In the Spring of 2020, Ambitious.Africa kickstarted its series of online matchmaking events connecting young changemakers, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders in Africa and the Nordics. The timing was perfect. People were forced to stay at home due to the pandemic and therefore more people across the two continents could attend. However, this was about more than just luck.

Many dots had to be connected long before the events kicked off in order to bring the Ambitious.Africa concept to life. To understand how Ambitious.Africa started, one needs to go back to when Peter Vesterbacka – one of Ambitious Africa’s principal backers and advisors, and former Mighty Eagle of Angry Birds – co-founded Slush, one of the world’s biggest startup events. 

“Slush wasn’t initially intended to become the “biggest or the best”. The goal was simply to inspire more ambitious young people to challenge the status quo within the entrepreneurial ecosystem”, says Vesterbacka. Most young people were more interested in joining big corporations instead of starting their own companies. Vesterbacka wanted to change that. 

In 2007, Vesterbacka spoke in front of 600 Aalto University students and asked them how many had ever thought of starting their own company. Three people raised their hands. Vesterbacka pointed out to them that many of the big corporations the students loved had started out as a small idea a newcomer dared to believe in – without any previous experience of building a company.

“Dinosaurs didn’t inherit the Earth. It was the small, furry animals. When these animals set out to grow large forests, they had to start by planting little seeds”, says Vesterbacka.

Long before the global attention from the Angry Birds craze at Rovio, Vesterbacka worked for Silicon Valley’s original startup Hewlett Packard, founded by college friends Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in 1939. These legends taught him it does not take much to start a great initiative. “Bill and Dave, whom I had the privilege to meet, demonstrated that you need nothing more than two curious minds and a small garage to turn a startup into a multinational company”, says Vesterbacka.

The Nordic Startup Event that Challenged Silicon Valley

In 2008 Vesterbacka and his friends wanted to send the distinct message that Silicon Valley was not the only place where innovative and bold startups could thrive and impact the fabric of society. So, they founded Slush. 

“At the time, everyone was busy copying Silicon Valley. But you can’t copy your way to leadership”, Vesterbacka says.

The first ever Slush brought together a growing ecosystem of 300 entrepreneurs which lit up a cold and dark November Helsinki – a stark contrast from a sunny and polished Silicon Valley. Well-known founders, such as Risto Siljasmaa (Chairman of Nokia), Ilkka Paananen (Supercell), Sulake (Habbo Hotel and later worked for Facebook) and Getchar (Vilius, Lithuania), shared their stories and Matt Marshall, founder of VentureBeat, was the moderator. In 2019, twelve years after Slush’s humble beginnings, 25 000 people participated in the event from 160 countries around the world.

The Slush team wants to encourage its volunteers to use the experiences learned from the event to realize their own ideas and build their own team. Slush organized a pitching competition series called ‘Slush 7’, which allowed seven teams to pitch their startup ideas. This has generated a lot of early-stage startups. Many of the teams and Slush volunteers came directly from student entrepreneurship ecosystem from various Finnish universities such as AaltoES, HankenES, LutES, OuluES, or VaasaES.

The initiatives Slush has created for young people are all founded upon the belief in learning-by-doing. This is the idea that you can only get so far by careful thinking, planning, theorizing, or trying to predict an outcome. Taking an action and trying things is how you learn the fastest. When learning by doing, failure and mistakes are regarded as an essential part of the learning process. One can never fully predict the future, but one can create the future by iterating one’s idea to a better one with every lesson learned from an unexpected or undesired outcome.

Bringing the Startup Sauna to Africa

In 2012, Richard von Kaufmann, who is a founding board member of Ambitious.Africa and has founded the payment solutions company Pricetap, helped bring the Startup Sauna accelerator concept to Africa.

Von Kaufmann reached out to the iHub Director of Partnerships, Jessica Colaco, an experienced Kenyan entrepreneur and computer scientist and she agreed to co-host the first African Startup Sauna event at iHub in Kenya. In 2014, the Finnish Startup Sauna delegation including CEO Juho Kokkola, Slush Chairman Ilkka Kivimäki and Inka Mero, founder of tech VC fund Voima Ventures, went to Kenya to host pitching and coaching opportunities for local startups.

Following the Kenya event at iHub, the Startup Sauna team got the opportunity to make a trip to East Africa to Tanzania and Ethiopia, to do similar pitching and coaching events for startups. The collaboration with iHub in Kenya also led to Jessica Colaco joining the Ambitious.Africa Kenya team. Vesterbacka and von Kaufmann, were already then planning on how they could scale the events to more African countries, however, as many venture capitalists know, one is often either too early or too late. It was not the right time - yet.

Slush 5 Years On

Meanwhile back in Finland, Vesterbacka held the same talk five years after the first Slush and asked students the same question: who is thinking of starting their own company? This time more than half of the audience’s hands went up. Slush had sparked a startup revolution amongst young people. “Young people showed up to the events because they loved being there. Ambitious.Africa is about the same kind of voluntary participation”, Vesterbacka says.

When in 2014, Finland’s former Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen attended the World Economic Forum in China, he sat at a roundtable to discuss entrepreneurship with world leaders, someone asked him: How did you make the transformation in startups happen? He answered, “I don’t know”. The point he wanted to make was that it was not the politicians or the government that had been in charge of the change – it was the young people.

