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NOV 20, 11:30 AM - 6:15 PM, HELSINKI CABLE FACTORY

READY TO
LAUNCH.

Kick off your Slush week with a gathering of the 1,000 brightest minds in product management. Apply to attend - it’s free even without a Slush Pass! Apply before Nov 16.

Apply now

BRINGING TOGETHER THE BUILDERS.

Ready to Launch is the perfect kick-off to the Slush week for product-focused founders, Chief Product Officers, Product Managers, and Product Leads. The event revolves product management at different stages of growth, with talks from experienced product and growth professionals, connecting with your peers and much, much more. B2B, B2C, D2C, B2D – it doesn’t matter. Attendance to the completely free event is by application or invitation only, which means you’ll be in good company.

WHY ATTEND?

Ready to Launch brings together the who’s who in product management to share insights behind high-growth products. Join to learn the tricks of the trade from experts across industries and different stages of growth. Form connections with other product people, meet investors to bring your product to the next level and join mentoring sessions hosted by speakers and other experts. And remember to have fun while doing it.

This is for you product people

Every company at every stage needs a strong dose of product expertise – even if they might not even have dedicated product managers yet. This is why we are inviting both product managers, product-focused founders as well as a bunch of other product-minded friends of ours. Investors are also welcome. No Slush Pass needed. We review each application on a case-by-case basis!

Apply Now
SPEAKERS.

THOSE WHO DISCOVER AND DELIVER.

All Ready to Launch

April Underwood

Founding Partner, #Angels

April Underwood is a founding partner of the angel investing collective #Angels and a member of the board of directors for Zillow Group. Until 2019, April was the Chief Product Officer at Slack Technologies, Inc., a cloud-based software company that builds professional collaboration tools. Prior to joining Slack, April was Director of Product at Twitter from 2010 to 2015. Previously, April has held product, partnerships, and engineering roles at Google, Travelocity, and Intel.

April holds a B.B.A. in Management Information Systems and Business Honors from The University of Texas at Austin (2001), and an M.B.A. from The University of California at Berkeley (2007). April has received numerous honors, including Fast Company’s “Most Creative People” (2015), Fortune’s “40 Under 40″ (2016), and the highest alumni honor for professional achievement from The University of Texas at Austin, the “Outstanding Young Texas Ex Award” (2019).

   

About #Angels
Founded: 2015  |  HQ: United States  |  Industry: Venture capital

Cameron Adams

Co-founder & Chief Product Officer of Canva

Cameron Adams is Chief Product Officer and Co-founder of Canva, an online design and publishing tool which makes graphic design simple for everyone.

Since launching in 2013, Canva has grown to over 15 million users across 190 countries, with more than 1 billion designs created – that’s over 33 designs per second! Today Canva is growing from strength to strength, with over 600 team members working together on a mission to empower everyone to create beautiful designs.

Cameron is responsible for heading up the design and product teams, as well as playing a key role on future product directions and innovations.

Prior to joining Canva, Cameron ran his own successful design consultancy, before joining Google, where he found himself working closely with Lars and Jens Rasmussen (co-founders of Google Maps) to realise the design vision for Google Wave.

He then moved on to build email startup Fluent, before meeting Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht and deciding to bring Canva to the world.

With a strong design background, Cameron has also authored five books on web design and regularly speaks at conferences around the globe.

In his spare time, Cameron enjoys spending time with his two kids, playing music or DJing. And you’re also likely to find him relaxing with a nice cup of hot chocolate!

   

About Canva
Founded: 2012  |  HQ: Australia  |  Valuation: $40B

Gustav Söderström

Chief R&D Officer at Spotify

Gustav Söderström is Chief Research & Development Officer for Spotify. He oversees the product, design, data, and engineering teams at Spotify and is responsible for product strategy. Mr. Söderström is a startup seed investor and also has been an advisor to Tictail since 2013 and was formerly an advisor to 13th Lab (acquired by Facebook’s Oculus).

