How I succeeded at Slush as an XR entrepreneur

Last week, I was in Finland and, for the first time in my life, I attended Slush, one of the most important events in Europe for entrepreneurs. In this post, I’ll share my experience with it, the life lessons I’ve learned, and offer you some valuable advice if you want to attend this event for your business, too.

Slush

Slush is probably the most important event for startups in Europe. This year alone, it was able to attract something like 13,000 people from all over the world, even though it is held in Helsinki, Finland, which is not exactly the most welcoming city in November (it is friggin’ cold). In fact, the name “Slush” comes from the fact that in this period of the year, in Helsinki, usually the streets are covered in a mix of water and snow, which the Finns call “Slush”.

The event is attended by mostly startuppers and investors. Many important companies and names take part in the event: for instance, in this year’s edition, there was on stage John Hanke, the founder of Niantic, and people from a16z and Google Ventures; among the companies having a booth there, Google had an important presence. It is an important event, and it is very business-oriented. So I’m not talking about the usual XR event here: I’m talking about an event where you go to talk about money and business, which is something important if you want to see your XR company survive.

Buying the ticket to Slush

Let’s start the story of my adventure at Slush from the moment I decided to purchase a ticket.

Let me clarify a few things. First of all, Slush is a paid event, and with “paid”, I mean that the startup ticket costs $400 per person, which is not exactly cheap. There are different tickets for different types of participants: startup, scaleup, and investor, all of which are pretty expensive. This means that you should ponder the decision to go: it is not an event you go to “just to see how it is”. If you spend that money, it means you expect to have something big in return, like, for instance, a few contacts of investors who may sign checks for your company.

The second thing to consider is that Slush is a very transactional event. A friend of mine defined it as “take Silicon Valley, condense it in an event in Europe, and you obtain Slush”. I will return to this topic later, but let me put it very clearly here: this is not a community event. This is an event where you give something to get something in return. You understand this event is transactional just by looking at the badges: the thing that is written more clearly is not your name, but what type of ticket you have, that is, if you are a startup or an investor, that is, what you have to offer. No one cares who you are: if you have an investor badge, you have the potential to give money, and startuppers will come to you as bees attracted by honey. The fact that it is a transactional event means that you should have a clear reason why you are going there. Ask yourself what you want to have in return from this event, and if you have a clear answer, then go. Otherwise, if you don’t know what you can give and what you can get, just don’t go to Slush. It is as easy as that.

I had a clear reason to go there: I can not say much about it without violating secrecy agreements, so let’s say I wanted to go there to pick the brains of people around a specific topic.

The online platform: setting up meetings

After I bought the ticket, I was able to access the online platform. I didn’t manage it very well since the beginning, and I kinda regretted it later.

On the online platform, you can set up your profile, describe who you are and what you do, what the financials of your startup/VC fund are, and say what you can give and what you expect to get. After that, you can hope that people magically find you, and this may work if you are an investor, or you can move your ass and look for the people you want to contact. If you are a startupper, most probably you want to speak with investors.

The platform is made quite well, so you can filter the investors by location, seed round, sector they operate in, etc. Once you have a list, you can also export it to CSV for further analysis in Excel. And when you select the names, you can contact them through the platform and ask for a meeting with a short introductory sentence. They can accept or refuse the meeting. If you think about sending thousands of requests, beware that you can have a maximum of 50 unanswered requests at a time, so don’t exaggerate with the spamming. On the other side, don’t be too picky: a lot of people won’t answer or will say no, so find the right mix between the two things.

I sent a lot of requests and was rejected by the majority of people. This is because I made some mistakes. I started a bit late to ask for the meetings, so some people already had their agenda full. And I didn’t make my profile so attractive for people receiving my request: I should have worked better in looking like someone it would have been very interesting to speak with. Furthermore, being a transactional event, writing to people to ask for feedback (which is basically just a request without anything in exchange) is not a recipe for success. Next year, I’ll work on fixing all of these errors.

As we’ll see later, having a good number of meetings is fundamental to having a good Slush experience. I would suggest having most of your time occupied in meetings, and just leave a few hours free either to watch some talks you find very interesting, or to just go around the event and visit the booths. This is not AWE, so you’d better go there prepared and not hope for “serendipitous discovery” of people.

The online platform: the side events

During the Slush week, there are many side events. Many of them are listed on the online platform, while others are unofficial, and you need someone to tell you where they are. I saw someone one day having an Excel file with the list of the side events of this year, but I have no clue where he found it. Next year, I need to understand how to get my hands on it, because it can be very useful.

Some people say that the side events are where you really make things happen: in my experience, this was not true, since I had the most value from the real event, but I can understand why there is this opinion. Usually, side events are smaller and more intimate, so if you need to spend some time speaking with an investor, you have more time and a cozier environment to do that at a side event.

