This is the first part of a diary written by Adriana Ancuța, cofounder of Flyst, about her experience at the Sampo Accelerator in Helsinki, Finland. The purpose of these article is to get a better understanding as a founder of the intricacies of joining and working in a startup accelerator abroad.

While this is not the first accelerator designed for early stage startups I attended in the last 4 years, it is the very first international one. I made the application hoping that I will find a totally different entrepreneurial mindset compared to the Romanian one. I really needed a reset as my first startup hit the walls.

FLYST is my second journey as an entrepreneur, this time with a tech co-founder on my side, Andrei Georgescu, who is not afraid of leading extra large teams of developers nor to start from zero and build a complex product. We’ve met in Commons Accel Cohort #8, when he was looking to extend his network and I was Entrepreneur in Residence, with a simple mission to keep the community together.

We started discussing a side project, but it turned out to have all the ingredients of a brand new startup. The secret ingredient is that we are both good at solving problems: I easily spot them in our customers' daily businesses and he is rapidly identifying the most effective way to get things back on track.

Now about Sampo. I remember the application was brief, the interview call with Mike Bradshaw (the program director) was short too, and the follow-up emails from him even shorter (1-2 sentences). Later on, in my first days in Helsinki I learned the lesson of being concise when the weather outside was cold and my hands would freeze doing long dialogues on WhatsApp (around zero, when in Bucharest were more than 20 degrees in October).

Mike told me before the last day of the program that Nordics have the ability to communicate in one word anything that English people would communicate in a polite and sophisticated phrase.

While Nordics are sharp, Finnish people in particular have a sense for making life uncomplicated. The city looks like it is being built without harming the woods, few cars on the streets, you only have one shop in your neighborhood for groceries and it took you one 1 km to reach it (perfect for your 10k steps/day plan) and buses stop in your station only if you hand signal them your intention to onboard.

This ‘uncomplicated’ mindset worked also for hospitality. The place I stayed was a contactless check in hotel, meaning there is no lobby, nor reception staff and that I only got a code that allowed me to enter the building, the floor and the room.

Sampo Accelerator is designed to provide daily education for 3.5 weeks in Aalto University, being hosted by Startup Sauna, the most active Northern Europe startups community who built SLUSH, for instance.

My cohort was made by founders from Australia, Iran, Siberia and Russia, most of them immigrants, established in Finland with their entire families. I was the first Romanian entrepreneur the program ever has but I made a promise to myself not to be the only one as the program supports 3 cohorts a year in fall, winter and spring.

Some of the ideas that stuck in my mind during the first week are about the discipline required to build a startup, the bigger picture of myself, my interactions in the ecosystem and overall, how do I return better than I left. I documented them in LinkedIn posts. See them bellow:

You can follow Adriana on her Linkedin profile. And if you want to find out more about Sampo Accelerator, you can connect with Adriana there.