I'm a student at Aalto.
There is promise, there are some communities with really, really smart people. But this article feels like it hypes the government.
Personally I do not agree with the government throwing a bunch of money at things, it creates a loop of nonsense, people milking the cow while the fun lasts. This can be seen and heard on the ground level here. Throwing money at companies is something Tekes has done for ages with established companies in Finland, like Nokia. The startups are just the hot thing now so money is flowing there.
This leads to the fact that the startup scene is hyped in general.
Please note that this comment is quite specific to Finland.
I've heard bad things on HN (possibly from yourself) about government startup funding in Finland - something along the lines of there are a small number of entrepreneurs favoured by the government who receive investments and produce some mediocre product doomed to fail and repeat semi-regularly.
Is this anything close to the truth or did I misunderstand/mis-remember this?
As far as I know there is no "favoritism" for goverment grants . Like any fundraising, there are those are better / more experienced with it and those who aren't.
But the real problem is that the government officials are not investors. Steve Blank said this well on his visit:
Ironically one of the things that’s holding back the Finnish cluster is Tekes, the government organization for financing research, development and innovation in Finland. It’s hard enough to pick which existing companies with known business models to aid. Yet Tekes does that and is trying to act like a government-run Venture Capital firm. At Tekes, government employees (and their hired consultants) – with no equity, no risk or reward, no startup or venture capital experience – try to pick startup winners and losers.
I'm from Finland, from what I have heard and seen about the government funding companies is that they usually fund companies with a clear plan and with founders with a lot of experience in their field (that is have worked their whole life in the field/phds).
Running a software company in Stockholm, Sweden is a blast. It is a great place to live, plenty of good people to recruit, a decent domestic market, e.g. many big companies willing to try out services from startups. There is a vast number of small tech companies here, most of them completely unknown. Every week I learn about some cool new company doing their thing just around the block from us, without ever having heard of the people involved.
There are some major caveats: Income taxes are extremely high and tax rules makes it almost impossible to share ownership in a rational way, e.g. it is very hard to setup stock option programs etc. Also, the domestic venture capital market is extremely underdeveloped - a great opportunity for foreign investors!
I am a firm opponent of all government programs to stimulate entrepreneurship. My view is that the government should simply get out of the way. And in fact, except for the taxes, this is by and large what the Swedish government is doing. For example, there is very little bureaucracy around running a business, e.g. starting an incorporated company is now done easily over the internet, often the whole process can be completed in a matter of days.
Out of interest, do you think it’d be easy to get into the startup scene with minimal Swedish? My wife is Swedish and we have in the past considered a move to Stockholm but my Swedish is absolutely not fluent (although were we to do it I’d enrol in an evening course as soon as we moved).
Getting by in Stockholm won't be a problem: you can safely assume that people within the start-up scene are fluent in English. You'll be met with a slightly different kind of problem: as communicating in English is so effortless, you'll have few opportunities to really practice your Swedish.
Hah, yeah, I know the Swede’s proclivity for English :) Just wasn’t sure that it’d be acceptable to speak it in a business context. That’s interesting for sure.
I've been in Stockholm for 1.5 years now. When I arrived, I didn't know a single word of swedish (I've taken classes since, but not in a very productive way), and things have been just fine. Like another said, I'm not improving so much because I have very few incentives to do so.
Our monthly Python meetings in Gothenburg are almost always in English. In part because it was founded by two native English speakers, in part because there are other non-Swedish speakers who come, in part because many of the software courses are in English, and in part because almost all of the literature and documentation is in English.
And of course, in large part because this is effectively a bilingual country. In the years I've been here, I've only talked with a handful of native-born Swedes who did not speak English. Those were older people who had learned German as a student. (There are non-native-born Swedes, like immigrants from Chile who speak fluent Spanish and Swedish, whose English can be poor.)
I agree with Matti - doing business in Stockholm without knowing Swedish is no problem. Swedes are generally fluent in English and most often they enjoy speaking it. I know several foreigners who run startups here without bothering to learn the local language.
I had to go to Stockholm a few years ago. It was somewhat short notice, so I didn't have time to brush up on my Swedish. I knew how to say "thank you", and "Sweden", and that was that.
