The Startup Minister aka Alexander Stubb visited the Startup Sauna teams this morning at the Aalto Venture Garage. It was his first visit to the Otaniemi’s Startup’s hub. The Minister for European Affairs and Foreign Trade of Finland  first started hearing about entrepreneurship excitement last September with the Steve Blank’s week.

The Startup Sauna teams, who have been practicing their presentation skills for the past weeks had the opportunity to pitch in front of the Minister.

Some of the more technical teams had a dose of reality with their pitch. “I’m a humble political scientist, so please explain it to a consumer” says Alex Stubb when Zonear was pitching their Boilderbuild HTML 5 solution.”  It was good practice for the technical teams to tune down their techy language.

Alexander Stubb had good tips to the startups, he says he also deals with the same issue as an EU enthusiast. People are often only interested in the end results meaning that Mr. Stubb must use simplified language to convey his message. Startups often forget that not everyone uses the same entrepreneurship lingo.

“I find this all fascinating” admits Alex, who wanted to know all about the funding process, the investors, the angel situation etc. The teams along with a few coaches describes the situation in Finland but also in our neighboring countries. Ville Simola explains that Startup Sauna is making the area more attractive and the goal is to get the top investors here to see the startups of the region.

“In the past, Finland was missing the startup culture, but now with entities such as Startup Sauna & Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, it is now cool to be an entrepreneur”  Alex Stubb reflects on the situation in Finland.  “There is more and more hype and people will start talking about visas, tax breaks, foreign investments. We will see more and more success stories. We see it happening right now: we are the Arctic Valley”