Why Slush Exists

Slush is a not-for-profit organization on a mission to help and create founders to change the world

Founded in 2008 as a 250-person gathering, Slush has grown into the world’s leading startup event—bringing together a curated crowd of European startups, world-class investors, and tech journalists.

While Slush is best known for its annual main event in Helsinki, an equally vital part of our mission is to inspire young people to pursue careers in tech and entrepreneurship. Slush is meant to be a human accelerator—giving young people their first step into the startup world, whether they go on to become founders, operators, or VCs. To this day, Slush is organized by students and recent graduates, and the main event is made possible by a team of 1,600 volunteers.

We serve founders and investors with a year-round online community via the Slush Platform, and support nascent startup ecosystems globally to build their own local events through Slush'D.

Slush is owned by the Startup Foundation, a Finnish not-for-profit working toward strengthening the local startup ecosystem. Most of any profits made by Slush go back to the foundation, which uses them to support other ecosystem initiatives.

The Next Decade

Our goals for the decade are derived from Entrepreneurship Redefined, a whitepaper we wrote in 2020.

We need companies to be built by a diverse set of individuals. People solve problems they themselves face.

We need those companies to take extraordinary risks that, if successful, change the future beyond recognition.

We need them to pursue the most pressing problems of our time, requiring that society at large – investors, LPs, academia, corporates, and regulators – is on board.

2020-2030

The change doesn’t happen overnight, nor is it something we can just focus on during one event, tick a box, and consider it done. That’s why we’ve dedicated the 2020s to really working on it.

Mission & Vision

We believe entrepreneurship is the most efficient way to change the world at scale. We need more builders. But we also know building companies is hard.

That’s where we come in. Our role is three-fold: inspire, help, and collide.

  • Inspire the current and next generation to take on hard and complex challenges through entrepreneurship.
  • Help them build impactful, durable companies.
  • Collide them with the people who’ll enable their success—co-founders, investors, operators, mentors.

In other words, we want to create and help founders to change the world.

OuR Values

Be Curious

Slushers are some of the most curious individuals you’ll encounter. We have strong opinions, but we're curious to hear reasons why we might be wrong.We’re curious to understand how great companies are built and how technology is shaping the world we live in. We value people who get excited about entrepreneurship—about building and solving hard problems. We value time spent on learning about the ecosystem, whether through consuming content by others or actually getting outside of the office, getting to know people, and forming our own opinions.

This is important for three reasons:

  • Slush is a workplace that will give young people more responsibility than any other. What we lack in experience, we must make up for in curiosity.
  • With 15 different teams, curiosity is essential to understand how our own work fits into the broader goals of Slush, what’s happening in other teams, and what makes this company run as a whole.
  • Slush is meant to be human accelerator and a launchpad to the startup ecosystem. We acknowledge we’re not (yet) founders ourselves, and make an effort to understand the founder mindset by going out there to ask, listen and read.

Trust by Default

At Slush, trust is not earned, it can only be lost. From your first day as a Slusher, every person will believe in you more than you believe in yourself.We show this trust in ways that set us apart from most workplaces:

  • Slush trusts you more than you do. To complete our work, we first ask ourselves “can I do this myself”, and only then ask for help. More often than not, we learn something very useful along the way.
  • At Slush, leadership is a division of responsibilities, not an expression of hierarchy or a command chain. We trust every Slusher to act as the founder of their own domain. This means taking full ownership of projects, planning your work, challenging the status quo, and making decisions as if Slush were your own venture.
  • Decisions should be made as close to the team as possible and by the person who owns the corresponding domain. We trust each other to seek out the necessary perspective to make an informed decision, and even after heated debate, once a decision is made, we expect our colleagues to stand behind it.
  • We recognise that while we’re at Slush, we have been put in charge of a project that is not our own. Each year, the team is trusted to shape the company and event to look like their own. We strive for leaving Slush and our own domain in better shape than we found it.

World-class standards

To achieve world-class results, two things are essential: A) Understanding what excellence looks like and actively pursuing it, and B) Holding each other accountable to the mindset that "if the basics aren't right, nothing else matters."

