HELSINKI, Finland – The warm welcome meted out to the Skolkovo delegation at Europe’s biggest startup conference last week shows that Russia is becoming a key player on the international tech scene, but the organization can’t rest on its laurels, says Pekka Viljakainen, an advisor to the organization’s president.
Skolkovo sent more than 50 startups to Helsinki for Slush 2014, with all taking turns to exhibit on the Skolkovo stand and seven participating in the pitch contest at the two-day event.
“Skolkovo is a known brand, that’s not an issue,” said Viljakainen, one of the original founding partners of Slush who is now based in Moscow. “But still people think it’s a political project, or PR for Russia. But when people see these companies on stage – it’s like when a Japanese investor said he never understood that Skolkovo is so mature, that there are really like 1,200 companies,” he added.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich viewing the Skolkovo stand at Slush. Photo: Sk.ru
“So I think that any three- or four-year-old, we can walk. We are not crawling any more. Now we have to learn to run. And run faster than the others. We will not run faster without practice. … We have to set our bar high enough for that.”
Meanwhile, for seven Skolkovo startups, the Slush 100 pitching competition was a learning experience.
They had been among 100 finalists selected by an expert panel from a thousand applicants to compete at Europe’s biggest startup conference in Helsinki this week, with 250,000 euros in investment on offer to the winner.
But the latter stages proved a step too far in a competition that saw Skolkovo’s WayRay finish runner-up last year.
Element 22 CEO Alexey Kosachev pitches power-storage technology at Slush as the judges look on. Photo: sk.ru
This time, despite the fraught political climate hanging over Europe, hopes were high that the feat could at least be repeated, especially after protracted applause from the audience following each Skolkovo presentation.
But the judges didn’t agree, and the winner’s check went to Enbrite.ly, a firm that claims to have a 98% accuracy rate in locating people on the internet for online advertising. Such was the belief in the project that the sponsors of the competition, the Finnish Business Angels Network and Evli Bank, doubled the investment to 500,000 euros.
“We can say that we didn’t make it,” Viljakainen said. “But there are several hundred companies that were participating. I would hope that in the top ten there would be one or two, but if not, then we were not good enough. The way the companies are selected is a very transparent way. … We just have to be better, we have to run faster than the others.”
Alluding to the political difficulties facing Europe today, the only chill at Slush was to be felt was in the Baltic breeze, Viljakainen said.
Pekka Viljakainen
“I couldn’t see any of that, not a single comment anywhere,” he said. “We had 2,500 people watching our panel discussion with Mr. Dvorkovich, the reactions were positive there,” he added, referring to the fireside chat with Russia’s leaders of innovation.
“We had 720 people at our Skolkovo official VIP event. There were just 500 seats. There was a heck of a lot of attention. I cannot see any discrimination. In this particular field, in a very positive way, this is the answer to the sanctions. It was a very open-arms event. Slush gave us seven full-time people to help our companies, we had Russian-speaking Finns there helping, so I felt that Russia is warmly welcomed by the international startup community. But they have to run faster.”