Before joining Spotify in 2009, Mr. Söderström was Director of Product and Business Development for Yahoo! Mobile from 2006 to 2009. In 2003, Mr. Söderström founded Kenet Works, a company that developed community software for mobile phones and served as the company’s Chief Executive Officer until it was acquired by Yahoo! in 2006.  Mr. Söderström holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Leo Nilsson

Chief Product Officer at iZettle

Leo joined iZettle in 2013, when the company was roughly 70 people and the word fintech hardly existed. His first focus was international expansion – bringing iZettle’s payments services to Latin America and key European markets. As iZettle expanded its product portfolio, Leo was part of building the product team from the ground up. Today, Leo leads product management across 25 growth, product and platform teams that deliver multiple products across 12 rapidly growing markets.
In May 2018, PayPal made its biggest acquisition to date when it bought iZettle for $2.2 bn. Leo is an integral part of taking iZettle to the next level, as part of the PayPal family. His focus is on product synergies and building a one-stop-shop for small businesses, ensuring they have everything they need to get paid, sell smarter and grow.

Janna Bastow

CEO & Co-founder of ProdPad

As a product manager always looking for better tools, Janna founded ProdPad, product management software that helps you manage your roadmap and your product backlog. Janna also occasionally works with other companies as a trainer and mentor to help them figure out how to build and learn, without breaking the bank. 

Audrey Tsang

Chief Product Officer at Clue

Audrey is Chief Product Officer of Clue, the fertility and ovulation tracking app that millions of women use to track their menstrual cycles. She leads the company’s product teams, is responsible for the product roadmap and oversees product strategy.

Before joining Clue, Audrey served as the Product Lead of the Pinterest Home Feed and the Product Director of Hotel Tonight.

She holds a Master’s in Computer Science from Stanford University and an MBA & MEM from Northwestern University.

Kaisa Salakka

Director of Product Management at Unity

Kaisa is Director of Product Management at Unity and leads new product innovation. Her focus areas are game economies and machine learning. Prior to Unity, Kaisa served as a VP of Product for Silicon Valley game analytics start-up Omniata that later got acquired by King. She has also held several senior product roles applying machine learning for telecoms and media in companies that are today part of Nokia. Kaisa holds an M.S. in Operations Research from the Aalto University

Jonathan Rochelle

Chief Product Officer at Zapier

Jonathan Rochelle (aka JR) is an entrepreneur and technology product manager. He is currently Chief Product Officer at Zapier. Prior to joining Zapier in 2019, he was the Director of Product Management at Google and one of the original co-founders of many Google Apps, including Google Sheets, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Drawings, Google Forms, Google Apps Script, Google Fonts, the new Google Sites, Google Classroom and Google Jamboard. Jonathan led product development for these collaborative apps in G Suite from inception, through their first 8 years (from 2005 until 2013), which are now used actively by almost 1 billion people. He is the co-inventor on several patents related to real-time collaboration in productivity apps which was at the core of the G Suite apps he helped launch.

Prior to joining Google in 2005, Jonathan co-founded and sold two technology start-ups – ITK Solutions, a technology consulting firm, and 2Web Technologies, a software product company which was acquired by Google in 2005 as the technology behind Google Spreadsheets – the first publicly launched component of the Google Docs suite. Before founding the start-ups, Jonathan spent 15 years as a software engineer and engineering team manager, primarily at JP Morgan & Co., across a broad set of financial service businesses.

Urho Konttori

Founder & CPO of Varjo

Urho Konttori is Founder and Chief Product Officer of Varjo. He is a product innovator and program manager who has 15 years of experience in designing, engineering and managing large-scale hardware and software projects at Microsoft and Nokia. Varjo is a forerunner in the VR and XR space, the first company having built fully immersive human eye resolution XR technology, focused purely on the professional market.  

Deepa Daniels

Director of Product at Peakon

Deepa Daniels is Director of Product at Peakon where she works with Product Development Teams and Customers to build software that helps organizations and managers make better people decisions.  Deepa has an MBA from the Danish Technical University (DTU), studied Disruptive Strategy at Harvard Business School and Innovation Leadership at UC Berkeley College of Engineering. She lives in Copenhagen, Denmark and is passionate about promoting inclusion and diversity.