To that end, we maintain high standards for ourselves in doing the basics right:

  • Clarity. We believe everything is “work in progress” and therefore document and share our work publicly for feedback already ****before it’s ready. We recognise the difference between half-done and half-thought: we ask the right questions while providing the needed context, instead of making our colleagues to do the thinking for us. Clarity and complexity can rarely be reconciled verbally—therefore, we default to writing.
  • Communication. The most common root cause of failure at Slush is unclear or insufficient communication. We always show up on time, communicate promptly, and close the loop—both internally and externally. If we are unsure, we say “I’ll figure it out and get back to you.” We put extra effort into documentation because we know it’s a gift to current and future Slushers.
  • Leadership. We recognise that the most important job of leaders at Slush is to reduce complexity. We help our teams do intentional, clear and specific work. We ask “why?” over and over again. Whenever needed, we get our hands dirty and tackle the challenge together. This way, we set our teams up for success.
  • Prioritization. We separate what truly moves the needle and what is noise, and focus on the former. When tackling complex tasks, we break them down into actionable steps. We understand that there is always more work to be done than hours available to do it. Therefore, we actively take time to prioritise, deprioritise, and plan our work.
  • Frugality. We are frugal like a startup, and default to solving problems with creativity over budget. Whenever it makes a difference, we are ready to do things that don’t scale. We want to ensure that money is being spent where it has the most impact for our core customers.

Crazy Ambition

Over the past decade, Slush has grown from a local gathering into the world's leading startup event: a remarkable achievement for a team of inexperienced students and recent graduates. However, the ecosystem is ever-evolving, and we must be too. Stagnation and reliance on past successes are sure paths to irrelevance.

Therefore, we must constantly evaluate our work from first principles, as if nothing had come before us. Every day, we must answer questions that haven’t been asked before. Equally, we don’t hire people who can execute a checklist—we hire those who can throw it out the window and redefine what success looks like in their role. Concretely, this means we don’t rely on an existing playbook; instead

  • We ask what the startup ecosystem truly needs and how Slush can answer that need.
  • We reimagine how Slush works and make it memorable both for newcomers and returning attendees.

We ask over and over again, 'Why does this matter?', 'Why are we doing this?', and 'What's next?', because at Slush, every day is Day 1.*We understand the importance of using our resources , especially time and money, wisely, and not reinventing the wheel for concepts that already work. Instead, we focus our efforts on aspects that truly need redefining.

Care Deeply

We care deeply for our work, our colleagues, founders and the surrounding startup ecosystem. Work at Slush is about us, not me. We are curious to get to know our team members, and proactively ask how they are doing. Even if in a hurry, we take time to pause and listen.

Caring takes many formats in the Slush team:

  • We win and lose as a team, and help beyond our own responsibilities. We own our failures and embrace them as collective opportunities to learn. Internally, we spread positive news through channels like #posiposiposi and celebrate our colleagues both in public and private.
  • We give and ask for candid feedback to help each other grow. By giving and receiving feedback, we're able to create a feeling of accomplishment, foster personal and professional growth, and resolve issues proactively.
  • We steer clear of gossip and encourage giving feedback directly by asking “have you said this to...?”. When encountering something uncomfortable or against our culture, we don’t close our eyes but run towards the pain.
  • We know that doing what’s best for Slush translates into maximal personal learning for ourselves. To pursue our mission, we actively put founders first in everything we do. It means that we obsess about solving founders’ problems at all stages, from pre-seed to exit and everything in between.
  • Our commitment to diversity, inclusion, and sustainability guides every decision we make, demonstrating our care for and dedication to improving the European startup ecosystem.

