 Okay, we're in the Cube in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, founder of SiliconANGLE.com and SiliconANGLE.tv. And we're here in Palo Alto, California at the home of Big Data, Cloudera, Inc. They obviously commercialize Hadoop and they're very generous to give us the space here. So we want to thank Cloudera for allowing us to be here. But Silicon Valley is great because all the entrepreneurs are kind of hanging out in Silicon Valley developing new startups, big companies trying to figure out what to do, and all the entrepreneurship is here. But the other good thing is a lot of people come in and visit. So Ramin is here to talk with his friends from Finland and we're going to introduce them all. And Ramin's a contributor of a SiliconANGLE, but more importantly is an entrepreneur who lives in Finland where entrepreneurship is booming. And the entrepreneurs are ahead of the government and there's a big counterculture going on in Finland and it's exciting and new things are happening. You guys are breaking new ground. So Ramin, introduce yourself and your friends from Finland to SiliconANGLE and Silicon Valley community. Sure, so my name is Ramin. Ramin Darbihar, I'm the founder and CEO of MySites.com. We are the most trafficked startup in Finland. We focus on cloud storage. So we've got quite big experience in the cloud. We started in 2006. The idea at the time was that we're building something a bit like Chrome OS. So an OS in the cloud windows for the internet and that didn't fly because while we launched it two years ago, there was no iPads and 3G and things like that that were quite common and that are common nowadays. So what we're doing now is we're a social drop box. So we focus on making file sharing easier. Players and things like this. That's your company? Yes. But also you're heavily involved in the study community and you've given back to the community. So share with the folks out there some of the things you've given back and what you're doing now with entrepreneurship. So I'm part of the Alto Venture Garage which is a venue but I think Christo will do a lot better than me explaining where it is. Essentially it's a wide combinator for the Nordics and I'm one of the coaches there. So I was coaching at Summer of Startups which was one of the two entrepreneurship programs we started in Finland. So Summer of Startups was a very interesting program because we got students who managed to raise money 50,000 euros from the government and got it to pay students to create a startup in summer. So essentially instead of finding a summer job like cleaning the table or something like this, they wanted to create a startup. So we paid each student 750 euros per head per month. We got 10 startups created, 30 people. We got people from 10 different countries. So we had people from Uganda, people from Kenya, people from China, people from Latvia. And it was in Helsinki, right? In Helsinki. Yeah, well, suburbs of Helsinki and Espo. And we got another program called Bootcamp which is a two-week program aimed at accelerating existing startups, early stage startups. And Bootcamp just finished two weeks ago and now we brought our best startups here. And so you can see some of them now. So you're an entrepreneur and now coach. You give back to the community in Finland. You're here in Silicon Valley connecting with us and others to bridge the entrepreneurship across the world. Exactly. So introduce the folks here and that you're teaming with and have them just share a little bit about what you guys are doing. So Christo here on my right is the founder of the Alto Entrepreneurship Society and Alto Venture Garage. Alto Entrepreneurship Society is the leading and Christo, go ahead, set the microphone. Thank you. Thank you. So great to be here. My name is Christo Vasco. I'm founder of Alto Entrepreneurship Society and Alto Venture Garage. So actually my story is a bit different that I'm just now getting into the startups and founding my first startup, frontrank.net now. But we realized two years ago that there is a huge challenge in Finland and wanted to change that culture. And it took off really well. So we created Alto Venture Garage which Jens actually runs nowadays. And after a year, so at the beginning of this year we started with Alto Venture Garage. So it actually, what we do, it's the leading incubator or actuator in Finland. So we gathered the best startups from all around the Baltics and Nordics. We trained them with our experienced coaches and actually we ship them, we give them a bit of seed funding and we ship them over here for six months to get feedback to do business and get hopefully raised funding from here too. So I mean entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon. We all know that Finland is not known for having a venture capital community absolutely pretty well documented. But there's a counterculture going on. Even in Silicon Valley, a new era is upon