Slush 2025: What Startups Are Really Struggling With
I’ve just come back from my first Slush experience in Helsinki, Finland 🇫🇮, the world’s leading startup event:
- 6,000 startups
- 3,500 investors, representing the largest VC gathering in the world (over $4 trillion in assets)
- 20,000+ meetings, mostly between startups and investors
- 600+ side events all over Helsinki during the week: sauna & ice dipping, investor days, industry-specific events (AI, deep tech, …), country-specific meetups (Belgian beer night, …), networking night at Epic Games, and many more
If you’re an early-stage startup, Slush really is THE place to be.
It’s impossible to capture everything in a single post. Between intense networking, very honest talks from startup and scale-up founders, and countless hallway conversations, a lot happened. Topics ranged from go-to-market and product-market fit to deciding when to pivot, handling co-founder tensions and breakups, staying mentally healthy as a founder, and figuring out how to raise money from the right investors.
Rather than trying to cover everything, I’ll focus on what kept coming up again and again in my conversations with 40+ founders: what startups are actually struggling with in 2025, in this post-AI era.
Insights From the Ground with 40+ Founders
1. The Fundraising Paradox: Money Is There, but the Pressure Is Higher Than Ever
Across dozens of conversations, one theme kept resurfacing:
founders are stressed about fundraising, but even more stressed about what comes after.
Many teams feel stuck between two pressures:
- Investors expecting traction earlier than ever
- Internal systems that aren’t ready to scale once the money lands
Several founders told me they raised a first round, only to see their velocity drop after hiring.
Why?
Because execution was fragile. The idea was strong, but the operating system wasn’t.
My recommendation:
Before chasing the next round, build a clear 90-day execution narrative:
- What you’ll ship
- Why it matters for growth
- Who owns what
Fundraising gets much easier when you look like a team that knows exactly how it will deploy capital.
2. Acquisition vs Conversion: Where Early-Stage Momentum Quietly Dies
One of the most surprising patterns:
Almost every founder felt confident about generating interest, but very few felt confident about converting it.
The traffic is there.
The inbound is there.
The calls are there.
The follow-through… often isn’t.
Typical reasons I kept hearing:
- Unclear product story
- Weak onboarding
- No consistent tracking
- A funnel built mostly on instinct
This isn’t a marketing issue.
It’s a systems issue.
My recommendation:
Run a conversion audit before increasing acquisition.
Map the journey from first touch → closed customer, then fix the single biggest point of friction.
Improving conversion by 10–20% often beats tripling your reach.
3. Talent Isn’t the Hard Part, Alignment Is
I heard this a lot:
“Hiring devs is hard.”
But once we went deeper, the real issue was usually something else.
It’s not finding developers, it’s finding developers who align.
Strong engineers want:
- Ownership
- Clarity
- A mission they understand
- A product direction that doesn’t change every three days
When alignment is missing, everything slows down.
PRs drag. Features bounce around. Priorities shift without context.
Velocity drops even with a technically strong team.
My recommendation:
Introduce a simple weekly alignment ritual:
- What we’re shipping
- Why it matters this week
- What “done” means
- Which trade-offs we accept
It’s one of the cheapest productivity boosts you’ll ever get.
4. Architecture Is the Silent Killer of Startup Speed
This pattern was hard to ignore:
Startups with momentum had simple, boring, reliable architecture.
Startups struggling had complex, modern, over-engineered setups.
I heard stories about:
- Microservices with teams of 4–6 people
- Over-designed schemas
- Fragile deployment pipelines held together with duct tape
- Tech choices made because they were “cool”
Complexity slowed teams down.
Morale dropped.
Throughput tanked.
My recommendation:
Run a focused 30-day tech simplification sprint:
- Remove unnecessary complexity
- Unify naming and data patterns
- Automate one painful manual step
- Fix the three workflows devs complain about most
Simple architecture leads to fast execution.
Always.
5. Europe Has World-Class Talent, but Scaling Still Feels Slow
Talking with founders from across Europe, a recurring tension emerged.
They have strong talent, ambition, and engineering culture, yet scaling beyond their home country often feels painful.
Regulations differ.
Buying processes vary.
Constraints appear everywhere.
Teams move fast internally, but slow down externally.
The upside is clear, though:
Founders who manage to stay fast despite this friction often outperform competitors by a wide margin.
My recommendation:
Design for cross-border readiness early:
- Modular features
- Flexible data structures
- Compliance-aware product decisions
- A roadmap that anticipates friction instead of reacting to it
What slows others down can become your edge.
6. Founders Are More Resilient Than Ever, but Burnout Is Real
One of the most human takeaways from Slush:
Founders genuinely love what they do. Most wouldn’t trade it for anything. The chaos energizes them.
But many are exhausted.
Late nights, constant context switching, investor pressure, self-imposed pressure… it accumulates.
The risky part is that burnout often shows up after execution starts suffering.
My recommendation:
Introduce a monthly health retro.
Not about KPIs or roadmap, but about:
- Focus
- Workload
- Morale
- Clarity
A healthier founder usually means a faster company.
Conclusion — In 2025, Execution Beats Everything
If Slush 2025 reinforced one thing for me, it’s this:
the strongest founders don’t win by thinking bigger, they win by removing friction.
When team, product, and tech are aligned, speed becomes natural.
If you’re a founder and want to talk about your team’s velocity, architecture, or execution patterns, I’m happy to share what I’ve seen inside fast-moving startups.
