MoMo Helsinki – Acquired! What next?

MoMo Helsinki – Acquired! What next?

“Acquired! What next?” turned to be an interesting topic even if Telcogames/Fathammer was able to send a speaker and Marc Norris of SliceWireless/Oplayo was stopped on the way when he ended up assisting in an accident.

About one hundred people had registered for the event where Artturi Tarjanne of Nexit Ventures and Ari Viitanen of Cboss Finland gave very interesting talks. The evening was MC’d André Chaker of Veikkaus who had his own “acquired experience” when Enpocket bought his Mobicus.

Tarjanne approached the topic from Finnish society angle pointing out that in the US venture capital is responsible for ten percent of jobs and sales. The number is quite a bit lower in Europe and even lower in Finland.

The biggest reason for this is a lack of proper exit possibilities in Finland and even in Europe. Exits are seldom done through IPO’s in these days. More common exit strategy is large company acquiring start up.

“Even Nokia is not spending very much money buying companies,” Tarjanne said. “This situation keeps VC market small and prevents the growth of serial entrepreneurs who would be needed to lead innovations into new business.”

Ari Viitanen talked about how real time billing systems development team had survived from Nokia to ICL to Fujitsu before being acquired by large Russian telecom software house Cboss. It was interesting to hear that the mother company has adjusted itself to the much smaller Finnish subsidiary in business methods and logic.