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Help us make Finland better place for startups

We, the Finnish Startup Community, are inspired to make Finland the best place for startups.

However, we know that unfortunately that is not the reality yet. We’ve heard frequent stories on the ridiculous bureaucracy on opening bank accounts, getting your ID’s and waiting multiple hours in front of the Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) in cold windstorm. Fortunately these kind of extreme examples are thing in the past but the work is definitely not over.

That’s why we are launching this anonymous board for all startup founders, employees, immigrants or anyone likeminded to share their stories publicly. The feedback can be anything you’ve personally experienced, positive or negative. For example, if you have had to wait months for basic services, we want to hear about it. Likewise, if your work permit was obtained within 24 hours, please share these positive experiences with us as well. The Finnish Startup Community will utilize this as one of their sources on when pushing for changes which ensures that Finland is the best target country in the world for labor migration.

Posts are fully anonymous and do not require any personal information. Finnish Startup Community moderates only to ensure that the feedback is relevant and does not include any personally identifiable information.

You can read more about our work here.

This board was directly influenced by the launch of this great Portugal board

Share your experience

8 Suggestions

I wrote a piece about it with 8 concrete suggestions: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/finland-from-founder-friendly-scale-ilya-mikhalev-0b6kf/?trackingId=PYBtZyoe1m1FUFx9HCKx2g%3D%3D Copy pasting it here as well: As someone who spends most of my day on LinkedIn due to the nature of my job, I see a lot of posts and comments on how to boost economic growth and innovation in Finland, and in Europe overall. I have seen a lot of infographics comparing the sizes of unicorns from each country and how the AI boom will accelerate the future. I am not an expert on any of these topics. However, I have spent my professional life helping companies grow, so I thought I would share my point of view. I do not know if this post will get any reach, but at least it can serve as a watermark I can look back on to see whether any of these suggestions made sense or gained support. Most of my career has been in Finland, the country I love and call home. Like many others, Finland is figuring out how to grow again and adapt to the velocity and realities of the new world. A lot of great things have happened here. The startup ecosystem built over the last 10 years has grown remarkably. As someone who has been part of it, I see many right steps, and truly admire people who innovate and drive change here. It’s very possible to grow a strong 50–100 person tech company in Finland, and we’re seeing more of them every year. But scaling beyond that size while keeping talent density high is much harder, and the benefits compared to other hubs aren’t always obvious. Another perspective worth considering is the role of international companies. Before Covid we saw examples like Zalando and Unity (after the Amplifier acquisition), that continue to grow the hubs year over year with dozens of job openings Lately, there’s been less of that. As a recruiter I see the growing number of new companies and applicants per job, but not growing number of jobs and HC growth of newly founded companies. Even though major players like FAANG have entities here, they aren’t expanding their presence. If we want to strengthen talent density, it might help to focus on how to attract more international companies to build teams here—through tax incentives or other support. Still, the question persists: how do we build more great companies here that hire and increase talent density in Finland? As someone who has hired hundreds of highly skilled people and relocated dozens of families to Finland, while also hiring across Europe, I have been thinking about this and tried to articulate my observations. I do not claim to be the smartest person in the room. I may be wrong on parts, or some of these ideas have already been tried or are in progress. Either way, more visibility encourages discussion. Here is my core view, and it is positive.

1 year ago

Our employment market is too stagnant.

In Denmark, companies are very dynamic in hiring. Companies can hire for any need and see how the person performs, 6 months, 1 year, etc. Then if the relationship is not valuable anymore, company might have changed course, strategy changed, it’s easy to fire. Not having the flexibility to fire makes Finland a very stagnant country. It also leads to the problem that we have much fewer jobs open, so much fewer chances of making great employer - employee matches happen. Also for the employees, it’s much better to be in a place where they can make a valuable contribution rather than staying at a company just because it’s difficult to find a new job and because it’s difficult to fire them.

1 year ago