Tempted by the reputation of the Finnish innovation and entrepreneurship feast known as the SLUSH and motivated to get ready for this big November event happening in Helsinki, we headed to Istanbul for its smaller yet inspirational local spin-off: Slush'D! And we would love to share with you some learnings and thoughts gathered during the conference.

The organizers are proud to tell the story of Slush'd

Slush is a not-for-profit movement on a mission to help and create founders who change the world. It has grown into the world’s leading startup event, uniting startups, top investors, and tech media. Through Slush’D, we’re bringing that same spirit to Istanbul, creating a community-led gathering that empowers founders to drive local impact while staying connected to a global network.

The event took place on 3-4 October in Rixos Tersane, gathering quite a big crowd, especially considering that locally it was the very first edition. The conference revolved around three main themes:

• Resilient Founders - Sharing the knowledge on how to build a successful business through resilience, providing the opportunities to network and talk to the investors.

• An emerging powerhouse - Exploring Turkish startup ecosystem, with a focus on talent and fueled by sectoral momentum in gaming, fintech, e-commerce, AI, and SaaS.

• Borderless Innovation - Comprising discussions, workshops and exchanging ideas on how to scale abroad, and become a globally-minded company from day 1.

Jarek, our CEO, shared his thoughts as well

Listening to the speeches of successful business developers, founders, who managed to scale, and investors, I heard one important sentence that stayed with me. "In the Y Combinator, what they focus on in a startup are three major things: Founder(s), Business Model, Market." It was also reaffirming to hear so often from the panelists that integrity, transparency and simply honesty in business dealings are the universal values which are the main ingredients of a startup's success.

The event proved that the companies’ cultures and their care for the quality of human interactions are the most crucial factors for quality development even in the tech and deep tech fields. We were proud to promote the human touch as one of the main values of ExpertHub. And we were happy to absorb the knowledge from the very best, on how to grow and how to be ready for growth.

We hope to see you in Helsinki on November 19-20, at the main happening, the one and only SLUSH!

Let's stay in touch.