Open positions

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
Requirements

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Technical

  • 1-2 years of experience with full-stack development
  • Git and common Git workflow
  • Typescript (TS)
  • PERN stack: PostgreSQL, Express, React, NodeJS
  • Databases, SQL and schema designs
  • Cloud Platform and containerised deployment
  • Interest in prototyping and experimenting with emerging AI capabilities (i.e. Agentic AI, RAG)
  • Experience/interest in React Native/App development is appreciated but not mandatory

Non-technical:

  • English fluency (technical and casual work settings)
  • Creative, driven, ambitious, and adaptable to changes
  • Passionate about technology, and interested in the startup ecosystem
  • Ability to learn quickly through work experience
  • Excellent problem-solving and critical thinking skills, task division and prioritisation
  • Time management, balancing tasks, and scheduling work autonomously
  • Ability to communicate effectively, both to technical and non-technical audience
Responsibilities
  • Write maintainable, logical and testable applications
  • Building AI-powered features into web/mobile products
  • Document software and write effective tests
  • Communicate with stakeholders/customer technical support
  • Collaborate with different internal teams
  • Identify and implement effective internal tools for teams, volunteers and customers
Team
  • You will be part of the Dev Team for this role.
  • The team is responsible for building the digital tools and products surrounding the main event, used by internal teams, volunteers and event attendees.
  • The team is building year-round solutions for startups and investors, facilitating deals, ecosystem growth and startups discovery. You can affect technical choices, planning and contribute to the final product decisions.
  • The team is planning on building AI-powered product experiences. You may work on features leveraging LLMs, recommender systems, and AI-based automation tools. You can influence our direction in technical choices around model usage and the product value AI can unlock.
  • The team actively uses AI-assisted coding tools (Cursor, Copilot, etc.) and encourages exploring AI to improve delivery and development quality.
  • The current team comprises of 5 software engineers, closely working with the UI/UX team.
  • This position reports directly to the Head of Tech, Aapo.
Bonus points
  • Interest in specialized fields: data engineering, machine learning, UI/UX, DevOps
  • Hands-on experience building agents, RAG systems, or AI-based automation, for example, through personal projects
  • Good-to-know technologies/concepts (non-mandatory, in order of priority):
    • Elastic Search
    • Prompt Engineering
    • Expo/React Native
    • styled-components, zustand
    • Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
    • Gitlab
    • Vitest/Jest
    • Monorepo
    • Microservices
Practicalities
  • This is a full-time, paid position.
  • The ideal start date is in February but can be adjusted.
  • The role is fixed-term for 12 months from the starting date.
  • We open the recruitment process in December and finalize the last interviews in January.
  • The team primarily works at our Helsinki office. Due to the physical nature of our work and culture, some office presence is required. Partial remote work is also possible.
  • If you have any questions, feel free to message Aapo at aapo.leppanen@slush.org‍

We look forward to hearing from you!

Head of finance
Overview

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Head of Finance is the core of Slush’s finance function, which consists of an over 11 M€ in revenue. You will have a significant impact on the financial health and operational efficiency of Slush as well as developing the company through data and analytics. You’ll work closely with our COO, play a crucial role in team goal setting and managing budgets, revenue tracking, leading our analytics and automation efforts as well as leading the two person Finance team. You’ll be working closely with our Partnerships and Investor Teams as well as collaborate with other teams around finance topics.