us. Technically, business-wise. Talk about the environment in Finland around the entrepreneurship, that grassroots, that grounds swell, that emerging energy. You guys have done some work with the community. So talk about the environment and how the community's getting together. So actually two years ago, there is a huge change going on. So two years ago, it was still much government-orientated and Nokia-driven culture. But within the two years, I would say that the moment it's the most active entrepreneurship scene in our grassroots in whole Europe. We have a lot of good ideas bubbling around and they are just waiting to break through. But then we have these role models, which came here like there is Skype, there is GetZar, there is MySQL, now there is Angry Birds, Spotify and Sweden. But those role models haven't been that visible before. And they all came here or to rest of the Europe. But now what is happening that they are really starting to give back as Ramin also, starting to give back to the society and they are driving the culture. And that's actually kind of the role of auto-entrepreneurship society is to get those role models and increase the culture. But now there is like two years ago, there was one event maybe in a month, now there is three, four events in Helsinki per week where startups talk pitch and share their experience. Is there a lot of collaboration amongst the entrepreneurs out there right now? There is a lot of, not only in Finland, but whole Baltics as we told that we are organizing these Garage 48 events, which are like the startup weekends here, so that we get people from all around the places. And there is a really good engineering knowledge in Baltics, in Finland, in Russia. And we do develop great things together. So there is a lot of collaboration. And then also with business people and with entrepreneurs. So it's a small and tight community that everyone knows each other and willing to give back. I mean, actually Alto Venture Garage is also a co-working space. So all the startups that participated in some of our startups in Bootcamp and the previous Bootcamp also, or any other startup is free to go and work there. Will we do a collaborate? That's great. And so going around the horn here, go ahead, Jens. Jens. So hi, everyone out there. My name's Jens, Jens Sorensen. I'm the, currently I'm the chairman of the Alto Entrepreneurship Society, which is the student-run organization by students, for students, that's creating the entrepreneurial environment that we're in. I was just told to move to the left just a bit, which I did. We all noticed, well done. Right. See, it takes a bit of brains to be an entrepreneur. From Finland, you know, you guys got to be sharp out there, we know that. Exactly. But so actually I'm stepping off that role pretty soon since for the past five months, we've been running our own startup, ExpertQ, which is derived from experience questions and we're learning companies know now what their customers are feeling about their service. As you, John, said, it's we're creating a big backend mashup where we link our system into their systems, allowing us to know when a service event has happened and allowing us to push a feedback question the media consumers are already in. And the fact that I'm doing this startup these days is very much down to the environment that's been created over the past two years. Is there a couple of URL for that? www.expertq, e-x-p-e-r-q dot com. And funrank.net was Kristoff's, right? Yeah. Okay, good. Make sure we get the Ezra website. Is all this located on the Alto Ventures website? Yes. So AltoVG.com. Now that he's at Palo Alto, it's got two A's in it, A-A-L-T-O, which is great. So, I mean, you guys like entrepreneur, you guys doing, you like startups, guys? Yes. Yeah, it's fun, isn't it? It's awesome, exactly. You're young enough. I'm old and I can't do them anymore. Actually, the big turning point for me was summer 2009, I spent four months in an investment bank. Summer internship, the basic thing that you usually get out of college. Not the basic thing, but I mean still. Yeah, get another treadmill, get some coffee for all the big guys. Read the analysis, do the real work. Yeah, 15 hours a day. You're playing golf. I'm still doing 15 hours a day, but now I'm very much enjoying it, it's my own thing. And as I said, the ecosystem around it, here in Silicon Valley, everybody's pretty much breathing the growth entrepreneurship field. Back home, it's only been in the past two years that we've actually been able to see the same kind of aura, I'd say, the same extension here. Yeah, I mean 10 years ago, when I did my first startup, you didn't really see so very few non-U.S. guys hanging around. Now, global entrepreneurship is booming. Right. And it's exciting. I mean, I think we met together online through SiliconANGLE, through SiliconANGLE Labs, just collaborating. And next to you, you're contributing, now you guys are here. It's