What can we say about KickStart Fest?
Huge. That’s the word.
Five days, 70+ students, a lot of conversations, a lot of new faces and quite a few ideas that looked very different by the end of the week than they did at the beginning.
KickStart Fest was our way of starting the semester with something more than just another event.
The idea was to bring people together, show what entrepreneurship can actually look like and give everyone enough space to try things for themselves.
You didn’t need to already have a startup. You didn’t need to know how funding works or what half the startup vocabulary means. Curiosity was enough.
DAY 01: so what does entrepreneurship actually look like?
Pitching, funding, cold calls, VC, the “Mom Test”…
If you’ve been around entrepreneurship for a while, you’ve probably heard all of these before. But hearing the words and actually understanding what happens behind them are two different things.
That’s where we started.
Sini Mäkelä, Mikko Kiertonen and Mike Bradshaw joined us for DAY 01 to share their own experiences of testing ideas, reaching out to people, building things and figuring stuff out along the way. Instead of trying to make entrepreneurship sound complicated, the sessions brought it closer to something people could actually imagine themselves doing.
One line from Mike Bradshaw stuck with us especially well:
“People love helping students”.
It sounds simple, but it says quite a lot. Being a student gives you a pretty good excuse to ask questions, message someone you don’t know, admit that you have no idea how something works, and just see what happens.
Judging by the conversations that continued after the sessions, people took that seriously :D
DAY 02-03: Synergy
Listening is useful, of course. But at some point you have to do something with what you heard. That was the idea behind Synergy.
Students formed teams, started working on ideas and slowly turned them into something they could actually present. There were discussions, changes of direction, more discussions and, eventually, pitches.
The final presentations showed how much can happen in a short time when people sit down and start building something together. Not everything had to be polished, and not every idea had to become a company. That was never really the point.
What made us especially happy was seeing that some teams decided to continue working on their ideas even after the event. For us, that says more than any perfect pitch deck could!
DAY 05: outside Lahti
For the final part of the week, we changed location and, as good old tradition, headed to Helsinki.
Our stops were Maria 01, Reaktor Ecosystems and Komu Homes. Three different places, and three different views of what building something can look like.
At Maria 01, we stepped into one of Finland’s main startup hubs and got a closer look at the environment where early-stage companies grow. At Reaktor Ecosystems, the perspective shifted towards technology, collaboration and how ideas are built into something larger. Komu Homes gave us another side of the story, turning an idea into an actual business and continuing to grow it.
Different businesses, different stages and different stories behind success. That was kind of the point.
There isn’t one correct version of entrepreneurship. Sometimes it starts with a pitch deck. Sometimes with a problem someone is annoyed enough to solve. Sometimes with a random conversation that goes further than expected. And sometimes it starts with getting on a bus to Helsinki early in the morning.
Why the sunrise?
There was one idea behind the visual direction of KickStart Fest this year: sunrise.
Not just because it looked good on a poster.
A sunrise marks a beginning, and that fit the event pretty naturally. KickStart Fest happened right at the start of a new semester, when many students were also starting something new themselves. New country, new studies, new people and, for some, a first step into entrepreneurship.
KickStart Fest was never supposed to turn everyone into a founder in five days. That would be a bit ambitious.
It was more about making entrepreneurship feel less distant. Giving people a reason to ask questions, try something, meet someone new or pitch an idea that only existed in their notes a few days earlier.
Maybe that idea continues. Maybe it doesn’t. Either way, something started.