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What will you get?
  1. You’ll get an unmatched experience of running the finance & analytics operations of a 50-person company—this level of ownership and responsibility builds a solid foundation for any finance-related career. This is a full time paid position.
  2. You will not have the same amount of freedom, responsibility and trust in any other organization; leading a multi-million not-for-profit’s finance operations and development will be fast-paced and highly rewarding.
  3. You will build a unique network of people throughout the global startup & innovation ecosystem (VCs, founders, facilitators), as well as an international tech/innovation/CVC network through our counterparties (leading tech companies globally).
  4. Due to our culture of “trust by default” and the constant need to renew ourselves, Slush has become one of the best operator & founder schools on the planet. You’ll get to work with an exceptional young and ambitious team that never settles.
Responsibilities
  • Leading the two-person: Finance team at Slush (and during the Fall the Finance Team Leads). This includes setting the right ambition level with goals, ensuring your team reaches them and ensuring your team’s growth. Finance team at Slush is known for it’s approachability and default-to-action approach with complex tasks.
  • Budget management: Managing and having an overall responsibility of our over 10 M€ budget—managing the budgets with our COO, delegating budgeting responsibilities to teams, setting deadlines and objectives, updating the budget, and making sure we are on the right track financially.
  • Leading our analytics efforts: Head of Finance will be the main responsible for driving our operations and efforts forward through data and analytics.
  • Financial Operations: Overall responsibility over day-to-day finance operations, such as accounts receivables, accounts payables, payroll, monthly and annual closing processes. You will also manage the yearly audit process—one of your first tasks will be closing the fiscal year of 2025 with the support of our COO.
  • Compliance & Policies: Ensuring company-wide compliance with financial policies, procedures and regulatory requirements.
  • Tickets & Tracking: Ticket sales generate 50 % of Slush’s revenue. You’ll manage and oversee our ticket & revenue tracking, and ensuring our tickets-related requests & transfers, visa invitation process and business analytics function seamlessly and reliably.
  • Liquidity Management: Overall responsibility of our liquidity management—modelling cash flows to ensure liquidity, optimizing capital use, and making decisions around short-term deposits.
  • Customer service: The Finance team owns our finance and tickets inboxes. You’ll ensure all of our customers get 7-star customer service from the Finance team all the way from purchasing tickets to ticket troubleshooting at the Slush Main Event.
Requirements
  • Excel and SQL: Advanced skills in Excel and SQL. Our finance operations are run in Excel, and our analytics and revenue tracking are run on a SQL-based database. Curious mind towards data and analytics is a must as the Head of Finance will be the main point of contact with these efforts for the entire organization.
  • Accounting & finance knowledge: You have experience in accounting/finance and a solid understanding of basic accounting principles, e.g. from a relevant university degree or previous work experience.
  • Process-orientation: You’re always looking for ways to improve processes and drive efficiency across the finance function. You must be process-oriented and constantly look for ways to improve and streamline our finance operations.
  • Project management skills: Strong project management abilities, decision-making, delegation, and the capacity to execute both big-picture strategies and detail-oriented tasks.
  • Excellent communications: You have strong verbal and written communication skills, both in English and Finnish. Unlike other roles at Slush, fluency in Finnish is required for our Head of Finance.
  • Thriving under pressure: Slush is a dynamic and evolving company, and you will need to thrive in an environment that has tight deadlines, is fast-paced,  high-pressure and sometimes unpredictable.
  • Interest in startups: You are curious about startups and want to become a leading finance professional in the European startup ecosystem.
Practicalities

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This is a full-time, paid position, with a permanent contract starting at the beginning of February. We open the recruitment process in December and finalize the last interviews in January.

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Our team works mainly at the Helsinki office. Because of the physical nature of the work we do at Slush, working here will require some amount of office presence, but partial remote work is also possible.

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If you have any questions, feel free to send a message to kasper.makela@slush.org.

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We look forward to hearing from you!

Head of Investor Relations
Overview

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The Investor Team is responsible for attracting the world’s leading VC’s and LPs to Slush bringing in over 4T in AUM. The Investor Team creates value for and together with the investors to help the startup ecosystem at large. The Investor Team manages some of our most important relationships, ensuring investors continue to choose Slush as their #1 event of the year.

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In this role, you will work closely with the Startup, Program and Partnership team, reporting directly to the President.

