But his classmates were all studying to become bankers or consultants and Ovaska found himself following suit, pursuing studies to specialise in Russia at the Bank of Finland.

Ovaska is recounting his story a world away on a sunny spring morning in Palo Alto, California, the hub of Silicon Valley. Things have changed for Ovaska and the business culture in Finland. In 2008 Finland’s top three universities in technology, design and business merged to create an “innovation university” called Aalto – including the Helsinki School of Economics.

That’s when Ovaska embarked on a mission to help entrepreneurship flourish on the new Aalto campus. First, he founded the Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, to link start-ups and hopeful company founders, and drive a cultural revolution on campus. It rapidly attracted 5,000 members and went viral nationwide, spawning replica clubs at 10 Finnish universities within 18 months and a network that now counts 25,000 entrepreneur-enthusiasts.

A new model campus incubator

Building on that success, in 2009 Ovaska led a grassroots effort to fund Aalto Venture Garage, a new model campus-based start-up incubator. This has since helped to launch more than 50 companies, including Audiodraft, Powerkiss and Hookie Technologies.

Once accepted into Venture Garage, teams of researchers get a mentoring relationship with coaches, office space for six months and €5,000 in seed funding. Backed by Aalto, the Garage offers entrepreneurs intensive training courses, or “boot camps,” helps them connect with financiers, and sends them to technology hotspots, from Israel to Silicon Valley.

Reaching beyond Finland’s borders to connect Aalto’s start-ups to the world’s entrepreneurial and venture capital hotspots was Ovaska’s idea too. As founder and head of Silicon Valley operations for Venture Garage, Ovaska is spending two months in Palo Alto linking Aalto boot camp finalists with potential technology partners, distributors, marketers, angel investors, and even competitors. “They need to create a network and learn the culture of start-ups,” he says.

Ovaska’s achievement in forging an entrepreneurial ecosystem at Aalto impressed the university’s top officials and has won him the Science Business 2011 Academic Enterprise Bridge Award. As Ovaska sees it, Finland would do well to follow his own unconventional path. The culture of the country, he says, still nudges ambitious young students towards safe and respectable jobs in government, banks or large multinational corporations.

Starting a company is what people do when they can’t find a job, he says. “It’s a sign of failure.” But these are precisely the kind of “failures” Finland needs. The hopes that a single technology powerhouse could drive development have shrivelled as Finnish mobile telecoms giant Nokia has faltered in the smartphone marketplace. “It’s much healthier to have a thousand start-ups than one giant company,” says Sami Inkinen, one of Ovaska’s Finnish friends in Silicon Valley. Inkinen’s five-year-old real estate start-up, Trulia.com, now employs 240 people.

Russian and American inspiration

Ovaska’s conversion from would-be bank analyst to entrepreneur began in Russia. On a visit to the Moscow School of Economics, he noticed that the Russians, unlike his Finnish classmates, were eager to start companies. “That was the first eye-opener,” he says.

Soon after, he and a group of 25 economics students visited the US, making the usual stops at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington DC and the New York Stock Exchange. But Ovaska and two classmates broke away in Boston and visited the Center for Entrepreneurship at MIT. There they saw the student-run $100,000 Entrepreneurship Competition in action. Inspired, Ovaska immediately made plans to postpone his master’s studies in economics in order to launch something similar in Finland.

Back at Aalto University, which was then developing its first multidisciplinary programmes, he started to pull together students, friends and friends-of-friends into a society for start-ups. A Canadian professor of entrepreneurship, Peter Kelly, hired him as an assistant and helped get funding for the Aalto Entrepreneurship Society. In its first year, the group sponsored some fifty events, from financing seminars to technology workshops. The Society’s aim is spearhead cultural change in Finnish society by spreading awareness and interest in start-ups, says Ovaska.

Start-up Sauna

The next step was Venture Garage. Ovaska led a student initiative to raise €500,000 and convinced the university to turn a building with 700 square meters of open space into a hub for start-ups and networking. One board member, Tina Selig, who managed the Stanford Venture Program, provided valuable connections in Silicon Valley.

Ovaska quickly took the Garage’s six-week boot camp programme international, branding it “Startup Sauna.” It expanded Aalto’s impact to far-flung campuses by offering coaching to start-up teams from Finland, Sweden, the Baltic states and Russia. For the Sauna programme starting next month, Venture Garage received 300 applicants and selected ten.

In addition to the boot camp training and mentoring, all ten teams will receive a week of experience and networking in Silicon Valley under a new three-year alliance between the entrepreneurship programmes at Stanford University and Aalto. At the end of the Venture Sauna programme, the most promising two or three teams will be awarded $10,000 seed money, office space in the Venture Garage and mentoring, and a two-month networking trip to Silicon Valley.

“The most important thing is to get out there and learn fast [how the ecosystem works],” Ovaska says. Three start-ups who graduated from the Aalto Garage boot camp have raised $5 million in Silicon Valley venture investments over the past 18 months.

Angry Birds

To foster an entrepreneurial culture Finland needs success stories that inspire others, and Aalto is already generating role models, thanks in part to Ovaska. One of the most important, he says, is Rovio Mobile, a start-up located just a short walk from the Venture Garage. Rovio is the developer of Angry Birds, a gaming sensation that has been downloaded more than 100 million times.

In March Rovio raised $42 million from investors including Silicon Valley-headquartered Accel Partners and Atomico, the London-based fund set up by Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström. “Having a company like that founded by people from our school is an amazing catalyst for the culture and our people,” Ovaska says. “The main guys from Angry Birds are coaching our start-ups.”

So has all this entrepreneurial ferment inspired Ovaska to start a company of his own? Yes, he says. A year ago he launched FunRank, which created mobile apps to lead people to local events ranging from concerts to art exhibits. But the start-up stalled early on. “We weren’t able to recruit coders fast enough,” he says. After five months, Ovaska pulled the plug.

If the Finnish start-up ecosystem created by Ovaska continues on its current trajectory, finding coders – and serial entrepreneurs with deep pockets to finance promising start-ups at Aalto – should become much easier. Ovaska aims to complete his master’s this year, and beat a path back to Silicon Valley to join a young company, or start his own.

There aren’t too many entrepreneurs who build an industry first, and follow it up with a company. But Ovaska clearly enjoys veering from the expected course.