A guide to freelancing in Finland

I spent a lot of time in Belgium (to the point I became a citizen) and am now in Barcelona starting a FinTech.

Europe lacks both a risk-taking mentality and the framework to foster real entrepreneurship.

Spain was able to become much more competitive thanks to the austerity they were forced to go through post-crisis, but there are still way more bureaucratic hoops I have to jump through compared to what I would need to do to start my business in the US.

Incorporating an LLC alone (the equivalent of a c-corp is rarely used by startups over here) requires 3,000 EUR in the bank plus about the same amount in legal fees. In many other countries, it's a five-figure deposit to get a company set up. As the director of the company, I'm required to register as a freelancer so that I "can't fire myself and claim unemployment" which is ridiculous within itself.

Stock options don't really exist in Europe either, meaning I can't really issue them to attract talent. In otherwords, I need to access more capital at an earlier stage to grow my business in comparison to US competitors.

Finally, there is no such thing as chapter 11 bankruptcy within the EU, which limits risk-taking by businesses.

As for France, it's great that they have a visa. However, the legal and labor system is similar to Belgium, making founding and scaling a company a royal PITA. Belgium is a great place to work in a giant company (usually a bank or an insurer) but an absolutely lousy place to start a business, visa program or otherwise.

Europe needs to get this figured out. The continent has too much talent and too large of a market to not be able to be a global innovation force.

Don't get me wrong, subsidies are generally still important, for instance for initiatives that have a positive societal impact but that are hard to monetize. It's crucial that these organizations can still exist (not everything needs to be able to generate shareholder value to have a right to exist) and if subsidies allow them to do their thing, then that's great. But for the private sector, I think that there are other mechanisms that achieve the same goal but that maintain the much-needed Darwinism of startups, e.g. by offering tax breaks for angel investors.

Finland really does not have it. This may feel odd, but really, Finland is capital-poor country.

Unless government invested, nobody would.

In places like England with lots of private capital it makes sense to leave investment to the markets. But like I said... that market of capital just trying to find the best investment, does not exist in Finland in massive scale.

> I imagine there's a lot of 'who you know' going on, too.

Isn't this pretty much everywhere? US/India/China? And it's probably not limited to just government programs but even Angels/VCs/press are prone to hype?

The current product I'm building[1] doesn't excite a lot of people in my immediate vicinity but people thousands of miles away from me are looking forward to the launch. It's a question of positioning and product-market fit at the right place, right time with the right idea.

If the mom-test book and building this saas has taught me anything, you should always be evaluating the intent/point of view of the person you are talking to.

In this case, if it's a bureaucrat or a politician, it is all about optics. They have to justify every decision made, so implicitly their aim is to gain brownie points with the population and an average population does not really evaluate ideas based on pure merit but on what feels good which is, almost always, hype.

[1] https://getliste.com

Wow. I always thought that's a SF VC thing. If anything EU businesses focus much much earlier on profitability. That's the reason why they are much more risk averse and rarely (if ever) create some really ludicrous startups.

As opposed to the American VC model currently driving such vital innovations as "how do we make middle class people use a jitney cab service?", "what if short term office leases came with free beer?", "will lazy people pay to have food delivered?" and "oh will they pay to have other stuff delivered, too?"

Look, I kind of get what you're saying, but it's not as if US startups are immune from bragging about "changing the world" and I'm more willing to put up with that bragging if you're at least trying to solve an actual hard problem.

The government should be funding crazy blue-sky long shots like small-scale fusion reactors and surgical nanobots because nobody else will. It's hard to make money on that kind of thing in the short- to medium-term but if it came to fruition, it really would be transformative.

Well, that's not true. You also have a good safety net if it doesn't work out. Quality of life, happiness, health care and education is also good or among the best.

You can replace Finland with pretty much any non US country on Earth. I've met brilliant hard working people all over the world. The only thing they lacked to make it big was capital.

If the company has to pay 2-5k in monthly taxes, that will be on its revenue. If you have no revenue yet, then I don't imagine you will have to pay that much in taxes

Or would Finnish companies be able to pay an on-site freelancer with an American LLC just as easily?

