The Startup Sauna starts as a series of events held in differents cities in the Baltics and the Nordics region, called Startup Sauna Warmup. The best teams found in the Warmup events will be invited to the Aalto Venture Garage to the Startup Sauna Intensive program.

In addition the teams will be offered:

1) Mentoring from the best serial entrepreneurs and investors from the region

2) A free office space during the program

3) Seed funding to cover the costs during the program

Check out the teams from our last program from here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5127311/Startup%20Sauna/110617_dd%20hand%20out.jpg

This Friday saw Aalto Venture Garage’s biggest Demo day yet as 200+ investors, media, fellow startups and other supporters filled the space to witness the development and current state of the 13 Sauna teams.

Startup Sauna is the accelerator program run at Aalto Venture Garage and Aaltoes, that hunts down the best startups and teams in the Baltics and the Nordics. The selected Sauna finalists are then gathered to the Garage at in Otaniemi in Aalto University Campus where they start developing…with sweat.

Today the Startup Sauna program was concluded with a Demo day that selected three winners from the batch, Campalyst, Ovelin and Futureful. Campalyst offers an analytics platform for measuring social media return-on-investment thus helping its clients optimize online brand management. The Campalyst team comprises of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. As Jevgenijs Kazanins from Campalyst tells, what the Sauna really reinforced in the team was to get out of the Baltics and think global. And now with Sauna, Seedcamp and several clients to show on their resume, the quickly moving startup is definitely expected to go places. Our warmest congratulations!

The winning team gets a 5000-euro prize, sponsored by Technopolis, International VC Zone and Aalto Venture Garage as well as an office space at the Garage’s startup corridor.

The winner was selected based on four criteria, explains Juha Ruohonen, head coach to Startup Sauna. Firstly, the panel of coaches looked at the market potential of the business idea, and especially how Sauna can further help the teams reach their full potential after the program. Also important factors in selecting the top-3 were team commitment demonstrated throughout the program as well as the development each team and their product has undergone in the past six weeks.

Second winner is Ovelin, creating an app to facilitate learning to play the guitar, and whose charming product you can read all about in the recent edition of TechCrunch. Futureful, the predictive discovery engine that makes Google look simple was awarded the third winner of the day. Additionally, social carpoolers Sunyride were nominated for the best demo of the batch.

The day’s been filled with excitement and the athmosphere of a big sporting event, as the Sauna graduation festivities include motivational speeches by Thomas Johansson, an Olympic Winner in sailing and Wili Miettinen of Microtask, as well as a top-chef BBQ by the pool-and-sauna village. Thanks to all who contributed to making the day so fantastic!

When we visited the Dannish Center for Innovation in Silicon Valley, something caught my eye, there was a poster  that caught my attention. The simple poster states seven principles of good brainstorming and idea generation.  During the trip, we learned and experienced so much  that it became clear that the poster captured more broadly lot of the Silicon Valley attitude, spirit and culture.

Here are the seven principles of good brainstorming and idea generations

Defer Judgment

A well-known brainstorming technique, but in Silicon Valley it is a more profound principle. It is the “open-ness” that lets ideas to live and evolve in the whole ecosystem. In practice, you’ll just have to listen and respect other people’s ideas, and not fall for critical analysis and “it will not work because…” –attitude.  A culture of sharing ideas simply is not possible if ideas get shot down fast.

Build on the Ideas of Others

Vast majority of successful innovations are old ideas done differently or applied in another context, or new combinations of existing ideas. Silicon Valley is a machine for this. Dozens of events every week, people openly discussing on what they are working on, hundreds or thousands interactions a week… it’s just a matter of statistics how many killer-ideas are generated. In this game of innovation those who hold back their own ideas will not stand a chance against Silicon Valleys connectedness, openness and fast pace.

Encourage Wild Ideas

Looking close and confining to ‘rules’ you will only find small and easy problems to solve. Thinking laterally and out-of-the-box, being open and receptive you’ll get new perspectives and see new solutions to problems, sometimes wild and crazy. To work on these high-risk ideas, you need an atmosphere where it is ok to fail and ok to try again.  And ok to succeed big time on a wild idea.

One Conversation at a Time and Stay Focused on the Topic

This is about execution. In the game of speed you must know what to achieve next, be it customer feedback of the latest pivot, a financing round or getting first customers, and then go for it. Loose focus, get distracted and you’ll loose your speed.

