What is it that makes an average team outstanding? How do we discover our skills and work in a way that as an individuals we serve our team best? These kind of questions were asked at the start of the week 1 of Startup Journey.

After an awesome and intensive Boostcamp the teams worked on their own on Monday, but on Tuesday we got back together to the drawing board. After the weekly info session we heard an awesome keynote from Minna Mustapää who shared her ideas and the lessons on team buildingh that she have learned during her years spent at startup communities of Zurich, San Francisco and London. Minna also helped teams by meeting them all one on one in order to talk about the essentials of organizational culture.

Wednesday we got to take part in a hands on type workshop about team communications hosted by truly amazing Murray Dick and Emilija Veselova

Murray coaching the teams

Murray hosting the workshop

Every Thursday we will have a metrics day where we go through a small checkup with the teams. This week we went through the teams motivations behind their startups. Our head coach Pyry Liukas had one on ones with every team to help them with things that are holding them back.

Metrics day

Head Coach Pyry Liukas catching up with the teams

After the weekly metrics it was time for weekly BBQ and this time it was hosted by one of our kickass startups called Utovia (more about them in couple of weeks). As part of our BBQ we had also visitors from Helsinki as IT-talent agency Talented provided us with cold drinks and snacks.

Weekly program finished on Friday when we had the first pitching session of the summer. Essential feedback for the teams were provided by the guys from *Ship pitching festival and from Lasse Rintakumpu (one of the founding fathers of Boost). We also videotaped all of the pitches so teams can see themselves what kind of work is still to be done this summer.

Journey has just started but already we are super excited about the teams and how they help each other. Now that we have started building working cultures of the teams it is time to move to even more serious things as the theme of the week 2 is business plan.

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