great, I totally dig it. Right, and the whole point is actually just getting similar-minded people around you. People who are willing to get an idea and actually work on it. So it's not just rhetoric, it's actually a motoristic reaction to your idea. And that's what leads stuff to happen. Regarding what you just said, I think it's very important for us because when you're based in Europe, there's not that many success stories that happen out there, right? There aren't that many startup entrepreneurs that you can go on and learn from. So the guys are here. We need to be international, especially in Finland, where you have a population of 5 million people, you can't just go on. We do have a lot of success stories from Finland. We have Linux, we have SSH, we have MySQL, we have IRC. There's a lot of really great things on the web that come from there. But there's not that much business experience. So that's why we have to be even more proactive, pushy, and just be there. I'm talking to you guys. And the great thing about real-time web and real-time internet, whether it's mobile or just online, is that you can literally have collaboration, no pun intended. FaceTime, like with the iPhone, the Skype video, you have all kinds of collaborative tools that are very robust now. You got your venture, for example, and you can do all kinds of cool stuff as well. So I just see the future's bright for what I'm going to see as a global collision of entrepreneurship, of great new companies, new kind of weird relationships developing. And productivity should be great. One of the cool things, actually, that the U.S. is bringing up is the potential for the entrepreneurship visa. The fact is that a lot of stuff in most fields happens here in Silicon Valley, so allowing us to come and actually experience that through programs such as the entrepreneurship visa. Fantastic. Or startup visa, is it called? I think it's called the startup visa. Startup visa, but so, yeah. Brad and Dave worked on that. Brad Feldman, Dave McClure, Chevron from SGV. Eric Gries, yeah, all those guys, great stuff. And we all believe in it. My fear is just the government in the U.S. got to get out of the way, just rubber stamp it. It's just as bad over here with the government trying to regulate venture capital, all these other things, so. Actually, I'll take my politics out of it, but the neutrality, gotta love that. To showcase that actually, it's not just Helsinki and Finland. We have a couple of guys from Latvia who are actually part of our group as well. Okay, guys, stand up to the microphone. Let's bring them up. Let's bring them up to the mic. So, hi, my name's Kasperz. I'm from Latvia. We were one of the teams that participated in the boot camp with auto people, and we were selected to come here as one of the four winning teams of that event. Yeah, so we are here with our startup. It's called Eklinda. It's really good. Well, like most of the people here, we are the founders. And it's really fun to see that mostly people here are talking about startups, talking about funding and ideas. They're just out there. I mean, today we were walking in the streets and the lady just recognized people from Alto just by looking at the logo on the t-shirt, so. Yeah, you guys are, your brand's growing like crazy. Since you've gotten Silicon Valley. Keep on wearing those t-shirts, you know? We got our sticker on Richard Scoble today. Yeah. Robert Scoble. Richard, not Richard, Robert Scoble is great supporter of entrepreneurship. He has been a big proponent of the user community and entrepreneurship. And you know, you got to commend Robert. I've always loved his nose for good stories, the right stories, and protecting users and doing the right thing. So you know, you want Robert on your side for sure with your program. So what else is happening? And he has a reputation already in Palo Alto here. He's having a good time, right? Having a good time? Well, I can continue. It's like, well, I'm Ernest. I'm from Latvia also, and I'm on a team with Caspers. And besides having been co-founder for the startup, I also tried to move, push the startup culture back in Latvia. So I'm sucking out the ideas and experience of these guys, what they are doing in Finland. And also here, by visiting co-working spaces, incubators, seeing the stuff happens here to bring it back and push the culture. What's the biggest thing holding back the culture? Is it fear? Is it risk? Is it the money? It might be that we don't have that big ship which leaves trail behind it, like these guys have. Skype. No, the Estonians had Skype. Lithuanians got Gadjar. And we don't have that ship which leaves the trail of professionals, ideas, while the dreaming things. Got you guys. Maybe. Yeah, we are now like a small boat. Move to Palo Alto. Yeah, we are a small boat, which is going and. Move to Palo Alto. Maybe, maybe. That's, we are considering that. That's one of the things we are looking