Be visual

In almost every discussion, or pitching about what you do, you’ll get the “Can you show me a demo?” question in 30 seconds. Without a demo you are just waving hands trying to express abstract ideas, but a demo makes things explicit and tangible. Be visual in every level: whiteboard sketches, screen mockups, business model canvases, product demos, etc..  The most important reason for being visual is getting feedback. For abstract ideas you will get abstract feedback, but for visually presented ideas you’ll get concrete feedback. And feedback is what let’s you learn about the problem you are solving, your product and customers. Be visual to be able to pivot!

Go for Quantity

Always looking for the “big one”, not being afraid to fail and positivism. This attitude taken into an ecosystem that is capable carrying ideas far, creating and supporting large success stories, is the recipe for the “next big thing”, as it has been for so many in the past.

Silicon Valley is about innovation, execution, feedback and fearless ambition, all captured in a single signboard. This is my takeaway lesson from the trip.

- Antero Järvi -

After the journey to Palo Alto and a nice welcome dinner in the Fish Market an epic week in the Silicon valley begun.

This was the first time we were in the Silicon valley and everything seemed so cool, and to make it even cooler – it turned out that the first activity that was planned in the valley was Surfing lessons in the sunny beaches of Santa Cruz. Trying to catch the waves and stand up on the surfboard was a fun and new experience. And it involved a lot of falling off the board until we succeeded and got to stand up for a second.

Overall this week was great and it would take too much space to describe all of the cool people we met and all the things we did, so i will just put here some of the highlights from this week (31.05.11 – 05.06.11)

I’ll start with the Monday. The highlight of the day was meeting with Sami Inkinen – President and Co-Founder of Trulia. Their office building was quite amazing(we’ll take one of those). Shortly after gathering the group we introduced ourselves and our projects and got some feedback, after that we got to hear Sami’s story about Trulia and how he started it and what it took to go from nothing to something. And that was quite awesome, and even more so becouse this was our first big story from the Valley. During the meeting we found out that Sami was going to participate in Iron Man qualification event that was supposed to happen in the next day after our meeting.

Tuesday we had very packed day – we checked out some Co-Working spaces(Founders den, Rocket Space etc) and after that we went to meet Steve Blank. He was one inspirational meeting. Steve is a guy who has worked his way with amazing dedication and he is realy passionate about the thing he does. He told us his story and gave some great insights of what is what. He realy has inspirational personality(and also an awesome view from his ranch.)

After meeting with Steve we went off to our next meeting. And here starts the fun part – roads in California mountains are soo damn curvy, and the planned easy ride turned into something very weird. Yeah.

Ok, after we finally arrived at our next meeting that was scheduled to happen at “Bella Vita’s” in Los Altos. This meeting was with Mårten Mickos, the former CEO of MySQL. That was a meeting we were looking forward to scince we heard about it. When we met him turned out that he was realy fun and open person and he gave us a lot of insight in working with team that is scattered all across the globe. Also we had a few more discussions about MySQL(after all this is what allmost every single web geek uses) and some opinions on one of our potential business models. The meal went on and we made an awesome picture for startup sauna sticker contest. Nice.

Then came Wednesday – this was interesting one. We finally got to see some real lawyers from the silicon valley, first impressions were great and now i can see where all of those startups can easily spend all of their money.

The Next highlight was meeting Robert Scobble, the meeting lasted for around 3/4 hours and the meeting place was Ritz hotel (quite the high end hotel). We talked about a lot of general stuff, mostly topics somehow involved a little bit of Nokia talk. And then came the camera. Teams got to pitch their idea on Scobbl-cam and some of the lucky teams even got to see Roberts house. The filming was fun and a lot of interesting stuff happened while the filming was going on. Another place and another topic for that stuff tho.

Thursday – the day of VC’s. This was the day we got to meet some of the top tier VC’s from the Valley. We met with DFJ and Sequoia those were some interesting meetings and we finally saw that the guys so high up are not scary at all, they were really cool. We pitched and pitched our ideas and got some interesting feedback from those meetings. After that the group split up a little and went to different meetings – MF also split up to see one of our potential Clients and to go and speak with Jussi from Applifier – he was one awesomely stright forward guy and the feedback he gave was amazing. No BS just everything how it is.

