From Taival participant to organiser
How did I end up travelling to London and Berlin to learn about the startup culture there?
The article is only in English
Taival is a project by LUTES, where students make excursions to the most interesting entrepreneurial cities in the world. Taival’s mission is to inspire and guide people to go beyond their limits. Learn directly from top international entrepreneurs. Make an impact and boost the entrepreneurial society of Lappeenranta. Taival’s vision is to create student driven entrepreneurial community with a global growth mindset. Taival wants the students to learn from the best and use that knowledge in their own adventures.
Taival London
Taival’s history begins in the fall of 2023 when the first trip took place in London. Amazing! We travelled from Lappeenranta to London and got straight away to action.
First on the list we saw a big animation company DNEG (dneg.com), which is big player in the visual effect world. Can you imagine that just 3 sec clip in Hollywood movie with coo effects can take up to half a year in studio..crazy!
We also visited award winning marketing agency called Brandfuel where we has chats with the head of Google deep mind and a serial entrepreneur from the marketing industry. Best quote overheard from the discussions: “Continuity is better than innovation with branding”. In general marketing industry in London super evolved and usually agencies are super focused on some niche rather than working on every industry.
We visited Cambridge university and their entrepreneurial society CUE (cambridgeuniversityentrepreneurs.org) there. We also had an event together in the campus. It was a discussion panel with entrepreneurs. Oskari Hervonen from LUTES and Taival group reprenting his startup Pikapay and then 4 other local entrepreneurs.
Some insights from the panel:
- Founders should train creativity
- Founders live’s are hectic, you should take time to take your mind off of the business
- Don’t take no for an answer. Try to get a why after a no.
- Be determined!
In Cambridge we visited Spotta (spotta.co) which is a small startup and linked to the university. Cambridge was only one day trip, and so we spent some time in London after that. During that last day we visited the London School of economics and LSESU Entrepreneurs. It was beautiful campus and we joined their event there for the evening.
I attended the excursion then as well. Taival London was my best trip abroad ever up to that point. It sparked some flame inside of me as well, someone could call it inspiration. I like the concept of taking these students from this town named Lappeenranta and letting them to see how the global world works.
After the excursion and after thinking of the concept, I took initiative. I heard that the second excursion would be in Japan. I attended SLUSH as a volunteer and during that event I got four to five different contacts to Japan. Of course I talked about it to Arno, who was arranging the first trip, that when do we advance the excursion. I think he was a bit impressed and asked me to arrange the next excursion. You already know that I agreed to that offer and started to gather a team for myself. I got few close friends to join the team, and we even recruited one as well. This team was amazing.
Taival Berlin
Unfortunately, we didn’t decide to go to Japan. We had better destination at our hands, and it was Berlin. Long story short, after ups and downs, we managed to put the budget and the schedule together after months of work. We hosted a competition, where the winning team got free tickets to Berlin.
In Berlin we visited Motion Lab, which is shared space for small startups. We met starting entrepreneurs and succeeded ones with sales reaching millions per year. Although visiting the HQ of Siemens, we met more startups in Berlin than in London. We visited Betahouse (betahaus.com), it’s a coworking space in the east side of the city. We attended few local entrepreneurial events. Some of the events had angel investors. It was great that we got to hear from their perspective regarding the investing to companies. Some of us even got to pitch their ideas to them, of course very helpful insight.
The Taival trips broaded up my perspective of things. The first trip was meaningful for me because it made me realize that there are opportunities abroad and it is beneficial to go out there for few years to learn the best. Finland needs the perspective and knowledge of other flourished countries. We need talented people here.
The arrangement of the Berlin excursion in of itself teached me about management and was example for my own future. Those same problems and tasks will be found during my own career, so this was really good way to get experience. The excursion of course strengthened my previous views and encouraged me to maybe start my own business. The insight of professionals is more effective than what you learn from theory.
After this you may think should you, yes, you should apply for the next Taival excursion!
More on Instagram: @taivalbylutes
Website: lutes.fi
Written by Alvar Joukamo, LUTES Team member.