Wisdom from unicorn tech founders: notes from Tech Cornwall at Slush 2024

 

Slush is the biggest tech startup conference in Europe and is probably one of the biggest gatherings of Venture Capital in the world, with 4+ trillion in assets under management under one roof for 2 days.

It’s often described as the ‘Glastonbury Festival’ for tech startups. As a bit of a Glasto Fest veteran (20+ years), I’d say I have to agree!

• Infamous mud at Glasto? Slush isn’t called Slush for fun, it’s winter in Helsinki and that means snow and slush.
• Multiple stages and epic line-up? At this year’s Slush I had the opportunity to see the founders of Twitch, Vinted, NVidia, Figma and Revolut speak along with the President of Finland, plus a whole bunch of others. As a tech enthusiast, yes I fangirled. I’ll share some of their wisdom later.
• Discovering new artists? One of my favourite things about Glastonbury Festival is the discovery of new music, and at Slush, the same goes for startups. Founders are out there, solving real-world problems and rallying for support and pitching for investment. It’s humbling and inspiring.
• Music, vibes, serendipitous moments, spontaneous dancing and epic after-hours parties. Some of my most interesting meetings happened accidentally or in queues and brilliant partnerships and introductions were made between DJ sets and karaoke changeovers.
• Randomly bumping into your mates. Somehow, even with 200k people at Glasto, this happens to me regularly. Slush has 13k people and thanks to Cornwall Trade & Investment who brought 10 Cornwall-based founders with them, there was always someone to share news and happenings with. Stella, our coach for Cornwall Slush’D also connected us with all of the other Slush’D event organisers from across the world (30+!) so it was like having a constant big group of friends to collaborate with at different points throughout the conference.
• A positive culture of generosity and driving change. This one is a biggie. The sheer volume of people willing to share their advice, and experience, open their network to you and make your pathway just a little bit easier, whether you’re a founder or just someone trying to drive positive change, is amazing!

 

Wisdom from four founders

(quotes may be paraphrased, all videos are online, I’ve linked each one I saw for your convenience)

Alexander Stubbs, President of Finland

Alexander called for global AI governance and legislation around AI. Hear hear.

Chris Malachowsky, Founder, NVIDIA shared some wisdom from his 40 years in the industry. 

• “Good judgement is the result of experience and experience is the result of bad judgement. Get your ideas out there, get them better and criticised. Get them qualified because not all products and ideas are good ones. Bias toward action”. I fully agree. We’ve launched Cornwall Demo Night with Canopy Community to help local founders do just this!
• He also said “Start with the result you want and engineer the systems to get it that way” and quoted Peter Drucker, “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

 

Milda Mitkute, Co-Founder of Vinted, discussed becoming Lithuania’s first unicorn and finding a good successor. 

• Milda said that starting Vinted was purely for selfish reasons – she had clothes to sell. She started a website which validated the market and developed the app after two years which “changed everything”. The website cost them £3k to build and felt like a hobby project. 
• Their first investor joined seeing their potential and steered them on the investor journey. Vinted raised £350m for over a billion valuation. Milda’s big lesson was “Done is better than perfect. Never try and launch the perfect product. Don’t worry about the business model, go for traction and growth”. 
• Milda wanted to start a family. That’s when she doubled down on the business model and how to make a profit. She put a successor in place and her advice when choosing a successor was not to be afraid of new views and doing things. Hand over slowly, delegate, and create teams and ensure that the successor has a similar culture set and aligned values. Treat them like a late co-founder to help embed them. Check your ego and let them do what they need to do. 
• Milda is now a mother to four boys and whilst on maternity leave did 3 Master’s degrees!

 

Haikel Balti, CEO & Founder, Faircraft was fascinating. His company has created high-performance leather material targeting luxury brands (lab-grown skin/leather!) He shared actionable advice on getting your first clients and market traction:

• Cold call customers to validate the market. Their COO reached out via LinkedIn to CEOs of 5 luxury brands and got a message response from the CEO within minutes. The brands had been looking for similar solutions for nearly a decade. 
• The LinkedIn message went along the lines of: “We understand this is a problem for you. Is this the case? If so, can we have a call?”
• They validated their market and now each brand works with them to develop their own lab-grown leather that is signature to their brand, matching the look and feel and the needs of their customers. 
• They target fashion, furniture and automotive. They got early adoption from brands and found out quickly what they had to double down on. 
• It’s not about creating the best lab-grown skin ever, but the best one that fits their customers’ needs. They niched in quickly.
• It took them 3 years to get from lab to market – long sales cycle but the innovation has now happened, next is market traction. 

 

Nik Storonosky, Founder, Revolute talked about scaling globally:

• Read the first principles of philosophy. Here’s a piece from James Clear (Atomic Habits) on first principles: https://jamesclear.com/first-principles
• He studied physics and maths and learned how to model and apply it to business and life. 
• They built most of the tech stack in-house. As a founder, he said he was very controlling and didn’t want to be dependent on any critical vendor so everything was done in-house.
• He learned early on that no matter how smart you are you can’t predict anything, so you have to try things to get a steer and feedback.
• You can achieve your goals locally, it’s harder to go global but it’s more meaningful and profitable. Launching things really fast doesn’t always work for expansion.
• He said that the US banking system is 10-15 years behind the UK.

In Summary

There is so much more I could share about Slush and I’m always happy to talk more and share my experience. If you’re a founder seeking investment, I would highly recommend attending in 2025. Investors are there because they want to meet founders and for some of them, they do all of their meetings within those 2 years for the entire year. 

If you’re not ready to head all the way to Helsinki, I’m pleased to say that we are bringing Cornwall Slush’D back to Cornwall for a third time on 17th September 2025! It will take place at the Lighthouse Cinema in Newquay and will welcome 200+ founders, investors and the support ecosystem for a day of inspiration, pitching, connecting and everything in between to help founders succeed in business. 

Find out more at www.startupcornwall.co.uk and follow us on socials!

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