What a lovely chance to meet some “old friends” in San Francisco.

I met with Aleksi and Stella, our colleagues and “startup mates” from Aalto university and Startup Sauna / Aaltoes community. It was really cool stuff back in the days in 2015-2017… ☺️ time flies though really fast! And a small little Covid came also in between.

Aleksi has a really unique startup success story: joining directly after graduating from Aalto to a forward-looking, ambitious startup in robotics and AI – and is now preparing to create a disruption wave in the manufacturing processes related to the warehouses. His company has grown 20x and company has over 100 employees now. All kind of tech talents from Silicon Valley and globally are joining onboard.

“It’s really cool Lauri to live in San Francisco. This really is the center where things are happening in tech. Twitter is next door and many other global leaders next door.”

The life is cozy, but interesting. To combine a nice neighborhood, excellent nature and cycling possibilities, with an ambitious tech career, is exciting. The life expenses are slightly higher than in Finland, but the booming of “welfare” and high stakes for the tech talents in the Bay Area has brought the salaries probably three-fold, compared to the Finnish ones.

“However there’s a reset ongoing now”. Twitter, Google, Facebook, they’re all laying off staff big time. But that might even be healthy in a broader scale…

Stella is working with Smartly, a really cool and innovative Finnish tech company who has a strong branch in SF.

We were laughing for some old pictures taken in 2016-17 – guys have changed a little in a few years… ☺️ time is flying. It really has flown…

We also wondered how much the whole world has changed since we were doing student Entrepeneurship buzz in Finland and China since then. China has changed. US has changed. The world is in a different position geopolitically… looking at what’s going on in TikTok and all the discussions around it. You didn’t have that in 2016-17. But not all change is necessarily bad.

Aleksi mentioned he has seen me developing in china through video and written posts in FB and website… “it feels like we’ve seen many times since that”. Digitalization is not always a bad thing. 🙂

However today was a good reminder that digital cannot replace physical meeting. You can’t eat a bagel with avocado, salmon, and pineapple and have meaningful F2F talks online. It’s not the same. And very possibly never will be… Though digitalization is well catching up. 🙂

In the last 3 years many of us hasn’t seen our friend and families as much in Finland as we’d like. But things may be coming now more back to normal.

Doesn’t matter how “global” you are, or wherever you go in the world, it’s difficult to be global if your not local first. Welcoming glocalization…. 🙂 it’s a nice buzzword, but it actually makes sense. Perhaps we can connect different spots in the future in a new way, SF, Helsinki, Shanghai region… Everything is possible. If there’s a way, then it’s just some committed people to find a way to get in there. That’s the spirit also here.

And btw, when walking in the streets, you realize clearly why SF has its unique, colorful reputation. It IS a very eccentric place – and mainly in a good way. ☺️