How to find a co-founder in Finland

Great co-founders can be found in many places. You’re typically looking for a person with specific skills who is also interested in building a startup, and you rarely find large groups of people who have both.

Startup events and groups have people interested in startups, so you have to find a suitable one for your startup who has what your team needs. Domain-specific groups, like developer networks or circular economy events, have plenty of people with the skills and interests you might be looking for, and you’ll have to find the ones interested in joining a startup.

Here are a few places where you can start looking for a co-founder for your startup.

General

The Hub – You can post a job ad for a co-founder for free. This website has a lot of visitors. Unfortunately posting is for companies / teams only; you can’t post an ad of yourself as an individual person looking for a team.

Kiuas Inside – A platform made for co-founder networking by a local non-profit accelerator. They have 100+ profiles already, but you can’t browse those without signing up.

Stealth – The brand new successor of Founder2Be, which was a big and old global platform. Their tagline: “Discuss ideas, find co-founders, get startup resources, connect with freelancers, and more.”

Icebreaker – Icebreaker VC organizes a lot of activities to bring promising co-founders together, such as the Pre-Founder Project. This helps co-founders meet and get things going, and the nice investors at Icebreaker to be the first to get into discussions with many new startups.

Local

Startup Helsinki Slack and Startup Space Helsinki are online platforms that allow you to network with others interested in the Greater Helsinki area startup ecosystem.

Events

There used to be plenty of events listed at Startup Events List’s Helsinki page and NewCo Helsinki’s event page, but at the time of writing there are only a few. These are worth checking out time to time though.

Pre-covid, NewCo Helsinki ran In Search of Team Members events on a monthly basis. Who knows, perhaps these will continue soon in Startup Space Helsinki?

Mentors and board members

Smart startup entrepreneurs look beyond the core team from day one. To help in this I wrote a separate article on how to find advisors and board members in Finland.

Other

Do you know of some other ways to find a co-founder? Let me know through comments below or the contact page and I’ll be happy to update this page 🙂

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