Slush week is over....
- Steve Morrell
- Dec 3, 2023
- 7 min read
Updated: Dec 4, 2023
So, I have reached the end of my first Slush week. For those that don’t know, Slush is one of the world’s leading conferences for start-up investment, held in Helsinki at the end of November every year. The team does an incredible job of leaning into their brand, and accepting the reality of Helsinki winters. This is not a beach resort in Florida, or a place to have meetings with historic buildings in the background. The weather is crappy and cold. There will be snow and ice. Wrap up warm, and don’t expect to see daylight for a few days.
The event is also run nearly entirely by students and volunteers. Of the roughly 13000 people that gather in Messukeskus, around 1600 are volunteers, and I have been told that it is somewhat of a rite of passage in the Helsinki tech scene to give your time to Slush.
This being my first full year in Helsinki, I had always planned on volunteering, so I took the plunge. I was fortunately accepted and was lucky to be asked to lead a team of 10 customer service volunteers, as part of a larger team of nearly 100 volunteers. We would work for one morning early in the week, manning points around the city center to help direct attendees and offer advice to newcomers. Then we would work one 6 hour shift at the venue, manning info points and offering help and guidance. For the rest of the event, we could go around as attendees and take in the content and atmosphere.
And then there would be the after-parties, but I’ll get to that…
I was told it would be an amazing experience. Energizing, positive, transformative.
And it sure was….
To start with, my shift at the venue began at 0745. I arrived at about 0730, later than I wanted, due to a tram mysteriously disappearing despite being 1 minute away from my stand. To be in a massive venue like Slush, when it was pretty empty, was quite surreal. Especially when I had seen it as a building site two days before. As the attendees came in, the team started to get their first questions. Mostly asking for the location of various side events, to the extent that we quickly developed a running joke of “If you don’t know where something is, that means it’s in Siipi.” I could see my team was hesitant to begin, but I was so proud to see them find their voice and within an hour they were managing every curveball question with aplomb, and we had some amazing ones. I’m still laughing about the wine bottle…
Having the chance to work with such a different group of people was one of the most wonderful things about the event. I pride myself on being a leader & coach, and went through an almost 5-year streak of no-one leaving the team I managed. However, managing people in the same sphere as you, that you get to see every day for years, is very different from building a diverse team, some of which are at very different stages in life. My team included 4 Finnish high school students, as part of an engagement program. Of the remaining 6 people, I deliberately chose 6 different nationalities. It is a very different challenge to attend to the needs of all those different people.
And then there was the Chaos. The unpredictable questions. We were told before Slush that most questions would be “Where is my meeting?”, “Where is the coffee?”, or similar. But we would see curveball questions. I think I had to manage 6 of them on the first day. My shift was scheduled to end at 1400, and I answered my last question at 1730. Between the 4 days from Tuesday to Friday I did around 85000 steps.
And I loved it. With half an hour to go to my scheduled end of shift, I said to someone that I didn’t want it to stop. I loved running around the venue between issues. I loved the grins on my colleagues’ faces as they explained the next oddball question. I loved knowing the location of seemingly the only pair of scissors in the hall and the power that brought.
The thing is, I’m a support professional, and build support teams for a living. I’ve also been a front line support engineer. I regret that earlier in my career I joked that I was a “failed developer”. Saying that, I’ve been in situations where I’ve explained coding to developers, and once did some of a development interview in my old company while I was loafing in the office, and was told that I’d just done better than most candidates in half the time.
WIth reflection, I’ve realized that a good support person has a value of variety. The best support people I’ve met easily have the skills to spend 6 months writing a coding project, but it doesn’t motivate them. On some level they want to continually work on different things, and love the fact that their job is unpredictable. It’s the mindset of looking at a zany problem and thinking “Oooo this is going to be fun to solve.” It’s why support is a very specific skill, which needs to be done by very specific people that have the mindset and background. And that's why I was loving the pressure and unpredictability so much.
Then there was the event itself. I didn’t have much time to take in many talks, but the ones I did were fascinating, and there were many snippets and fragments that I caught that make me think I would have enjoyed many more. A personal highlight was hearing the formula 1 world champion Nico Rosberg talk about the mental space he was in as he won his title, and why he retired immediately afterwards.
There was also a wonderful setup where many speakers would partake in a small Q&A session 15 minutes after their talks, so attendees could book into small classroom sessions to ask questions. I made it to a few of these, and I am particularly grateful for one session where I was able to pick the brains of the Chief People Officer of a 4000 person software company on their approach to values and growth.
Then there was the randomness. For an event with more than 10000 attendees, I seemed to bump into people everywhere. I was able to meet people in person and not zoom for the first time, in two cases just because they walked up to me to ask a question without recognising me. And there was the double-take when I walked past one large booth and saw a former Irish rugby international standing there, as he now worked for Stripe. His colleagues had a good laugh at my expense, and I was able to have a nice chat with an Irish legend.
And then there were the after-parties. At 1800 on Friday the venue basically turns into a nightclub and concert venue, and I have had so much fun sharing videos of techno dance floors and laser shows with people, and explaining I was there for work…
One detour… One of the headline acts was Finnish Eurovision hero Käärijä, which was legitimately one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. The man is as funny as a standup comedian, while also being a rapper and singer. The energy was incredible, and I feel very lucky to have seen him in such a venue. As odd as it seems to be happy about seeing an act at a conference, the production values were exceptional. He also was doing all of his banter in English, which was great for me, but with a majority Finnish crowd. I expect other shows in Finland would be all in Finnish, and shows elsewhere wouldn’t have had the same energy.
He played an incredible trick. He of course ended with “Cha Cha Cha”, but played it twice. That might seem that he was milking his big song, but… For the second go around, the entire crowd had to crouch down and only get up to jump with him on the chorus. This meant that for the first song, people had their phones out and could take video. For the second song, they had the video they wanted, and didn’t want to drop their phones on the jump… I swear that that explosion of the crowd jumping and screaming as one is one of the greatest moments I’ve seen at a gig. The man is a master.
Finally, we had the volunteer’s afterparty on Saturday night. This was an invite only event at a backstreet Helsinki nightclub, where I had my first experience of having to wear snow gear to walk to a club, as it was around -12c. The crew put on a great event. It was intimate, it was positive, it was energized. And it was a few hundred people burning off the same stress at the end of a long week. Was a wonderful way to draw a line under a great week.
As cheesy as it is, what has been lovely is the people. The Slush community is tight in Helsinki, and I feel lucky to be part of it. The shared experience of not just this week, but the last few months of organization has brought me some great new friends, that I would not have met otherwise. The good-natured banter at the event between people that had only met briefly over the last few weeks was utterly heart-warming. I loved that at one point in the week I found myself standing next to another volunteer on the metro and just showing the now iconic orange wristband to him was enough to get a fist-bump.
I’d say roll on next year, but I don’t have to wait. My new friends and I are already planning where we are doing our Christmas drinks.
* All image copyright of Steve Morrell, other than the following used with kind permission from the Slush Flickr
(1) Slush & Julius Konttinen
(2) Slush & Samuli Pentti
(3) Slush & Riikka Vaahtera
Comments