Aiven joins forces with Slush to define the future of entrepreneurship

What is Slush?

Slush is the world’s leading startup event. Hosted in Helsinki, Finland every November, the event has 25,000+ attendees and facilitates meetings between the world’s most promising startups and venture capitalists. With matchmaking and pitching competitions, Slush has built an exciting community of the most innovative minds in tech.

Slush has also built an education program - Slush Academy, which aims to accelerate the learning process for young entrepreneurs with mentorship from experienced founders through a 3-month summer program. The Slush event in Helsinki as well as the Slush Academy program have been put on hold in 2020 due to COVID-19, so the company has since focused on research.

Entrepreneurship Redefined

Most recently, Slush has published research on startups, investors, and the state of tech. Their most recent publication is called ‘Entrepreneurship Redefined’. In the 97 page publication, Slush presents data collected from 3,500 companies, 2,000 investors, and 10,000 event attendees, including data on 10,000 pre-booked meetings during past Slush events.

In addition to this data, Slush has conducted 60 anonymous interviews with some of the most influential founders, investors, and operators in tech, and pulled in 5,000 survey responses collected for their ‘State of European Tech’ publication in 2019.

The result is a compelling look at modern entrepreneurship, including a look into the near future with predictions for the 2020s. Diversity and inclusivity, purpose-driven change, and revolutionary innovation are the key narratives - and these, according to their findings, will dominate the decade. At Aiven, we tend to agree with them.

Aiven’s support for forward-thinking research

We’re working towards a new age of entrepreneurship alongside Slush and other innovative companies across the world. The core message of this research is that success stems from diversity, purpose-driven change, and revolutionary innovation. Starting a conversation about the shortfalls of the startup ecosystem is the first step in driving change for the better.

Aiven will be at the forefront of these discussions throughout this new decade, and we hope that entrepreneurs, academic researchers, government officials and creatives will work together to generate the revolutionary innovation that humankind desperately needs.

Download the full PDF version of ‘Entrepreneurship Redefined’ here.