Last week 17,500 tech heads travelled to Helsinki to attend Slush. Here the Dutch Tech community was proudly represented by approximately 35 startups, investors, accelerators, an innovation community and our eye catching Holland Corner.

Slush is famous for its festival like set up and intimate atmosphere. A great environment for startups to meet with investors and VC’s who normally are quite hard to reach out to. The Dutch Embassy in Helsinki and StartupDelta created some highly curated matchmaking opportunities between Dutch founders and European top tier investors. With programming on specific topics and additional meeting opportunities, founders could for instance participate in a coaching session with Corinne Vigreux (co-founder of TomTom) and our Startup Envoy Constantijn van Oranje, as well as one-on-one meetings with high profile investors like Reinout te Brake and Ronald Kemmeren. Meetups in the Holland Corner opened up the conversation to a wider audience on for instance HealthTech by Rockstart, scaling internationally by DutchBasecamp and expanding the Netherlands by StartupDelta.

Various media mentioned the presence of the Dutch, including the largest economic paper of Finland: Kauppalehti and het Financieele Dagblad (Dutch).  Startup Envoy Constantijn van Oranje moderated a discussion on “Is it possible to build the next Google in Europe?”. Despite his efforts to tempt the panelists for pessimism, he concluded on intangible trust in the European startup ecosystem. Check the full conversation here at 4:00:00.