There are side events of different types: some are parties, others are mixers, others are Q&A with investors, others show tech demos, etc Many side events require registration, so move fast, see on the platform which ones you can be interested in, and register.

I had a pretty negative experience with side events: I have been rejected by most of them, for no reason at all. There was an event about people with many connections, and I actually have a lot of valuable real-life and LinkedIn connections, but I was rejected from that, too. The most bizarre and humiliating thing was when I got an email from Slush inviting me to register for a side event, which was a Q&A session with some guy in AR I had never heard of. I registered, and two hours later, I was rejected from that, too. Probably the Slush people wanted to troll me; I don’t know what else to think.

The trip to Helsinki

Helsinki becomes pretty expensive during the Slush week, so make sure to book your plane and your hotel as soon as possible. If you have friends there, bribe them and let them host you. My friend Jussi hosted me all the time, and I’m very thankful to him, not only for the money he let me save, but also for the nice conversations I had with him.

Be sure to arrive a bit early to enjoy the side events that start a few days before Slush. I stayed there the whole week (the “Slush week”), from Sunday to Sunday, and I attended events from Monday to Thursday. I spent Friday and Saturday chilling out with the people of the Helsinki XR Center.

Helsinki is cold in that period, so be sure to take a heavy coat, a hat, a scarf, and some gloves. Also, wear shoes that can make you walk in the snow. Cover as much as you can: don’t worry, inside Slush, there is a free cloakroom. This time I brought to Finland a very heavy and long white coat that I bought in China. The problem is that for the Finns, in November, it is not so cold, plus no one in Helsinki dresses in white. So every time I took the metro, they all looked at me like a weak guy, weirdly dressed as a snowman. Some friends joked with me about it, too. But still, when I had to wait for Uber at -3° C, I was very happy to have my comfy big snowman-like coat.

The first side events

I attended a few side events before Slush, and most of them were actually about XR. At first, an event about smart cities organized by the Helsinki XR center; then the Minus One mixer organized by FOV Ventures, one of the leading VC funds that operates in XR; Match XR, which is probably the most relevant VR-oriented event in the Nordics; and a little party by Distance Technologies, the startup founded by the founders of Varjo.

These events were already very valuable for me: at MatchXR, I could connect with people in the XR ecosystem in the Nordics, and also spend some nice time with Ori Inbar, who was there as a special guest. At Distance’s party, I was able to try their latest prototype and talk about it on my blog. And at the FOV Ventures party, I could enjoy some meaningful conversations about my business goals. The only problem was that, I don’t know why, but every year that I go to the FOV Ventures mixer, someone from Finland at a certain point tells me “let’s go outside,” and so I must have a conversation at -1° C without my coat. The result is some happy Finns discussing XR and business, and me smiling, not because I find them funny, but because I’m rattling my teeth. Still, it’s an event I’m always happy to attend.

I also attended the “Founders’ Day”, which is basically an event in which you can take your badge and mingle with other people. It was useful to make sure that on the day of Slush I already had my badge and could immediately enter the event without losing some precious time (I strongly advise you to take your badge early, too!). That day, I also got to know a few nice startuppers and won some matches at table soccer. It was interesting to get the badge, but pretty useless for all the rest, for the reasons I’ll explain later.

Slush begins

On November 19th, Slush started. I had no fu**ing clue about what to expect, but my plan was pretty simple:

• Have the very few meetings I managed to arrange
• Visit a few booths and try interesting products, maybe also some XR ones
• Serendipitously know new people by meeting them in the corridors and have very meaningful conversations with them
• Attend some talks with interesting people that I selected before, wait for them to go off the stage, and ask them a few questions, and maybe also the LinkedIn connection
• Wear some smartglasses and hope that people stop me to ask questions about them.

It sounded very good on paper: this was not my first rodeo, and I already had very successful events like AWE with a similar agenda.

The slap in the face

The only place where my plan was good was on paper. The toilet paper, to be exact.

Since I had never attended Slush, I could not realize how dry and business-oriented it was. I told you before, but I didn’t realize until my first moments in. There were not many chances for meeting people serendipitously; everyone was just walking and minding their own business. And everyone was just too busy to notice that my glasses had some technology on them, so they were not asking questions. There were almost no booths about XR, because now everyone wants to talk about AI. And the booths there were mostly about talking business and not having demos of a particular hardware. Furthermore, since it was not an event about XR, my usual friends were not there.

So I needed to speak with people, but I did not know how. I felt like being in the center of Manhattan, with everyone walking, minding their own business, and I was willing to have a conversation. I was like those religious preachers who stop people in the streets asking, “Do you have 5 minutes to talk about XR?”