Of course I would like to learn more Finnish, but daily life and childcare interferes with regular lessons. (Of course being able to work in English also means that speaking Finnish at work is also difficult.)

Since moving to Finland four years ago I've bought a couple of flats, found a job, filed taxes, visited doctors, dentists, and similar things all in English.

I understand a lot of Finnish, I just speak less. Ordering food, etc, is something I'd usually do in Finnish although it has to be said a lot of people will either initially greet me in English, or reply to me in English which is a bit frustrating.

I just want to underline that, unlike most European languages, Finnish grammar is highly systematic, and so is Finnish pronunciation. Very few exceptions, it feels almost mathematical in nature.

There's quite a lot of grammar, putting off non-nerds who think "cases" are hard because after all, they are hard in eg German and Latin (they're peanuts in Finnish). But for a geek with mathy tendencies, Finnish grammar is a warm shower compared to eg Polish or French or, for that matter, English. It's all so super consistent, it's as if it's a designed language.

A fun exercise when learning Finnish is writing a tool that can conjugate verbs or nouns, which is totally feasible in an evening or two, showing just how straight forward the grammar is.

The pronunciation is also super consistent and phonetic, which means that if someone teaches you a word or a name, you can simply hear how it's spelled. This makes it much easier to remember the word, since you can store the sound and the letters visually in memory, even if nobody writes it down for you.

Another fun hobby project is coding a Finnish speech synthesizer. You could just have it concatenate audio fragments for each letter. It'll sound like shit but it'll actually be understandable.

The real challenge with Finnish is the vocabulary.

(source: I'm Dutch, lived in Finland for a year half a life ago, tried to learn the language, walked away speaking it close to accent-free and knowing all the grammar but still not able to understand shit because seriously not a single word is anything like anything else I knew) (except appelsiini)

Things have changed a lot in recent years. In the 1970s, or even the 1990s, then sure, learning the language would have been very difficult due to the limited selection of learning material and dearth of social opportunities to practice (the Finns being so famously taciturn). Today, however, there are so many different textbooks for Finnish that a foreigner can find one that matches his or her particular approach to language-learning, and there are lots of meetups now in Helsinki for foreigners to practice.

I learned Finnish many years ago when things were rather more difficult, and I envy the opportunities that immigrants to Finland today have.

"or even Swedish, which most of them speak due to historical factors that I will politely gloss over"

Most finns _don't_ speak Swedish, or it's very limited. It's a second language in law only because Finland was part of sweden from 1300 - 1800. There is nothing too politically awkward to gloss over. Finland was not conquered by sweden. We basically were swedes for 500 years, with a weird local language that no civilized person spoke.

Historically Finland could have been part of either a feudal society that became inclusive (Sweden) or that became stereotypically exclusive (Russia). As part of Sweden Finland was among the forerunners of countries that got a modern legislation and administration in the 1600's and strong cultural ties to the rest of europe. During this time the elite spoke Swedish.

The political interaction with Russia during this time was handled mostly by military means.

Finland's population rose from 50,000 to 800,000. The population of the entire country was less than the population in global biggest cities (a trend that continues to this day).

There was not much input to scientific or cultural development of the world as most energies were spent in surviving winters without famine and evading capture into slavery by invading various eastern entrepreneurs. Industrialism took it's first faltering steps, but there was not much capital to invest (a trend that continues to this day).

Then came Napoleon, who wanted to pressure Sweden to join into an embargo against England. At this point France was allied with Russia (this would change eventually) but for now Czar Alexander in 1808 was happy to oblige.

The initial plan was not to take control of Finland, just to occupy it until Sweden acquiesced. Things happened, and Alexander decided to keep it. But what to do with it?

