Finland has some new successes: Wolt being the biggest EU food delivery service, Oura being the first health ring and Silo AI being one of EUs biggest AI companies. Wolt got sold to Doordash ($3.5B), Silo AI got sold to AMD ($665M). Oura is still a $11B Finnish company.

We also had a Finnish Facebook before Facebook. Irc Galleria was used by all young adults when I was studying at university. Most girls I knew used it, which should have told investors a lot. But they never made it international.

It's sad that Finland could still be the internet superpower, but Finnish companies made the wrong moves and next wave of Finnish companies got sold. And the only remaining big things like SSH and Linux are free. And Oura is heavily challenged by Apple and Samsung smart rings.

IRC lost to MSN Messenger. The silver lining is that Netscape wasn't Finnish. That would have made perfect sense :D

Finland also had a GPU company. It got sold to ATI -> AMD. It was an EDRAM based design. Xbox 360 devs might still remember it. It was later sold to Qualcomm (Adreno). As we all know Adreno is an anagram of Radeon.

@SebAaltonen AFAIK Linus is „finlandssvenskar“ i.e. swedish

@BarnB That's a misconception. Sweden is one of Finlands main languages. Legally you can use both Finnish and Swedish for official matters. Finns speaking Swedish are still Finns (Finnish citizens). Linus is not Swedish citizen.

@SebAaltonen Does not matter that it’s free, it is a massive achievement. Something very few nations managed to do.

@VlasakLv30 Sure. It's a massive achievement. The problem is that Finland has been hit by recession quite hard this time, since we don't have all these big local tech companies paying taxes anymore to Finland. Linux is great, but doesn't bring taxes to Finland.

@SebAaltonen Regarding Linux: "we"? Is every Finn Linus Torvalds?

@realMrLaminar No, I am just listing achievements done by Finns. Most of them had Finnish colleagues and Finnish teams. Linus is not working alone.

@SebAaltonen linux being free isn't a failure man

@raphamorims Not it's great, but doesn't bring any taxes and prosperity to Finland. We are hit by recession pretty hard this time. All big Finnish tech companies are gone.

@SebAaltonen Question is: Do you understand why?

@SebAaltonen dude linux changed my life and gave me a career. thank you.

@SebAaltonen Europe decided to throw away its technology edge and instead focus on third world immigrants, regulations, and diversity

@SebAaltonen worked with a Finnish tech company once, very smart guys

@SebAaltonen There’s a great YouTube video by the serial poet documenting Finland’s contributions to irc! https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Wis I could tag them but idk their handle

@SebAaltonen The amount of tech innovation coming out of a country with so few people is astounding.

@SebAaltonen How do you use invented to describe an OS that is just a free knockoff of a 30 (now 50) year old work done by the phone co in the US? maybe look at that word up, or reread Bacon...

@SebAaltonen Finland really fumbled the bag

@SebAaltonen But you totally forgot we are the world’s happiest country. Not measuring happiness, but total goats in playing the game and its scoring. How could we monetise that?

@SebAaltonen wild how much finland punched above its weight in tech SSH literally securing half the world's connections, IRC basically creating online communities, and yeah Linux running like 96% of web servers... all from a country of 5 million people nokia's fall is such a classic case of

@SebAaltonen The GPU company was Bitboys, which was founded by members of the Finnish demo group Future Crew. I was always disappointed that we didn’t see retail hardware from Bitboys directly.

@SebAaltonen You don't know how many years are in "20 years" don't worry, it happens to me too

@SebAaltonen I think people underestimate the role of finance. Canada has the same problem - it’s hard to compete with an economic system with Wall Street backing it.

@SebAaltonen Still very good at drinking.

@SebAaltonen So why did it stop?

@SebAaltonen Hey, just implement higher taxes and more socialist policies and it will be fixed in a jiffy! You know, business is always happy when it is serving for the society /s

@SebAaltonen @threadreaderapp unroll

@SebAaltonen Finland has Solar Foods for the solar protein (Solein), you totally forgot that one:

@SebAaltonen Use still have some of the biggest mobile gaming companies and a great ecosystem for game development on the mobile with @Rovio, @supercell as key companies or @SisuVentures as a top global gamedev fund.

@SebAaltonen And now you f..d. Sacrificed all inovative talent for ESG scores.

@SebAaltonen This is a great reminder of the tech contributions made by the Finnish. A real shame, for me, that IRC lost out to MSN and others. It was a key part of my foundational experience with the Internet in the early days. Linux though, what a contribution to the world that is.