TechCrunch Brunch in Helsinki

I attended the TechCrunch Brunch in Helsinki, day after Slush. It's good to have these sort of events in Finland, so that the small startup groups can become more like a real community. As for me, I'm really crappy at networking, so every now and then I try to force myself to show my face.

Discussion was of course centered around current economic crisis and how it effects startups. I'm surprised how so many startups still seem to think that venture capital money is needed in order to run a small company. I think that VC funding is most needed at a point when you already have a proven success and you need help to turn the small company into a big company. There is a chasm when you are crossing over, and during that time there are a lot of new hiring to be done, product development, business strategy, partnerships, and many other little things that suck up a lot of capital. This is easier if there is financial cushion. This is the prime reason. There are other reasons as well, like getting valuable contacts and wisdom from investors.

One company that was quite interesting to me, was Hammerkit. It develops a:

"...true component-based architecture that allows web applications to be created very quickly using fully reusable components through a web-based, collaborative application assembly line environment"

It has a real early adopter approach, and is basically a tool that makes coders' life easier. It tries to solve a problem that I myself have been thinking about. I believe that in the future, people like me who don't know how to code, but have ideas for internet businesses, could somehow use a easy-to-use graphical user interface to create web services with LAMP. Like DreamWeaver with database functionalities. I use Max/MSP sometimes in my music projects, and something like that could be great. Drag'n'drop boxes with functions connected together. I know that something like this is possible to make. But which coder would want to create a software that makes coders lose their jobs? The managing director of Hammerkit, Mark Sorsa-Leslie seem to be a very smart guy also. Hopefully they make it, and at some point move from early adopter market to mainstream market so that a dummy like me can use their product as well.

I talked briefly with Teemu Kurppa (Jaiku co-founder, just left Google), and Heikki Mäkijärvi from Accel Partners. They both had interesting thoughts about the industry.