Friday – the final official day of Startup Sauna week in USA. This day was also quite tight but with something special in the evening. After meeting and checking out Venture beat offices we went off to see RocketSpace, I/O Ventures (Fave of the Mightyfingers), met up with Jyri Engeström. And then came the big event of the day – BBQ at the BlackBox Mansion.

The BBQ was fun, but also serious, we got to network with quite a lot of SiliconValley Startups (and not only startups) got to see how guys live and work here and of course – there was meat grilling and beer drinking. It was awesome.

Then came Saturday, the teams went off to see 500Startups co-working space and talked about hardships involved in moving to silicon valley from europe, about how to get in these spaces and a lot of other usefull stuff.

After that some teams started preparing for their Flights back to Alto Venture Garage in Finland, some prepared for a little celebration in the evening some others just enjoyed themselves.

Cheers to everybody already back to Finland, MightyFingers are flying back on Wednesday!

Here is a compilation of Robert Scobble video interviews.

Kristo Ovaska

FutureFul

Mighty Fingers

Campalyst

Fundfriends

The weeklong trip will focus on getting a snapshop of Silicon Valley.  The teams have a lot of scheduled meeting and events but were highly encourage to set up their own meeting. The aim of the trip is to get the Sauna startups as much feedback from potential customers, partners, investors and competitors.

During the week, they will be meeting local startups such as YC alumni: Likealittle and Crowdbooster. They will also be visiting co-working places as SSE Labs, I/O ventures and Rocketspace. The teams will also have the privilege of spending time with Steve Blank, Robert Scoble, and Mårten Mickos.  The week will end on Friday  with a pitching event at Blackbox.

Kristo Ovaska, the founder of Aalto Venture Garage in Finland, has been living in Silicon Valley for the past 3 months. He has been setting operations in Silicon Valley and already helping Finnish startups in the Valley such as DealMachine and Audiodraft.   It is because  of him that the Startup Sauna has great connections for this trip.“For someone from the Nordics and Baltics, the culture of Silicon Valley is a slap in the face. It’s so different that what we are uses to.” Ovaska says.

For the past week, Ovaska has been training the teams of the Startup Sauna . He has been coaching them on how to work in Valley and how to get the most out of the week.  “Its all about getting the right introduction with the right people and not wasting anybody’s time. People in Silicon Valley react very fast, everything is a on a faster paste in the Valley.”

The Culture
If you’re aiming for global markets you should think global. The best way to widen your views is to go abroad and learn from different markets and different people. For that the Bay Area is an excellent place to get started. The entrepreneurial culture there is a real eye opener. People are really open-minded and helping other entrepreneurs because they have been helped and will be helped in the future as well. Entrepreneurs have mindset and passion for building success stories. And if you fail it’s not the end of the world but rather seen as a valuable learning process.

The Knowledge
The Bay Area gathers together the most successful people from all over the world. There are events everyday where you can learn from these people. Not just by listening a star keynote speaker but by networking as well. Networking should actually be a crucial part of your business development. When talking to new people with different backgrounds you will always get valuable feedback and ideas. It’s up to you whether you act on the feedback or not since you usually know your own business better.

Grabbing the opportunities
Once you’ve arrived in the valley, you’ll soon realize the amount of networking and pitching events, hacker workshops, tech summits and fairs etc. There are so many opportunities out there, so be sure to have some reasonable filter on when you’re planning your moves. We would like to emphasize the fact that you should pre-plan your visit to some extent. You want to take the most out of your trip right? You don’t want to be use all your time to talking to people who are totally irrelevant to you or spending days doing the exact same things you could be doing at your home office.

Before you start your trip you should scout companies and people you would like to meet and mark events of your interest in your calendar. Set up your first company meetings one week before you leave to the Valley. If you can’t find a proper contact person on the company web site, LinkedIn can be a valuable resource to find the right match. We made valuable meetings become reality just by finding right persons on LinkedIn and sending introduction e-mails to them. Just be sure to contact a person that is in a relevant position to make decisions that you would like to achieve. In US you just might have to contact the companies more often to make the meetings happen. Compared to Scandinavian culture, you’ll just have to be slightly more aggressive to get to your goal. Don’t, however, fall into the trap of being desperate about getting the meeting done. Be determined.

