Estonia to mesh with the Nordics via a collective for founders
The Mesh Collective aims to bring the Nordics, new and old, closer together
Have you heard of the Mesh Collective? No? Well, listen up as it’s coming to Estonia soon - it could be fruitful for our founders in the region. I caught up with Anders Mjåset to unravel more about his ambitious network.
Norwegian serial founder Anders Mjåset set up his Mesh Community in order to better connect the startup scene in the Nordics and give founders a fighting chance to connect, grow, and collaborate.
In his early 20s, he founded a recruitment company and then a specialty luggage company; he found the startup scene “very bureaucratic and slow-moving”.
Mixing in circles in Stockholm, Berlin, London, Shanghai, and the US, where the startup scene was booming, he found the Nordics paled in comparison. “We decided to create Mesh, where we have the largest physical spaces, workspaces, and meeting spaces in Norway and Denmark, as of now. And we’re also expanding to the rest of the Nordics and new Nordics,” he told Fomo.Observer in the interview.
As well as creating these startup work locations, which he started 14 years ago, a recruitment platform called The Hub - an online recruitment platform for startups, scale-ups, and growth companies in the Nordic region - was born from the community, providing all the basics for a startup scene. And more than 1,000 events annually, ranging from basic physical activities and breakfasts, to cloud code and OpenAI meetups. What more could you need?
“The more experience you get as a founder, the more you understand that networking is insanely important to be able to do what you want to do. And then you need funding and talent. Those are the three resources that every ambitious startup needs,” he said.
“When we started back in 2012, we thought that the timing was perfect, and that the Nordic startup scene was going to boom everywhere - we were a little bit surprised by how slow things moved. It took 10 years before things really started to take off - now you have relevant startup scenes all throughout the new Nordics - Stockholm still leading the way.”
I’m interested in what he thinks Nordic startups can bring to a larger ecosystem. He tells me, “We are digitally advanced and highly educated, and have been for a long time - and then there is trust and access. With small communities, we’re able to do things fast, to get things off the ground fast.”
Despite Mesh's growth over the years, something was still missing for Nordic founders. “It’s a little bit frustrating,” said Mjåset.
“It’s fascinating and strange that all these small countries have all this quality coming out of them, but are still as disconnected as they are,” he explained.
“We felt that it had matured to the level where it would make sense to connect all the top investors and all the top founders, and then get the best international investors connected into that network. So we started doing that last year and had 10 events,” he said, introducing the Mesh Collective to the chat.
“We did one special event up in Lofoten, an island in Northern Norway, where we had 100 people in a small fisherman’s village - 50 VCs and 50 founders from all over the Nordics - just getting to know each other, swimming and fishing and skiing and stuff like that. We even had a little hurricane, so it was a very hardcore Northern, wet, icy, cold experience,” he explained.
Well, there is nothing like a severe weather event to bring people together, I guess! The Mesh Collective has since expanded from northern Norway to San Francisco. A Stateside event brought 50 Nordic founders over, and included 50 Nordic founders that live in the Bay Area, and 50 VCs, to go trekking, hiking, and ice bathing - no extreme weather event was mentioned during this outing.
He explains that while we have large tech conferences and events, there is a need for more intimate gatherings that can also connect the Nordic Region with key hubs in the US, noting that more of these events are planned for San Francisco and New York.
In fact, this autumn’s San Francisco trip will already yield benefits for Estonian relations, as we’ll be represented by Hedi Mardisoo from Cachet, Marko Klopets from Supersimple, Carmen Kivisild from Elnora AI, and Ergo Sooru from DrHouse.
“It’s an effective way for them to work deeper with the region. So we’ve gotten all the Andreessen Horowitzes, Kleiner Perkins, and all those top brands internationally to come work with us and also bring their partners from the US and from the UK to Norway, Sweden, or Denmark,” he said about how the collective works.
If you are as curious as I am to know what qualifies as a top founder for these exclusive events, he tells me, “it’s that you are of ‘international venture grade’. So, if you put somebody into a room with the top investors internationally, or the top founders internationally, will it be a valuable two-way meeting, or will you come up short?” And how do they find out who the great founders are? They ask the VCs.
“Well, we have two categories of founders and two categories of investors. So the founder categories are either what we call rising stars - Seed/Series A founders with the momentum in what they’re doing, or the founders that are established and have succeeded with something to a high level before. Then on the VC side, it’s the top Nordic or international top-tier VCs,” he explained.
On that basis, I believe this is a highly coveted group to be invited to.
Just what does the Mesh community have to do with the Estonian startup scene? “Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are the three countries that we have the strongest personal and company-related network, and then Iceland, Finland, and Estonia are the three countries that we are working to connect now, and then we’re extending kind of deeper into Finland, deeper into the Baltics,” he said.
So an Estonian introduction to the Mesh network is on the cards via the San Francisco event, and our very own Triin Hertmann and a few other great Estonian founders will join the next intimate event in Lofoten - no need to ask, will they have a weather event this year? Estonia is banking on Hertmann to bring the storm. Hurricane Hertmann has a nice ring to it.