Carl Christensen

Co-founder & CTO of Spacemaker

Carl is Co-founder and CTO of Spacemaker. He holds M.Sc. degrees in both Computer Science and Business, and has 15 years of experience in digital innovation and product development. 

He served as a member of the board and of the leadership team at Bekk Consulting AS, where he worked for more than 10 years and where he was in charge of 300+ consultants delivering software products to a multitude of large corporations in the Nordics. 

About 3 years ago, he left consulting to pursue a crazy idea with the potential to deeply disrupt the way we build cities all over the world. As the CTO of Spacemaker, Carl has built an agile and cross-functional product organization of currently 75 people to deliver a game-changing AI technology that helps users discover smarter ways to maximize the potential of a building site. Given that Spacemaker operates in a greenfield, this includes a research squad of eight people based in Boston, close to MIT. 

A mediocre but enthusiastic golfer, Carl lives in Oslo with his wife and two small children. True to his Nordic roots, he used to compete in alpine skiing, and still holds a lot of love for the sport. And when he is not busy (which is admittedly rare these days), Carl can be seen following his passion for food and food culture.

James Mayes

CEO & Co-founder of Mind the Product

Co-Founder and CEO for Mind The Product – the world’s largest and brightest community of Product Managers. Previously, over a decade in building high performance tech teams, startups to FTSE100. Agency, inhouse direct sourcing and RPO. Also speaker at numerous events in the UK, Europe and USA, particularly on future tech/talent trends. Co-founded (ideation / fundraising / sales / operations) and exited TweetJobs, Europe’s first Twitter-based jobs service.

Victoria Turk

Features Editor at WIRED UK

Victoria Turk is Features Editor at WIRED UK, where she oversees long-form coverage for the print magazine and website. She also writes features, makes and hosts videos, and appears regularly on the WIRED podcast. Before joining WIRED, Victoria was Technology Editor at New Scientist and UK Editor at Motherboard, Vice’s tech, and science channel. She tweets at @VickiTurk.

Vincent Ho-Tin-Noé

Head of Product at Wolt

Vincent Ho-Tin-Noé is the Head of Product at the Helsinki-based company Wolt. Founded in 2014, Wolt is one of Europe’s fastest growing technology companies known for its food delivery platform. Wolt operates in 19 countries and 70 cities while the company has raised $175M in funding from investors such as ICONIQ Capital, Highland Europe, 83North and EQT Ventures. Before joining Wolt, Vincent served as VP of Product at SSENSE, an e-commerce and brick-and-mortar luxury and streetwear retailer, where he built the Product function from the ground up. He also led Amazon.fr’s marketplace and later participated in the launch of Amazon Fresh in the UK, as Head of Category. Vincent holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an MSc. in Industrial Engineering and Management from Grenoble Institute of Technology.

Mentoring

Want some advice?

Our speakers and other experienced participants are here to share their insights in roundtables. Registrations for mentoring sessions will open during the first week of November.

MATCHMAKING

Through the Slush Matchmaking Tool, you can book meetings with other Ready to Launch participants, be those peers, investors or your potential new hires.

What do you need to do?
1. Apply and get accepted
2. Create your profile to Matchmaking
3. Start browsing
4. Send out some requests

 In case you are attending Slush & Ready to Launch, you are able to switch between Slush Matchmaking & Ready to Launch Matchmaking easily by clicking on “Change Event” in the upper navigation bar in Matchmaking. When selecting Ready to Launch, you will only see Ready to Launch participants.

Investors

To help startups make their products into household names, investors are also present at the event. The Slush Matchmaking Tool is in use for you to schedule the meeting that can define the future of your product.

READY TO LAUNCH – NOV 20, 2019, HELSINKI

STRAIGHT OUTTA HEL.

The event will be organized in Helsinki Cable Factory, which used to serve as the main venue of Slush for five years. A factory turned cultural centre – could there really be a better place for product building?

Where?

Ready to Launch takes place at Helsinki Cable Factory on Nov 20, 2019.

Contact Us

If you have questions or want to collaborate, contact us at [email protected].

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