With most of my plan gone, I attended the first interesting talk I had on the agenda, which was a panel between US investors discussing investing in Europe. I couldn’t wait for these people to come off the stage to have a conversation with them. But when they ended their panel, they stood up… and went backstage. That was the moment I realized you can not speak with the speakers. In my mind, there was only one thought: “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck”. Even the last part of my plan had just been torn into pieces.

It was 11 am on the first day of Slush, and I had no clue how to obtain what I wanted from this event. I literally thought I had wasted my money and that I would have to tell my colleagues that I went back home with nothing in my hand. It was Game Over.

This is why I suggested setting up as many meetings as possible on the platform before the event: without them, you risk losing most of Slush.

The grit and the success

One good thing about me is that I may be punched on the face one million times, fall one million times, but I’m pretty hard to knock out. So after a bit of desperation, I decided to fight back and find a way to succeed at Slush.

I changed my plan to an emergency one: I just needed to speak with people, and the people who could give me the best feedback were the ones with a yellow (investor) or green (ecosystem) badge. I could not select them very well, so I had to speak with many of them, and by the laws of probabilities, find some that could give me valuable feedback.

This sounded ok, but how to do that? I could not just stop people walking in the corridors and ask them to speak with me! It would feel weird, plus it would require some exuberant social skills I don’t have. I started walking around, and I realized that while walking, people are hard to stop without a clear reason. But there were many contexts in which people are naturally slowing down: maybe they are in line to get some food, maybe they are checking their phones, maybe they are chatting with someone. And it’s much easier to speak with someone who is still somewhere than with someone who is running to a place.

So, I just started finding any reason to start a conversation with yellow and green people who were still in some place. I went to a guy who was in line for a coffee at the Swiss booth and mentioned that I was a fan of the company he worked at (it was true, by the way), then asked if he could answer a few questions. Then I was in line to take a photo in front of the Slush logo, and I started speaking with the girl next to me about how boring being in line was, then asked her what she was doing, and then I asked her for an opinion about what I was doing. It was refreshing to see that even if the event was a dry business one, many people were actually very kind and just decided to spend a few minutes talking with me and giving me suggestions.

This gave me the courage to go on: I spent both days like a pirate, finding whatever excuse to talk with people. I looked like those people who feel lonely at home, so they go around and try to speak with whoever (or even whatever) moves in front of them. Sometimes I also cheated a bit with the system… my Southern Italian origins surfaced and gave me the bravery and the shrewdness (the “cazzimma” as people say around Naples) to start random conversations. For instance, I pretended to know a couple of guys, saying that I had contacted them on the platform, but they never came back to me: “But since we are here, maybe we can speak for 5 minutes…” I put myself in line to get some free perks I didn’t care about (like Google’s terrible healthy smoothies), just to put myself in line next to a yellow badge and speak with her. And I did a few fun things that I will happily tell you if one day we meet in front of a cup of coffee. And you know what? All of this worked. I managed to speak with a ton of people and get super valuable feedback.

Was I uncomfortable doing all of this? Every damn second. Was I happy to cheat a bit to start a conversation? Oh damn no. But I guess this photo I took during one of the talks at Slush says it all: it was embarrassing, but it would have been more embarrassing coming back home telling everyone I failed at my goals.

That’s how business works, and that’s how life works. Slush put me in front of a choice: either I stayed in my comfort zone and failed, or I pushed myself out of it and succeeded. I made my choice. And that’s why for me this Slush experience was not only useful on the business side, but it also allowed me to grow as a person. And this is something that I will bring with me for the rest of my life.

Ignoring the other startuppers

So I mentioned a few times that I was completely ignoring the violet badges, that is, the other startuppers. You may find it disappointing that I, a community guy, was completely ignoring other members of the startup community. Well, let me be brutally honest with you: I was ignoring them because interacting with them was totally useless.

If you are a startupper, the other startuppers are people you meet, you have a shallow conversation with, and then most probably do nothing related to your field, so you will never interact with them again in your life. And even if you ask some opinions on your business, many of them will just say that it is “amazing”, whatever you say, and this is not helping you at all.

The first day of Slush, I went during the evening to a couple of afterparties. They were full of startuppers, and this was the main interaction with them:

• I started speaking with them
• I asked them what they do
• They asked me what I do
• I asked them how their Slush was
• They said it was great. Then asked me how my Slush was
• I said it was busy, interesting, and fun.
• We said a couple of sentences about the party
• We decided to exchange our LinkedIn contacts, even if we knew we would never meet again

Then I moved somewhere else, and there I met new people.