On the first evening I had a bit of difficulty operating the keycard outside the hotel. A chap came up to me and started talking, presumably explaining how to use it. "Murgle burgle burgle wurgle furgle", he said, or something like that. I must have looked blank for about 0.1 seconds before he slipped, with barely a beat, into flawless, unaccented English. And the first English words out of his mouth were, "Oh, sorry..." :)
(This was not a unique experience. Even the petrol station attendants spoke great English. You don't even get that in England.)
It's crazy hard in Gothenburg, at least for some place I wanted to live. I've heard that Stockholm is worse. If you're a single person, willing to share an apartment with someone else, then you can rent just a room ("inneboende"). That's likely the easiest. You can also look for a sublease ("andrahandskontrakt"). But getting a lease ("förstahandskonrakt") is hard. Parts of town require you to be on a waiting list which can be up to 5 years long. For Gothenburg, I was on the list for 1.5 years for a lease before we gave up and moved to the smaller city of Trollhättan.
No startup scene, but a 1,300 sq. ft. apartment in the center of town (3bd, 1.5 ba) goes for only $1,500/month, and the commuter train to Gothenburg takes about 45 minutes.
If you have money you can get a "business apartment" for about 2x the normal rate. Those are pretty easy to find. But you'll need to have a business first (even one in the US) to rent it.
You can get an idea of what's available using the aggregator http://kvalster.se/Stockholm . When a place is "1 rum" it means studio, "2 rum" means "living room and bedroom", etc. As a decent approximation, 1sq meter is 10 sq. feet.
Rates in the tech area of Kista look about $700 for a shared room/studio. In Södermalm I see prices more around $800 for a room/studio, though you can pay a lot more. (350 sq. ft studio apartment, furnished, for one month rental while the owner is overseas, $1264 for the month.)
Förstahandskontrakt is more like 17 years in the most popular parts (Vasastan in Stockholm).
It is possible to get a sublet or such but it tends to be expensive and quite time consuming. A lot of scams going around as well so one has to be careful. Prices indicated above seem quite accurate.
17 years? Wow! Last I read was a couple of years ago, and it was definitely only about 5 then.
But when I first moved to Gbg it was easy to get a 2nd-hand contract. Now it's nearly impossible. I read that there was a change ~5 years ago in the law to make it financially better for the Bfr to switch from rental to co-op, so I can see how that would also affect Stockholm.
Well, if I want my children to retire in Vasastan then I should put their name on the list soon. (And have children, but that ruins the joke.)
The market for apartments is not a strong point for Stockholm. You can get an apartment rather easily, but it is not cheap compared to similar cities in Europe.
Some current listings from the Swedish equivalent of Craigslist:
I'm involved in the startup scene in Norway, and it seems to me that there are mainly two sources of real money; oil (gas/offshore/etc) and fish, considering both private and public funding. It doesn't look to me like unrelated tech startups gain any special advantages by being in Norway.
I grew up in a community in the North of Scotland that was dominated by fishing (more oil these days) and most boat-owning skippers were pretty much risk-seeking entrepreneurs - with pretty big rewards possible (certainly well into F-you money).
The chapter on Iceland in Boomering Michael Lewis where he describes how the risk seeking fishermen were maybe not the best choice to become investment bankers reminded me a lot of people I knew when I was younger.
I partially agree. Norway is a pretty small country - and folks here, it's seems, would rather sit on cafés drinking coffy and "solving the problems of the world" rather than getting into the hard world of entrepreneurship. There's just not that many good ideas to fund here (?) There's some gov. initiative, and now they are also open sourcing more (of our) data (and even throws in a competition: www.apps4norge.no)
Also IMHO, Scandinavians needs to stop blaming the "law of Jante" all the time - maybe we should take a look at ourself instead? :)
I'm from Lithuania (that is Baltic state, but http://www.arcticstartup.com/ includes Baltic states in their news coverage). I'm constantly getting offers from various startups without looking for them.
EDIT: basically if you want to start company here you can get help from forming team, getting training, getting a little bit money and etc.
I've been around the scene about 5 years (one of the founders of ArcticStartup which was mentioned in the article).
I think the Economist is pretty accurate on the fact that there is lot of bubbling but takes time and experience to actually build something big and successful. SV has had the mindset, experience and infrastructure for decades. We are just starting now.
Lund, Sweden, here. Currently doing a SaaS mobile project in my startup.
Malmö has a great startup scene with Foo Cafe and other gatherings. In Lund you have LTH, Ericsson, Ideon, etc so there's a lot of tech talent there as well.
Anyone, feel free to hit me up for free coffee in our Malmö office :)
