Just Thoughts #25: Do you know how to build an ecosystem?

Startup Heavy this week. With everything from picking up the Stanley cup trophy, to Slush memories.

Just Thoughts is for modern-day leaders who want to think better about business, life, leadership, and entrepreneurship every week. You are either inspired or not when reading these thoughts.

The first rule of reading these thoughts is to ask yourself:
Why should I think this way?

This article's Content is “handwritten” and co-piloted with Grammarly’s spell-checking and rephrasing for the desired tone of voice. I’m dyslexic, so the tool helps me overcome my impediments.

The free Content includes self-reflections from recent experiences and relatively brief mentions of Content consumed (compared to paid).

The paid Content includes timely and timeless thoughts for modern-day leaders.

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I’ve been reflecting on why I write and publish the way I do. I only have Substack and LinkedIn; these days, I rarely put out more than a few reminders on LinkedIn I write here.

The main reason is that when people put out their ideas on social media, they give them out for free, and someone makes a lot of money with that data, and they will continue to do so even after they’re dead. Of course, you can convert your activity to a revenue stream you wouldn’t otherwise see, but it still feels like being a contrarian.

Most people don’t take the time to grasp the message or fully comprehend the consequences of what they share on social media. We should not judge; we should stop to think about the times we live in and the actions we choose to take.

Free Content flows freely around startup ideas from recent events and those a bit more distant. We go from picking up the Stanley Cup trophy to exciting the Slush releases for this year with some memories from the past.

Free Headlines This Week:

1. Stanley Cup Trophy Reception

2. Startups: Subsoccer

3. Startups: Saha Training

4. Startups: Hill Helikopters

5. Slush is coming

6. Stop Cutting Yle budgets!

Paid Content includes a model for thinking about creating ecosystems, with personal experiences attached. It includes a couple of movie reviews and visiting the Flow Festival for the Nth time in a row with family.

Paid Headlines This Week:

1. Building Ecosystems: Part 1

2. Movie Reviews: Kingdom of The Planet of the Apes and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

3. One Day of Flow in Review

I may contradict myself by writing these stories rather than leaving them to others to tell. I think I wrote about that somewhere at some point. Help me remember when that was.

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Stanley Cup Trophy Reception

So, I randomly got assigned to help Anton receive the Stanley Cup trophy around his childhood neighborhood, which happened to be the same as mine. There were some questions about who was paying to have the trophy travel, but if it’s the players themselves, that’s ok if money gets spent against the local neighborhood. Otherwise, it’s undoubtedly the NHL assigning a budget for one of the most unique jobs you can find: being the person who helps the trophy travel between players celebrating.

Someone asked if that would be a subject for a good book; it’s probably better as a documentary, sitcom, or TV series. Start by saying “based on true stories” and go wild with it, or if a documentary tells the players' story.

In the picture above, Ron Bergman, the pilot and owner of Rotorway, is sitting in the helicopter, and Anton Lundell is holding the trophy in the background. The aircraft left the trophy in Espoonlahti and continued with the next customer, team Gilla FC’s head figures, headed for a golf tournament. I didn’t know you could make a business model around a team this way in Finland, which is unique to our time. The team is a social media movement with more followers than any Finnish top-league team on most channels.

These types of media businesses are common in the United States. In Europe, you face the disadvantages of language barriers, so acquiring millions of views with a language only spoken by less than 7 million people is a feat. However, the rate of LLM’s development will create unprecedented opportunities within the media business. Instant and correct translations will be available to all creators and consumers. Nonetheless, what already works in Gilla’s favor is that “football” is a universal language.

Subsoccer

When mentioning football being a “universal language”, Gilla FC media businesses aren’t (yet) venture capital cases, but Subsoccer is. This taps into an obliquely pervasive (everyone knows football or soccer everywhere) and unstoppable idea because its time has come.

”There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, and there is nothing more obliquely pervasive than ideas whose time won’t go.”

Its time has come because it’s perfect for social media. One point scored takes less than 10 seconds, and it’s a unique way to engage fans and clubs and even provides a platform for third-party advertisers to get returns on visibility. Additionally, if you’re looking for subscription-based services, Subsoccer has patented a self-service Arcade version. Finally, what keeps the community locked in is that they’ve built a proprietary platform for hosting subsoccer games. There will only ever be “the real subsoccer”, for every other player who wants to copy the product.

Subsoccer is a consumer product as good as Carbon Robotics' Lazer weeder. The numbers look so good that nobody thinks it’s real until it takes the world by storm. The difference is that Subsoccer is not substituting anything; it’s integrating the existing market and making it more efficient while being extremely fun.

You may call me biased, as I’ve followed the Founder Jarno’s journey since before he even started sub-soccer. We ran a project together in a joint partnership with a few innovators that resulted in a unique way to introduce speakers to the stage during Slush 2015 —having them photographed just 20 minutes before going up and being able to render their picture into a video clip. That wasn’t a unique business case, but it made these five white male judges (You shouldn’t easily forgive our ignorance on diversity topics at the time, but we cannot change the past) look cool when introduced to the Slush 100.

As a person, Jarno has had to go through some hard stuff during his entrepreneurial journey, and he has these sports-related goals every year. In the past, he aimed to shoot 10/10 basketball free throws by the end of the year, so I introduced him to Samual Haanpää from Saha training, and we went shooting the previous summer.