around. That's exciting. Good stuff. All right. Anything else? To add? Well actually, regarding the question you asked, is like, so Christo and I are super vocal about the issues that are preventing entrepreneurship, especially in Finland. But before you get into that, tell people your blog address if you can, your blog, because I know your blog's very well read. So I'm contributing to Arctic Startup. So it's ArcticStartup.com. And so there we do coverage of the Nordic Startups. I've done some writing, of course, on Second Angle and a little bit recently on ReadWriteWeb. About the ReadWriteWeb. I've never heard of them. No, great site. Now we love ReadWriteWeb. Marshall's right over there. Richard McManus. No, no, they're great. We love those guys. They do in-depth coverage. They're one of the good blogs out there that has really good product coverage. Compare with others. I know all the bloggers, you know. So they're all friends, so just joking. So I've been doing some of that. But the things we've been doing, we've been hammering a lot on Arctic Startup. For example, all the public funding issues and the culture issues that we have in Finland. So basically what happens there is that Finland is ranked the worst in Europe in terms of how many people, how many students want to become entrepreneurs. And we also, as a consequence, obviously, that have the highest proportion of elderly entrepreneurs who happen to be lifestyle entrepreneurs. So if I may jump in here, I think the culture is changing amazingly fast at the moment. But there is a challenge. The challenge there is around the fact that government and big corporations, it has built in the past really much around those things. So if you think about the best students and best entrepreneurs, or I would say more experienced people, they are still looking at the government and big corporation side, what they want to achieve in their life. Not that much striving to become entrepreneurs. So that's why it's really, really important to bring people here and... Well, the market is not only Finland. I mean, the government would have a protectionist's view on local products, maybe. But now you have the internet, it's global. You can hang a website, Shingal, and social network anywhere and collect revenue. You don't, the government can circumvent the government. I mean, just, you don't need the government. You don't need to do a business deal with anyone in Finland. The problem with that is that the incentives we have in Finland are exactly the opposite. Because there is a lot of public funding that is available pretty much exclusively for consultants. So if you become a consultant, you can get a lot of easy money from the government, from government funds, different big companies getting that. And they pay you essentially for free. Like, it's not a pocket. It's a great job. Great vacation plan, you don't have a nice kids, family. And when you combine that, easy money. Cushy life. The fear of risk. Pre-no value. Exactly. I mean, consultants, I mean, that's all they do is get the next gig, right? Exactly. But when you bring these guys, so we actually have 40 people traveling with us here in Silicon Valley from Finland, and you bring them here for a week and they suck in the information and they get really, really, really inspired about this place. And when they go back there, they tell their friends and their professors that, like, how it is here and bring the role models and stuff. So it's, I mean, that's the change that Finland needs and that's actually automated. It's a great ecosystem. Silicon Valley is a great place. And I moved from the East Coast here. And, you know, even in Boston area where I lived at the time, it was entrepreneurship, obviously, of MIT. You have Babson in Northeastern, you know, the best schools there. And entrepreneurship's encouraged, but there was still even that kind of leftover fear of failure. And if you failed, you were like, oh, like, almost like there's no second chance. So I find that the failure is an honor out here if you learn from it and you don't do the same things over and over again. So, you know, people like risk takers and there's a community that kind of protects that. So people watch your back. It's kind of like a, you know, angel on your shoulder, if you will, around here. For people to take those risks out in other countries, if you fail, you're outcast. And people don't want to take a chance. And I noticed that in the Netherlands is that, in the Netherlands is a culture of risk takers, but if you've got a scientist working for a big company, it's like, wow, if I leave and fail, they won't let me back in. So it was a fear of failure, losing the cushy, nice job that they had. And we actually organized the National Fail Day back in Finland just a few months ago, inspired by FailCon here. So that's, I mean, it's changing fast and actually, I don't want to be in my car on that day. National Fail Day, yeah. But