We are living super exciting times at Boost: the community manager recruitment is open and Startup Journey 2017 finally kicked off with 9 teams. Each week, we have a theme for the week in Startup Journey and we gather the top coaches from Finland to help our teams in improving their business.

To kickoff a 10-week program, you need to get the mindset correct. Also, because community aspect is super important for us and working together goes a long way, we wanted our entrepreneurs to get to know each other and have fun together. And fun we had for sure!

We kicked off the program with a coaching sessions with our head coach Pyry Liukas from Tidy Technologies. Pyry discussed the most important things of the summer with the teams: attitude, money and focus. And we can promise, it's not the last time we will be talking about these topics in the upcoming 10 weeks. As is a tradition, we also hosted a open BBQ for the community so everyone can meet the teams right off the gate. It was also nice to see some of our alumni startups from 2014, 2015 and 2016 programs and enjoy delicious BBQ rotisserie.

On Friday we jumped into the bus and drove to Mathildedal for the opening Boostcamp - our intensive weekend camp. To get the optimal start, we started with fun team building by mixing the teams into three and Aschwin van der Woude hosted a paper plane workshop to get our teams working together. Based on the amount of chatting and laughter we're pretty certain that goal was reached.

Getting the mindset and attitudes correct was one our key points in the first weekend and there's no one who does that better than Aape Pohjavirta, a startup coach and the Chief Evangelist of Funzi. He's seen more failures than all the other people in the room combined and his vast experience combined with pushing our teams to the limit was inspiring to follow. Match that with Sunday morning of pitching practice with coach Mike Bradshaw and you have the optimal coaching team for the kickoff. Mike also pushed the teams out of their comfort zone and provided on-point feedback for the pitches the teams delivered.

Now the teams have started the Journey of a lifetime and when the going gets tough, the tough keep going. We will continue to have coaches push the teams forward and outside the comfort zone since that's where the learning is fastest - and time is of an essence for every startup team.

Thank you Pyry, Aschwin, Aape and Mike for a great week! And don't forget, Demo Day is on August 17th, come and see our teams bring their A game.

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