Saha Training

Samuel was also building his venture, the Saha training app, so we exchanged thoughts on their current challenges. Saha aims to bring aspiring athletes and those who want to train like the best, the training programs of the best, by the best coaches.

Unlike many other ventures, Saha already has a community to lean on, with hundreds of top athletes training with them. The challenge is to truly stand out in the global market in that particular domain; you’d need some heavy hitters endorsing it publicly unless you come up with some other strategic way of accelerating growth, like capturing a couple of unique sports like lacrosse, 3x3 basketball, or padel, being the primary platform the coaches in the use of the sports to scale their training programs and customer acquisition.

Who knows, once Subsoccer scales its professional league, Saha might be the primary training program provider for the athletes in the league. Speaking of which, Gilla, Saha, and Subsoccer should do something together. I don’t know what that would be, but something beautiful would come from it. Having my friends at Marmori Entertainment run the project might win some awards.

Hill-Helicopters

Talking about disrupting innovators, someone also highlighted how comfortable the helicopter's interior is during the trophy event, which is decent. However, the whole industry will experience a shift with the release of Hill Helicopters. With 1400 pre-orders made for HX50, it’s the Tesla S for the personnel-carrying helicopter industry—an industry dominated by hardware and business models that haven’t changed for decades. With the price point and design, it will substitute much of the equipment in the industry; the only risk is clearing the different regulators before being cleared for flights.

This model is disruptive because its modern design, innovation, price, and upkeep cost will grow the industry, making it more accessible. If there is anything one should learn from the startup industry, it is that you want to focus on not simply growing your business but growing your market. Again, don’t take this advice from me; take it from the Collison brothers who built Stripe.

Slush is coming

As I mentioned the Slush 100, it would be good to highlight that the competition is still running regardless of the scrutiny of the validity research has on it. The recently released promo video will give you the details.

I will not review the video; instead, I will emphasize that Slush acts as an army of VC interns for the Venture firms sponsoring the bills. None of the 100 startups are going up on stage without going through some rigorous scrutiny. It is better to view this ordeal as "one of the drafts of the startup world." The only one that fairs better is likely YC's demo days, but they are playing the game of "sports" differently, the way the NHL is different from the NBA.

In all the significant sports leagues, you have drafts, where players (in this analogy, startups or founders) have been ranked and scouted before entering the drafts. Teams, in this analogy, investors, pick the draft winners and rank them accordingly. Slush acts as the league itself, like the NHL, NFL, or NBA acts as the roof organizations. Who becomes the "Hall of Fame Player" has some correlation with draft ranks, but more often than not, the topic picked by every cohort is not the one that history will remember. Admittedly, this analogy only works 1:1, but in its defense, no analogy entirely does. The goal is to re-frame context.

If participating in the competition is of zero interest, consider being a volunteer at Slush. As much as I liked the effort on the Slush 100 video, I wanted to see the same effort on the Slush Volunteer application. That experience sets Slush apart from everyone else. Volunteering is a stamp of approval in the startup scene, especially in Finland, unlike anything else. Additionally, you get unique lifetime experiences you'll cherish for a very long time—this advice you can take from me.

When being active in operational roles at Slush, the 2016 team ripped a hole in the space-time continuum of the startup scene unlike anything you've ever seen. The team was pulling off impossible projects one after the other. From the most viral event banner in human history

To renting a plane that pawed a way for business development of an airline…

With a main stage that weighed more than the Eurovision stage and an opening show unlike Startup Land has ever seen…

and doing the impossible, according to parachute professionals, and organizing a skydiving pitching competition

No one even remembers all this crazy stuff—we built a substantial fire-breathing Slush logo on an airfield, we organized Slush for the Music industry, we had events in Australia called Slush Downunder, and very few know we had people advising the Taiwanese government about how to build ecosystems and events like Slush while unintentionally handling trade relations with Middle Eastern countries.

These experiences are the things you can enable or do when volunteering. I’ve even gone back years later to participate as a regular volunteer, as all experiences are unique, and there are many ways to experience Slush that are equally surprising. I’m not writing this to take credit for the stories created. I’m writing to emphasize all the opportunities volunteering at Slush has created for the tens of thousands of volunteers who have helped build Slush year after year.

Finally, as we’re on the topic, I want to highlight that the Slush speaker line-up for 2024 will be released by the time you read this. Not that it would matter in driving ticket sales (almost sold out in every category) for this specific year, but keeping an impeccable program quality is good for longevity and credibility.

Stop Cutting YLE budgets!

Before moving on to paid Content, for the love of a nation that has topped the ranks in press freedom only to leave the number one spot because of hate speech towards journalists, stop trying to cut the tax-funded free media that is Yle. In a world where the enemy fights you with misinformation, this is not a question of overly funding a media organization and its usefulness; it’s a question of national security.

Additionally, anyone acting as a journalist or supporting the cause of diversity education our nation so desperately needs to build a healthy future economy should not have to feel unsafe for being a practitioner because of local hate speech. There is already enough to fight “out there”. Even the most conservative patriots need to get behind these points, as the politicians should put the question in the same bucket as protecting the borders from weaponized immigration. Free, well-educated, and well-funded media is our first defense against weaponized chaos and misinformation.

Furthermore, these actions shouldn’t be taken personally by the Russians living here who have a hard time visiting their families or relatives; it’s simply a matter of taking the situation seriously. However, I hope funds will also go to educating border control about diversity topics. Otherwise, when people forget why the parliament passed the law(and they tend to forget), the law may be ill-used in the future.