Why Slush Exists
Slush is a not-for-profit organization on a mission to help and create founders to change the world
Founded in 2008 as a 250-person gathering, Slush has grown into the world’s leading startup event—bringing together a curated crowd of European startups, world-class investors, and tech journalists.
While Slush is best known for its annual main event in Helsinki, an equally vital part of our mission is to inspire young people to pursue careers in tech and entrepreneurship. Slush is meant to be a human accelerator—giving young people their first step into the startup world, whether they go on to become founders, operators, or VCs. To this day, Slush is organized by students and recent graduates, and the main event is made possible by a team of 1,600 volunteers.
We serve founders and investors with a year-round online community via the Slush Platform, and support nascent startup ecosystems globally to build their own local events through Slush'D.
Slush is owned by the Startup Foundation, a Finnish not-for-profit working toward strengthening the local startup ecosystem. Most of any profits made by Slush go back to the foundation, which uses them to support other ecosystem initiatives.
The Next Decade
Our goals for the decade are derived from Entrepreneurship Redefined, a whitepaper we wrote in 2020.
We need companies to be built by a diverse set of individuals. People solve problems they themselves face.
We need those companies to take extraordinary risks that, if successful, change the future beyond recognition.
We need them to pursue the most pressing problems of our time, requiring that society at large – investors, LPs, academia, corporates, and regulators – is on board.
2020-2030
The change doesn’t happen overnight, nor is it something we can just focus on during one event, tick a box, and consider it done. That’s why we’ve dedicated the 2020s to really working on it.
Mission & Vision
We believe entrepreneurship is the most efficient way to change the world at scale. We need more builders. But we also know building companies is hard.
That’s where we come in. Our role is three-fold: inspire, help, and collide.
- Inspire the current and next generation to take on hard and complex challenges through entrepreneurship.
- Help them build impactful, durable companies.
- Collide them with the people who’ll enable their success—co-founders, investors, operators, mentors.
In other words, we want to create and help founders to change the world.