/notes/ ·
Two days in Tampere, and you do not need an idea
I found my own name on a mentor list this week. STUHI × Tampere Hackathon, 24–25 October, two days at the Hervanta campus in Tampere. Free, food included, for anyone in upper secondary or vocational school. Roughly fifteen to twenty-one.
I am not the most impressive name on that list and it is worth saying so. Timo Ahopelto from Lifeline Ventures is judging. Most of the mentors have built companies I would happily work at. I am the one who has not finished school yet. I graduate in December, five and a half years after I started, because I built companies through all of it and something had to give.
That is the only reason I am writing this instead of just showing up on the day. Everyone else in that room can tell you what this looks like from the other side. I can tell you what it looks like from where you are sitting, because I am still sitting there.
When I started at fourteen I did not know one person who was building anything. That was the actual obstacle, and it was bigger than not knowing how to code and bigger than having no money. There was no room to walk into. Nobody to ask a stupid question in front of. I read and guessed and got a lot of it wrong for years longer than I needed to.
Entrepreneurship education has been close to me for a long time, and most of my years outside work have gone into it one way or another. Not because every teenager should start a company; most should not, and that is fine. But the ones who would never think of it as an option available to them should at least get to find out that it is one. That is the whole job, and a weekend like this does more of it than a year of being told about it.
I would also rather this country produced a hundred ten-million companies than one worth a billion. The billion makes the news. The hundred change what normal looks like: they employ people in more places, they fail less catastrophically when they fail, and each one of them is proof to somebody watching that the thing is doable by someone like them. My generation is arriving in the machinery of this society right now, and in numbers. What we need is not one hero story. We need a lot of ordinary ones.
The two reasons people give for not coming are that they have no idea and that they cannot code. Neither is a requirement, and I mean that literally rather than encouragingly. The partner companies bring the challenges on Saturday morning, so nobody competes with their own idea; everyone works on a real problem a real company has. Teams are formed on site and most people arrive alone. And the good teams are never all engineers. Someone has to decide what is worth building and be able to explain it to a room, and that is a harder skill to find than another person who can write code.
What you get out of it is not the prize. It is forty-eight hours in which you finish one thing and show it to people who will tell you the truth about it. That combination is rarer than it sounds. Most ideas die half-built, in private, and you never find out whether they were any good.
So: go. I am saying that plainly rather than leaving it as an implication, because I know how this reads from the other side. You are seventeen, you are half interested, you do not know anyone going, and nothing bad happens if you skip it. Nothing bad does happen. That is exactly the problem with skipping it. A weekend costs you a weekend. Not knowing whether you can build something costs you years, and I know what that particular cost looks like, because I paid it before anyone told me I did not have to.
One practical thing, because it is the only advice I properly trust: be interested, and be interesting. Ask people a lot of questions: the mentors, the partner companies, the team at the next table. Almost nobody does, and the few who do leave with things nobody else got. Two days is short. You can spend them heads-down and shy, or you can spend them finding out what everyone in that room knows that you do not.
Bring a laptop and a charger. Everything else is handled. You sleep at home, which is deliberate and correct.
Part of why I am going is a question about myself: whether what I have learned is actually any use to anyone else, or whether it only ever worked for me. I do not know the answer yet. What I do know is that I do not want to be the person who turns up at these things to be seen at them. This world rewards talking about building far more than it rewards building. So find me, but not for a pep talk. I would rather sit down with your team and get my hands dirty on the actual problem. I am most useful on the part after the thing is built, getting it in front of someone, which is the part almost every team leaves until Sunday afternoon and then wonders why nothing moved.
Concretely that means sitting down and answering who this is actually for and who would pay for it. Then writing the message you would send that person, finding ten real people it should go to, and sending it during the weekend instead of putting "go to market" on the last slide. If something has to exist before that can happen, we build that. By Sunday you want an answer from someone outside the building, not a plan for getting one.
And if you are reading this beforehand and have a question about the weekend, about starting something, or about doing it while school is still going on, send it. Any of the channels below reach me and I answer them myself. You do not have to be coming to Tampere to ask.
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STUHI × Tampere Hackathon, 24–25 October