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Responsibilities
  • Recruiting, onboarding, and leading the Investor team, consisting of 2-3 Investor and LP Operations (and during the Fall the Team Leads).
    • Taking care of your team’s routines (team weeklies, 1-on-1s, team recaps, feedback 1-on-1s).
    • Managing (with the support of the President) your team’s workload and priorities.
    • Ensuring that the team reaches the set targets for the year to be agreed together with the President.
    • Maintaining and supporting (with the President and Head of People) your team’s well-being, motivation, and growth.
  • Responsible for reaching the Investor team’s revenue target.
    • Leading and tracking the Investor Team’s sales efforts valued at €1M, both in terms of ticket sales and partnership sales.
    • Head of Investors owns the sales process of Investor Lounges and new revenue generation, while supports the team in our Investor Office Hours sales.
  • Crystallizing and communicating the value proposition of Slush to the leading VCs & LPs globally. Nurturing the mutually beneficial relationships Slush holds with these entities by actively being in contact with and working together on several fronts:
    • Aim for an even higher level of ambition in VC & LP engagement, including breaking the record of Top VC’s at Slush.
    • Building a year-round investor community activation strategy, together with the President and the CEO, to strengthen Slush's presence at the core of the ecosystem.
    • Facilitating LP <> GP and startup <> GP dealflow by making relevant introductions.
    • Identifying and inviting relevant investors as speakers to the main event and Investor Day.
    • Collaborating with the Startups Team to craft startup <> VC concepts to help emerging founders we can have an outsize impact on.
    • Increasing the LP <> VC activities to help especially emerging managers fundraise. Fundraising at Slush is already now 200% more popular in 2025 compared to 2024.
    • Conceptualizing & executing new value-adding VC and LP concepts.
    • Co-organizing international events throughout the year and at Slush to increase Slush’s brand awareness and build our reputation as the leading event in the startup ecosystem.
Requirements
  • High-level understanding of the venture capital landscape and the startup ecosystem.
  • Lead sales for Investor Day partnerships, Investor Lounges, other VC & LP concepts, and Investor Passes. This includes the ability to drive sales, perform under quantitative weekly targets, excellent negotiation skills, and motivating the team to reach its sales goals.
  • Excellent leadership skills to set and prioritize goals for both yourself and team members. This includes excellent project management skills, ability to make decisions, delegate and execute from the big picture to the smallest detail.
  • Excellent communication skills—are you someone who can host an international event, network with the highest level VCs & LPs in the world, and come back with 20 strong connections:
    • Excellent spoken and written communication skills (in English).
    • Ability to work and communicate effectively between both internal teams and external stakeholders, especially with high-profile individuals in external contexts.
    • High EQ and understanding of the nuances of relationship-building & networking.
  • Understanding of the dynamics and economics behind VC is a requirement.
  • A curious mindset to absorb the dynamics of the global startup ecosystem and VC in particular, and excitement to build value within it. In other words, you're not afraid to ask questions to learn from leading VCs.
  • High ambition level. Our goal is to make Slush the most attractive tech conference on the planet for a Tier 1 VC investor, and we want you to show us the next step on the way there.

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Practicalities

‍

This is a full-time, paid position, with a permanent contract starting at the beginning of February.

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We open the recruitment process in December and finalize the last interviews in January.

Our team works mainly at the Helsinki office. Because of the physical nature of the work we do at Slush, working here will require office presence, but partial remote work is also possible.

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If you have any questions, feel free to send a message to Charlotte at charlotte.alholm@slush.org.

Get in Touch

General inquiries

hello@slush.org

Technical support

support@slush.org

Tickets

tickets@slush.org

Startups

startups@slush.org

Investors

investors@slush.org

Partners

partners@slush.org

Media & PR

media@slush.org

Speakers

speakers@slush.org

Marketing

marketing@slush.org

Meet the Slush Team

Charlotte Alholm
Head of Partnerships
Vilma Viertola
People Operations
Vilma Soini
Program Curator
Sandra Savelieva
Motion Designer
Santos Alcover
LP Relations
Rania Said
Operations Producer
Polina Kuklenko
Head of UI/UX
Oskar Aaltonen
Investor Operations
Noora Saksa
COO & CFO
Niki Nurmi
Partnership Manager
Nelli Sillanpää
Head of Media & PR
Natalia Grosheva
UI/UX Designer
Mikhail Cherkashin
Video Editor
Maryama Moalim
Head of Program
Marina Yurchenko
Marketing & Comms
Margot de Maulmont
Full-Stack Developer
Kia Kanninen
Startup Operations
Khai Chan
Full-Stack Developer
Kasper Mäkelä
Head of Finance
Kalle Kahanpää
Head of Startups
Julius Thimm
CPO
Joakim Berger
Head of Production
Ida Sinisalo
Partnership Manager
Freja Teijonsalo
Program Curator
Elina Laurila
Head of People
Elin Dölker
President
Edoardo Vacca
Mobile App Developer
Daniil Freidin
Partnership Manager
Carlos Perez
Creative Director
Camilla Komulainen
Head of Investor Relations
Aapo Leppänen
Software Engineer
Anshul Mahajan
Head of Tech
Anni Kotola
Finance Operations
Anindo Mesbaul
Head of Growth
Ali Zein
Partnership Manager
Aino Bergius
CEO