Fast Forward to the Start of Ambitious.Africa

The Triple E’s: Education, Entrepreneurship, and Entertainment

Entrepreneurship was established as an essential stream of Ambitious.Africa because, according to Vesterbacka, it doesn’t matter if you have the best ideas in the world if you don’t do something to make those ideas happen in the real world. Ambitious.Africa believes in the need for and value of extending the entrepreneurial mindset outside the domains of startups and into organizations, governments, and universities.

Ambitious.Africa sees high-quality education as the foundation for building and sustaining strong societies. This is why another one of Ambitious.Africa’s three streams is Education. Vesterbacka and the Hanken students wanted to harness the key strengths they saw in Finnish education and offer insights learned from over fifty years of education reform that African countries could build upon to strengthen their societies.

“The best part about the Finnish education system is that it doesn’t kill creativity and initiative. Children are seen as people and not as beneath adults. It’s not about age, it’s about attitude”, Vesterbacka says. Finland has a small population compared to most African countries, however, even in countries like Mozambique or Cameroon with populations of 20-30 million people are still the most important resource, according to Vesterbacka. “Everyone deserves to be educated at a high level. It is not a coincidence that Finland has been ranked the happiest nation in the world. Happiness and education go hand in hand”, he says.

Finally, Entertainment can be used to allow the learnings from entrepreneurship and education to engage and inspire massive audiences. “Today, everyone’s competing for people’s time and attention”, Vesterbacka says. By for example merging the expertise of teachers and game designers, new learning experiences can emerge which has the power to create greater engagement and focus on learning amongst young people, all in the spirit of having fun in the process.

Keeping up with Africa

Through the areas of entrepreneurship, education, and entertainment, Ambitious.Africa wants to be at the forefront of highlighting and celebrating the uniqueness of Africa on a global platform within all industries – business, fashion, design and so on.

Africa is undergoing a fourth industrial revolution. This means it is easier for them to go straight to 5G in comparison with many Western countries. Mobile, according to Vesterbacka, is an important part in the development and the opportunities are plenty when you build products that are relevant in the African context. Today, six out of ten of the fastest growing economies are in Africa. 

The Ambitious.Africa initiative hopes to see more two-way exchanges between students in the Nordics and Africa. “To understand what’s really going on in a place you need to spend time there. There’s no substitute for that. What you see on the news doesn’t always provide its true flavor”, Vesterbacka says.

Half of the Estonian unicorn Bolt’s business comes from Africa, which was founded by Martin Villi. The company has a billion plus evaluation. The Finnish energy company Wärtsilä has had a strong presence in Africa since 1975. It is one of their biggest operations. “The key is establishing a local presence. The locals know the reality of each country better than anyone else and when you work together, you learn faster”, says Vesterbacka.

Sparking Super-connectivity between Africa and the Nordics

The matchmaking events kicked off in April 2020. Ambitious Country Teams were put in place one at a time, with two young people from each continent as the team leaders. After two months of events and with support from the Finnish government, there was great participation from African governments and ministers in Rwanda, Ethiopia and Nigeria. “Our job is to give young people more chances to connect in an inspiring and ambitious environment. We want to encourage and remove obstacles for young people in Africa to achieve their goals”, says Vesterbacka.

To achieve this, Ambitious.Africa has partnered with Start North and Aalto University’s 5G hubs or ‘mökkis’ and Dealroom to smoothen the online interaction between the two continents. By providing the super-connectivity, Ambitious.Africa can be at the forefront of the developments taking place on the African continent thanks to its driven young people. Ambitious.Africa wants to highlight and share the good news.

As the Ambitious.Africa community is growing, there will be more specific events to cater to the whole community towards the end of the year. From April to June, teams have been established in sixteen out of Africa’s fifty-four countries. There will be events within areas such as IoT, gaming, funding/pitching and others related to the three E’s. “The good thing with events like these is they have a deadline, so it pushes you to get your act together. The events allow opportunities to come knocking which will help people accomplish more than they imagined”, Vesterbacka says.

The question, according to Peter Vesterbacka, is does Africa really need to be “transformed”? “When more employment opportunities are made, young people can make things happen themselves”, Vesterbacka says.

In order to work towards providing quality education for all in Africa, Ambitious.Africa is working with the Finnish educational company Fun Academy, which has partnered with the pan-African non-governmental organization FAWE (Forum for African Women Educationalists) to train and educate Early Education teachers. By replicating their model, the aim is to educate 2,4 million new teachers in Africa. “Educating ten thousand teachers is amazing, but it’s too small. We can take it to the next level”, Vesterbacka says.

Returning subject of learning by doing, Vesterbacka comes back to the importance of keeping in mind that when setting out with a big, ambitious goal, there is no way of knowing how it will turn out in the end. “Growing and developing the ecosystem is not for people who think they can control the world. The reality of it is more like a thick jungle than a potted plant – you can’t control how it grows”, Vesterbacka says.

“The Ambitious.Africa vision is purposefully vague”, Vesterbacka says. In order to transform systems on a high-level it is important to stay open to unexpected opportunities. MobileMonday, a concept sparked by Vesterbacka, is an example of this. What started as a regular casual meet-ups for mobile developers at local bars in Helsinki, turned into an idea that was first taken to Tokyo and then spread like wildfire in the US where it was replicated by someone else. It has grown into America’s largest community for mobile developers, startups and industry developers. Ambitious.Africa aims to create thriving branded communities which can be replicated around the world organically.

“A strong brand is one that people can relate to and identify with. You have to tell the story a million times and constantly over-communicate. What will it look like? We don’t know, but it will be amazing.”

— Peter Vesterbacka