actually, FailCon was a big eye-opener for us last year because we saw all these famous people talking about their fuck-ups, you know, and it was really, really good. You mentioned Tina Sealy, one of her cliches and great things is that, you know, the fail resume. She asked the students to put together a resume of all their failures. And it's inspiring for them, well, I never thought of it that way. In a way, that's the learning, right? So, you know, shout out to Tina Sealy, and Stanford, who I think you're gonna meet with her, right? Yeah, yes. Great person, great group over there. Actually, I'm an advisory board. She is, good, good, she's great. So actually, it's funny that at some point, it changes because if you think about small children, they learn about failing. They fell down and fell down all over again. They iterate and then they learn to walk. And then at some point, when you turn, I don't know, adolescent, like 13, 14 years old, you just like start hate failing. So we should go back to that. Entrepreneurs don't love to fail. Believe me, you talk to any entrepreneur, it's like they don't wake up in the morning and go, hey, I want to fail today. They're pushing the envelope because they're failing. And the secret that I've learned and observed is minimize your failure. Don't make big failures. Try to make little ones and grow from those. And I think you'll be okay. And like I said, you guys are on the right track. I think the funding is a big issue. If you guys can get outside the government funding, that'd be fantastic. But yeah, this whole co-working, collaboration is fantastic. Let me just give you a quick analogy actually about failure. I like, I'm a penis ceiling product to my mind. I attach it to my hobby, I skydive. So people say I'm a risk taker, but no, actually I'm a risk minimizer because I like to skydive. So every skydive for me is like an exit from a company. But before I jump out, I check all my gear very, very closely. So I'm actually minimizing my risk throughout. I think entrepreneurs throughout our skydivers in the sense that they don't like to fail. They're not trying to go out and take risks. They're doing their best to minimize the risks inherent to what they're doing. Yeah, and you know, that's a great example. I mean, I think that's, you know, that's a great, because if you screw up, it doesn't work. You're dead. And I think, you know, investing- It's not that bad an entrepreneurship. You don't, they don't actually kill you for failing. If you take other people's money, you know, like investors like venture capitalists or these money, they're hoping that the shoot opens, but you're packing it. So in a way, there's a big trust element that you have with taking money and forming teams as a leader, you're packing that shoot and you want to hope that it opens. So, you know, to me, that's the entrepreneurial spirit is to navigate that risk, minimize that risk, but understand that you do a test jump or you know, you kind of figure it out and, you know- The point is that entrepreneurship- There's been some big implosions though on Silicon Valley, you know. The point is that it's not risk taking entrepreneurship. It's minimizing risks inherent to what you're doing. And you know, the inherency of risk is very strong in entrepreneurship. But one thing I'd like to actually invite everybody out there listening to our Finland night tomorrow in San Francisco. What is it? Six o'clock, six o'clock, six thirty a pair of summer. We have Angry Birds, we have Get Jar, a lot of cool people, a lot of our startups, our whole group. And guests, of course. And pizza. Oh, we house pizza and drinks. Is there a Giants game going on? That's going to be a parking nightmare. A hundred dollars for parking up there today. We were up there visiting- But this is tomorrow. I don't know if they're planning tonight. Is this tomorrow? We were up at Justin TV today, they wanted 60 dollars for parking and then bumped a hundred at noon. Oh. Okay, well, the drinks will be free. Oh, we'll be fine. So where's it going to be? Paris Soma, it's downtown San Francisco. Check it out on Facebook, search for Finland Night. Finland Night. Yeah, I don't think you'll miss it. We have Peter Vesterbuckle from Rovio, behind Angry Birds. And Elia Lars from Get Jar, a lot of cool other people, so. Good. The car just crashed after Angry Birds was released on Android. So it's got a very interesting story. Get on that, Mark, Scoop, it's already out there, isn't it, Tom? It's already out there. There's going to talk about it tomorrow. All right, guys, we're going to wrap up here. We're inside the cube in our Palo Alto studio, building out slowly and surely. Guys, thanks so much for coming in and great to see you and meet you. Thanks a lot. Great to see you, person, and good luck with all of your trip and go get the word out and get some cash, get some opportunities and do some biz dev, meet some new people. Have a great time.