It all started in 2008. A professor told his students: “Don’t become an entrepreneur. It’s the worst thing you can do with your life.” However, the opposite happened. Aaltoes, a leading student entrepreneurship society was born, and later gave birth to: Kiuas (previously Summer of Startups), Dash design hackathon, Hel Tech meetup, Fallup student entrepreneurship event and Junction, Europe’s biggest hackathon. Startuplifers started sending the brightest minds from Finland and Sweden to startups in Silicon Valley. Our homebase, an old warehouse turned co-working space, changed its name from Aalto Venture Garage to Startup Sauna. We started running a world class accelerator when entrepreneurship was not cool. The accelerator program ran its course for 8 years, 2010-2018. Here’s the best tidbits from our years: meet the alumni (link), coaches (link), and reminisce the golden years from our blog(link).