As it turned out, there were two trends working to the benefit of the finnish polity. First, the czar was pretty sure sweden would eventually like their dominion back. Secondly, this idea of small nation states as buffers between big players was taking hold among the great nations (Belgium was one of these as well a few decades later). And there were no resources that the czar would really like. The country was foreign, there were no feudal lords the czar could command, the whole area was controlled in a totally unrussian way. Sure, he could put his boot down and russify the lot, but all of the things discussed above lead to the fact that instead Alexander accepted a plan that Finland would become a semi-autonomous duchy with it's own constitution and money. This would have been quite an impossible idea a century later but now it felt as an excellent idea.

There was only one problem.

There was no finnish national sentiment to speak of. And you can't have a strong autonomous nation state without a sense of nationality. At this point all educated people spoke swedish. Basically, it was an area ripe to return to sweden.

So, czar happily supported and encouraged the few individuals that thought that Finland should have it's own national spirit (the sentiment of nationalities was already spreading in europe and was not totally foreign in finland). So, in effect, they machined a campaign that it was effectively _cool_ to be finnish. Swedes changes their names to finnish in droves.

At this time, finnish language as a written tongue started to develop as well. It had more or less stagnated until now, but as finnishness was becoming a thing, surely something should be written in it as well.

So that is the reason there are no great literary works in Finnish before the early 19th century. There was no literary tradition, and everyone who would have been capable of producing great works wrote in swedish and other european languages any way.

So now we have a country with more or less modern administration, a national sentiment and a language. But it's still dirt poor.

This would be remedied eventually. The russian governors recognized that their domain was mostly unindustrialized backwater, and they heavily supported industrialization efforts. The funny thing is, that on the other side of the border the russian state did not support extensive industrialization, but on the finnish side it actually supported it quite a lot.

In effect, russian domination gave finland it's national identity, it's governing body, it's industry and supported it's literary and artistic efforts. Finland effectively was a dominion under czar's direct authority, and finn's loved their czar.

This love changed to something else in the late 19th century as the russian state started a strong russification push in all of it's dominions. But finns were still more or less content as their life went on. The finnish elite is strongly part of the russian high life - St. Petersburg has a large finnish population and finnish artisans produce goods for the wealthy. For example more than few of the Faberge eggs were made by Finnish artisans.

Come 1917, the czar dies, the house of Romanoff is no more, and the finns discover to their horror that legally they are no longer a duchy under russia as the way it was legally written was that finland was under czar's domain and not part of the russian state. Legally, it seems they are now on their own. Horror changes to realizing a possibility of an actual nationhood. So, a few politicians travel to Lenin to kindly point out that legally they are no longer part of russia, and, ahem, they would be very greatfull if the bolsheviks could awknowledge this. Lenin can do whatever he likes with them, but frankly, he has bigger political problems at hand (he will have for a while as the russian civil war will rage for years) and so for some reason or other he let's the silly finnish bourgeoise have their cute little state. The communists will anyway take over soon as the masses will rise in rebellion.

Except, they won't. There's a bloody civil war in 1918, finns settle it, continue existence as a parlamentarian state and... that's where it all comes from.

In II. world war they block soviet invasion with strong support from Nazi germany (yes, they were basically in league with the nazis but the alternative would have ranged from soviet opression to total annihilation - had he won Stalin could have basically destroyed every finn if he felt like it. He killed ten times more soviet people as an afterthought as there were finns in total.).

So, basically, Finland is country filled with people who for the most of civilized world history have died of starvation and have been hunted as slaves. Only in the last 150 years the country emerged from a rural backwater into a fairly succesfull nation state.

This history explains quite a lot of the typical finnish egalitarian sentiment. We've died of starvation. We've been sold as slaves. There's been no rich local lords since everyone has been equally miserable. There's been no big cities. Most of the urbanization has happened in the last 50 years. So, we're a bunch of people who's families are mostly country yokels, who's families have been quite poor, but who really like to read and write, do maths and enjoy cool gadgets.

I think the main reason Finland is pretty successful is it's centuries long history of inclusive institutions, and intentional investment into human capital (i.e. education). This history is very strongly linked with the swedish state and language, in one way or another, hence, there is nothing impolite about it.

Sorry about the long post.