Why Elexive Skipped Slush This Year
Slush Day 2 wrapped up and the energy in Helsinki was electric as always. But Henri and I were not there. As founders of a young startup, you would think Slush would be mandatory attendance. It is Finland’s largest startup event, a magnet for investors, press, and the kind of networking opportunities that startup advice columns say you should never miss. And yet we consciously decided to skip it. The FOMO was real, I will not pretend otherwise. But the reasoning was sound.
The first and most practical reason is that we were simply busy doing the work. Client meetings, active deliveries, and building our own product stack. These things do not pause because a conference is happening across town. When you are a small team, every day you spend at an event is a day you are not shipping. And right now, shipping is what creates value for us and for our clients. There will be other Slushes. There will not be another chance to nail the deliveries we had on our plate that week.
The second reason is more fundamental and probably more controversial in the Finnish startup ecosystem: we are not looking for external money. At least not yet. Henri and I made a deliberate, early decision to bootstrap Elexive. We are funding this with our own capital and revenue until we hit a genuine scaling problem that requires outside investment. Not a theoretical future scaling problem. An actual, present one. Too many startups raise money to solve problems they do not have yet, and in doing so they trade away control, speed, and the ability to make unconventional decisions. We are not anti-VC. We are anti-premature-VC.
This is a contrarian position in a world where raising a round is treated as an achievement in itself. It is not. Raising money is taking on an obligation. It is useful when the math works – when a euro of investment reliably turns into more than a euro of value at a pace you cannot achieve organically. But if you can grow with revenue, if your unit economics work from day one, then bootstrapping is not a limitation. It is a competitive advantage. You move faster because you do not need board approval. You focus on customers because they are your only source of capital. You build discipline because there is no safety net of someone else’s money.
Will we be at Slush next year? Maybe. If it makes strategic sense, if we have something to show, or if we reach the point where external capital genuinely accelerates our trajectory. But we will not go just because everyone else is going. The best thing about building your own company is that you get to decide which games you play. And this year, the game we chose was heads-down execution. I am comfortable with that choice.
