Join a startup day

This job-hunting day was possible due to the joint efforts of Oslo Business Region, StartupLab, Mesh and Nordic One.

Thursday March 26, 2015 was the day for the Norwegian Startup ecosystem. It was an episode -the first one of its kind in Oslo – that involved 20 companies pitching to an audience of +150 guests in order to recruit new members for their startups.

The evening
Norway’s biggest startups took the stage for around 40 minutes to deliver short presentations of themselves. The alphabetical list of the 20 presenters is available at the bottom of the article. Around 5 p.m. avid job seekers gathered together at StartupLab to start the late afternoon –which not even a heavy snow blizzard could stop- with pizza and small talk. The job hunters had some time to mingle with each other until they were all called to the forum. The call to action was given.

Rolf Assev –now partner at StartupLab, former Opera Systems and key person to its success- gave a solid speech to both attendees and startups about what he assures to be one of the biggest drivers behind success: the importance of hiring the right people. He emphasized on some prototypes of people, which he hired during his time at Opera. He talked about them and how they helped him build what nowadays is a platform that features over 350 million people. Following the introduction talk, CEOs of the 20 startups gave a 2 minutes presentation each. Despite being brief, all presentations managed to express three things: what the company does, which positions are open in their organization and where do they see themselves in the future.

After the presentations were done, the participants were to meet their potential employers. They had the chance to walk around the stands, introduce themselves, get to know more about the companies of their interest, talk to people who are already working their potential future workplace and even give out their CV.

On the event
The event, which had the primary interest of getting companies to meet with their plausible new collaborators in a proactive atmosphere, broke attendance records and filled the forum with people who are looking forward to help create the future. Overall, it was four hours of mingling, presenting and learning.