• I started speaking with them
• I asked them what they do
• … full loop again

It was so useless, both from the business side (these were people I couldn’t collaborate with) and the human side. The conversations seemed made with AI. At a certain point, I got so bored by this that I started giving random answers. They asked me what I do, and I answered with: “drugs and prostitution”. In Italy, this would have caused some good laughs, but I often forgot how outside my country so few people get sarcasm, so I actually got a few seconds of awkward silence from people believing I was in THAT business for real. Luckily, no one called the police that night.

I was so used to the “Slush interaction protocol”, that when I got back home and hugged my mother, the first thing I said to her was

• What do you do
• How was your Slush?
• Can we exchange our LinkedIn contacts?

After having gotten a pan in the face from her, I recovered the humanity in me.

I left both afterparties early. They were not parties at all… and most conversations were very shallow. Just to clarify, it is not always like that and I had some interesting conversations and some fun with startuppers, too. But most of the times, the interactions felt “mechanical”.

The talks and the booths

Slush is not only about meeting people while walking around. It also has other interesting things you can do.

First of all, there are like three stages with a program of talks for the whole two days of the event. There was a big stage with the big names like the CEO of Niantic Spatial, then a stage mostly dedicated to business (this is where I saw the guy from a16z), and another one with startuppers talking about their experience. This last one was my favorite, because the presenters were people who went through shit to make their companies succeed, and gave hints on how you can succeed too. A guy, for instance, talked about how he, a tech guy, learned how to do sales calls that were able to convince the customer but that were not promising bullshit. You know me, I’m the kind of person who writes about my experiences all the time (and this blog post is an example of that), so I totally loved that. Just be careful that some talks are made by American people who are used to another way of doing business than in Europe (if you are American, read this sentence in the opposite way): a guy said that a seed round is at least $2M, while in Italy, you can’t get a $2M seed even if your startup can transform cheese into gold. So if you are not already super experienced, save some time to attend a couple of talks; they can provide you with useful information.

Then there are the booths. You can just go there and ask people what they have to offer, and start a conversation very easily. Just be sure not to go there when you are close to the final party. I went into Google’s booth when Slush was about to close and asked a guy about how Google supports startups. His answer has been “I’m too drunk, I don’t understand, sorry, you had better speak with this random woman”. It seems that Google supports startups, but only if they produce alcohol.

Some countries also have their own booth: I spotted Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. Most of them offered free food: Italy had delicious coffee, and Switzerland had tasty chocolate. They can be a good place to be if you want to take a break. If your country has a dedicated place, I suggest you go there: I went to the Italian booth a couple of times, and between Italians in a foreign event, it was much easier to start conversations. Inside the booth there were startuppers, investors, and ecosystem people. In your country’s booth you may also find accelerators and other institutions offering initiatives to support local startups.

The final party

The final party of Slush is a real party. At 6 pm, the event ended, and many booths started giving free food. But I had to do a couple of meetings, and when I went back to the main venue at 7.30 pm, all the free food was gone. Considering that free food is the most important thing at an event, I suggest you not to live the venue at 6pm for any reason in the world. Or leave it only if you have a side event with more free food.

I went to the Italian booth hoping to find some food, and I just found some salted peanuts and aperitif olives. And the plates to eat were already finished. But you know, when you’re hungry, whatever food is food, so I ate the peanuts with my hands, and I used a flute to get the olives. They say that when you’re a startupper, you have to eat ramen every day… I got to the stage beyond that, the one you live out of stolen olives.

Then, energized by the fat of the olives, I went to the concert area. Every stage of the event became the stage for a concert. The main stage had famous-ish singers like Inna, Madcon, and Windows95man. There was real music and real fun. After two days of business, the badges did not count anymore; we were just dancing and playing together. It was crazy fun, like attending a concert. And you know… what happens at the Slush party, stays at the Slush party.

The aftermath

I left the event 10 minutes before the very end: I was having a ton of fun, but did not want to find myself stuck in traffic when the whole crowd went out.

When I got on my Uber, I had a big smile on my face. Slush has been great for me: I was able to achieve my goals, speaking with people from all over the world and from different backgrounds. I could get in 2 days what I would have needed probably 2-3 months if done remotely by reaching out to people on LinkedIn. Furthermore, I was able to grow as a person and as a businessman, which is something that I will take with me for the rest of my life. And I had a ton of fun at the final party. It has been a core memory for me. It was worth every cent of the 400€ ticket.

I will personally come back for sure: I bet my second Slush will be a bit less exciting than the first one, but I will organize it better, so I’m sure I will be able to get even more value from it.

Regarding you, I think that if you have some clear goals that you can reach at an event dedicated to business and startups, you should definitely attend it, too. The opportunities it offers are many, if you’re bold enough to get them. See you in Helsinki next year.

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