Even though most of Finland has escaped to summer cottages and reading books, Startup Journey has been going on with two intensive weeks. That's why this blog post will be a compilation of the past two weeks.

Week 4 we focused on combining the previous and the following week. We started the week with a 1on1 checkup meeting with our head coach Pyry Liukas and continued on Friday to our 2nd Boostcamp. We took the teams to beautiful Tuorla where in addition to traditional Finnish summer weekend of sauna and sausage, we practiced pitching, refined their pitch decks for Kotka and participated in a workshop on stage performance with Minna Mustapää. We also learned about product development with Hermanni Vuorisalo and user experience design with Juska Teittinen.

The progress teams made in their pitches during the weekend was enormous. Confident about our teams we jumped on a bus on 5th week's Tuesday and headed to Kotka for *ship festival to network, to get mentoring and to compete in Pitch Captain competition.

Each of our teams did a fantastic job taking over the stage and combined with the amazing team spirit between the teams supporting and cheering for each other really elevated the experience. Out of the semifinal rounds, Entis, Temu Materials and Gloriana Games made it to Top 10 and pitched in the finals at the Kotka market square.

Our teams have always marveled at the Pitch Captain stage. 2015 Identio's Joonas Korgan won the competition, 2016 Rekorder's Oskar von Wendt finished second and this year it was time to show Kotka and the world who's really rocking this game. Mira Valkjärvi of Temu Materials pitched and convinced everyone in the audience that they were worthy of the Pitch Captain title.

In addition to success in the competition, Entis and Temu Materials were featured in YLE Suomi Kotka, teams received plenty of mentoring and long 1on1 sessions with the coaches as well as discussions with other partners such as FIBAN. Thanks for *ship crew and other startups and ES people (we love you LUTES) for taking part and spending the week with us in Kotka.

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