Networking is much more easier and fluent in the Bay Area events. People are forthcoming and it’s much more easier to start a casual conversation. Sometimes it’s better to attend the events alone. Then you actually have to network with the people around you, as you don’t have your friends hanging next to you. In case you have your Finnish peers around you, don’t just stick talking with – go out there and discover new people. It’s always good to have someone with you who can make good introductions at the events, so get to know the local key players. As a thumb of rule, try to be relaxed and yourself and you’ll do just fine – it’s vague and transparent to play any roles.

Get out to the Valley to learn and get the feel of the culture. Whether you should stay there is totally up to you. It’s not the place for every startup, but you can think about it as a school for entrepreneurship. While learning figure out whether it’s a place for your business as well.

Read more blogs from DealMachine
Learning jumps to a whole another level when you spend time actually working in the Bay Area. A well-spent month in the Valley pretty much equals one year of working in Finland. If I could do things again, instead of coming here for two weeks in October 2010, I would have worked here for at least a month.
The sooner you start getting quality feedback from the right people, the sooner you’ll start making changes that will enable your startup to survive the intense competition of the Valley.

1. Learn to hustle
Everyone always talks about how hard startups need to work. In Finland, you get a wrong impression of what that means: building a great app is only a small part of what you need to do. In the Valley you’ll understand what hustling actually means.
The analogy of coming from SM-liiga to the NHL is a cliché, but so true.
The Valley has some of the world’s smartest, hungriest people who move fast and have laser-sharp focus on what they do. They make do with minimal amount of money and do everything (from driving around potential customers dealing out donuts) to make sure people hear from them.

2. Do customer development to understand true value
Customer development means that you seek to understand what problem your product solves, and how much value you create by solving that problem.
Only, if the monetary value for solving that problem is greater than its price, people will buy it. Through small iterations you improve this product/market fit.
You should spend a great deal of your time here getting feedback, because good constructive feedback is hard to find. And when you get that feedback, don’t get all defensive about it – suck it up and learn!
If/when, on the other hand, your product gets people excited, you can get advice on how to make it even better for prime-time. The key is to stay open and keep on asking feedback from anyone and everyone you can.

3. Don’t focus on investors all that much
I was taught early on that I should be constantly pitching to investors – that getting funded is the main objective. From what I have learned during the past months, it’s probably one of the last things an early-stage startup should think about.
First of all, investors move real slow, so you run out of money anyway if you start waiting for them. Second, when you happen to get mad traction, the investors will be likely to approach you anyway. Third, even if you happen to get funded, it doesn’t mean you will succeed.
4. Build your network
There are generally two ways of getting to talk with the right people: bump into them when they are receptive (i.e. a networking event) or get their attention through an introduction.
Getting introduced is the more effective way. You can get one-on-one time even with CEO-level people if a person they trust introduces you. Make sure you’re worth that trust, though!
If you don’t have a person to do introductions, you must rely on bumping into people in networking events. This adds randomness to who you are actually going to meet, which can be reduced by following people on Twitter, Plancast and other similar networks to know where they are going to.
Remember that people of importance are surrounded by people asking questions in these kinds of events. Asking relevant questions helps cutting through the competition.

Notes on meetings and asking for help
People in the Valley are generally surprisingly helpful, at least when you are introduced to them by the right person. You normally get 10-20 minutes of their time so don’t waste it! Briefly explain the problem you solve and if possible, do a demo on how you solve it. This should only take 1 minute.

After that, ask for feedback and mostly be quiet. If asked a question, answer as briefly as possible and don’t start explaining yourself or get defensive, you are wasting time! This seems to be hard for us Finns.

Offer to leave a little bit early to show that you don’t want to waste time.

Finally, try to get a next step out of this meeting. Ask politely if they can introduce you to someone relevant. Thank them and offer to help them out if needed.
Follow up as fast as possible afterwards.

Here are the selected teams:

	An analytical platform for measuring ROI of social media
Double Defense	A sticker that can determine if your packages in the mail have been tampered with
Fluorescent Nanoscopy :	Nanoscale imaging to show biological specimens in 3D in their native environment
	A game that helps track your personal finances
	A predictive discovery engine
	Customer availability & resource utilization analytics
Mighty Fingers	HTML/HTML5/JS based game platform.
Ovelin	Combines gaming with music exercises for guitar
Solu	Value added services to mobile customers in Africa
SunyRide	Social car-pooling service
	A teamwork platform
Twonicorn	Creates toys for social change
Walkbase (ex-Mobio)	Verifying your check-ins on location-based services

Further information regarding the program itself may be found in our earlier coverage.