Every year, people come to the event and see the result of days of work to make the venue ready for action. No one besides the team has ever witnessed what happens before we open the doors to visitors. This piece of text gives you an insight into top craziest things we have gone through just to make sTARTUp Day a bit cooler and more memorable, as well as the challenges that came along the way.

The Bold and the beautiful… and the stupid

sTARTUp Day 2017 was held at the AHHAA Science Center. The science mecca itself was too small to accommodate the 3,500 participants who were going to attend that year, which meant we had to think creatively. Since we couldn’t conjure up a magically expanding tent like in Harry Potter, we decided to unite the two buildings of AHHAA and Turu Sports Hall. The latter became our beloved Starlight Stage, and in the evening, we turned it into the legendary party venue where Tommy Cash gave the most unforgettable live performance. What made the live extra special was the 270-degree visuals that covered the walls.

The greatest obstacle has always been the weather. It’s hard to grasp how the weather at the end of January is not all sunshine and butterflies. That being said, uniting the two buildings with a huge heated tent in the middle of streetlights and concrete benches took us an unimaginable amount of man-hours to complete. A few days before the work began, the weather decided to contribute with over 30 cm of fresh snow every day.

With a 1000 square meter tent, the roof and the walls were the easy part but it also needed a floor that was raised one meter above the ground. After days of construction, the night before opening doors to sTARTUp Day, it was still not ready. The crew we hired ran out of working hours and didn't finish the job. Organizers were left with no further options than to find the solution themselves in the middle of the night - no warehouses and tech crews to summon, no stores open. Alone.

It was around 3 AM - 6 hours before we opened the doors when the Head Organizer, together with the Founder of the event, sent the last volunteers home and completed the task by themselves. Raiding the science center warehouse, calling friends for supplies, and using whatever seemed to do the work of leveling and covering the deep holes in the floor, the clock struck 7:30 AM (1.5h before doors opened) when the last piece of the puzzle was put together, mere hours before the opening.

"How do you sleep eight hours in one?" asked the Head Organizer, Ermo Tikk, before he had to be back at the venue to open the event.

“Hey, I have an idea!”

The year after the floor trauma, we moved the event to the freshly renovated University of Tartu Sports Hall. sTARTUp Day 2019 was the first-ever event to take place in the reopened building post-reconstruction, and we got to suffer the benefits of the new venue.

We always want to give as much as possible to make this venue look not like a sports hall. Today, we know that with molton fabric, lighting, and enough demo area companies, you might just make it what you want it to be. Before we had brains, we thought it was a good idea to borrow wall modules that AHHAA science center had created for their movie studio exhibition with what you could build something that looked like a city street. Due to their large size and weight, they required at least two people to operate. Sounds cool on paper, doesn’t it?!

During the 2019 event, it was around -30 degrees outside, which meant the same temperature in the hangar where the walls were stored and where we had to spend many days loading them. The only thing that kept us going and sane was blind faith in the event. The transport took us two long days. The pallets of modules just barely fit through the doors at the venue, and it took us thrice as much time as we anticipated.

Naturally, after the event was done, we had to do it all over again in reverse. Exhausted and drained, we had to pick ourselves up and return the modules to the hangar. We finished on Saturday evening (the event ended on Friday) only thinking, “Never again.”

The worst part after the cruciating logistics of the walls was that we ended up using only half of them. The modules had been designed to be used as small sets of buildings, not long continuous walls. This meant that stacking them on top of each other to make the wall taller was not an option due to safety concerns.

Whatever we do, winter will find us

Every failure might be a lesson if you’re wise. Every mistake might turn out to be a happy accident. Every catastrophe might turn into a possibility.

When COVID hit us, and it did hard, right after the end of sTARTUp Day 2020, we felt lucky and relieved not to have to suffer the consequences that the restrictions of public events brought. With enthusiasm and a spark of hope in our eyes, we started to organize sTARTUp Day 2021. “It’ll blow over soon," we told ourselves. In summer, there was a spark of hope that led us to believe that organizing a 4000-person event in January was possible, but then came the cold.

Every week, the government increased the restraints on public events, and then, in December 2020, there was a meeting with sTARTUp Day NGO members. Marili Vihmann, the Head Organizer back then, went to sell the idea of making the event online. She even had an excellent plan on how to make it engaging but after coming back from the said meeting, only one sentence passed through her lips as she walked through the front door: “sTARTUp Day will be held in August.”

We’ve never done sTARTUp Day in the summer and instantly, there were questions about the venue, concept, team and literally everything had to be redone. After several discussions we confirmed the Estonian National Museum (ERM) as our venue. The little obstacle with ERM is that it only fits around 1400 people inside. Could we do the event partly outside? It’s summer, what could go wrong?

We had a huge part of the event planned outside: the networking area, a huge part of the demo area, a pitching stage, a food court, and some of the demo areas as well. We knew the risks of an outdoor event, but the hope of good weather stayed with us until we saw the forecast a week before. Wind, rain, hailstorms, and cold weather - jackpot! You cannot change your fate, but you can make the best of it. We rented out heaters, ordered extra tents, and bought around 200 blankets to keep the participants warm. We were putting up wayfinding signs 5 meters above ground and could not remember a time with worse weather.

The day of the event arrived. Even though the rain had stopped, the nasty weather continued to make organizing this “Summer Festival” a true nightmare. We ran out of blankets and there were not enough heaters outside to make anyone listen to the Pitching stage.

As the day passed, the weather started to turn, and even if there was a slight rain in the evening, the “True Viking Party” at Lodjakoda was a true success. It was warm, there was tons of stuff to do and finally the weather was nice. The stars helped to carry the nice weather to dawn and the next day already looked like summer. Even if the first festival day was a horror show, the second day helped us turn the tables, and participants left the event with smiles on their faces.

“Not everything is a lesson, Jim!”

By trying to make sTARTUp Day more memorable for the participants, we have managed to create memories for ourselves that will last a lifetime. At the same time, we have become better and more effective at what we do, and by the ninth sTARTUp Day, we have finally learned our lessons on how to build such a venue. The main takeaway would be something like: “Don’t make it too complicated, find partners you can trust and let professionals do their jobs.” We have managed to cut back on the stress and physical hours that volunteers and the team put into the event. That definitely does not mean we have abandoned the effort for sTARTUp Day. Vice versa, we have figured out that this event is all about bringing awesome content to the stages and awesome people together to network with.

Today, the three former Head Organizers, Ermo Tikk, Lauri Sokk, and Mart Lättekivi, continue to build events outside of the sTARTUp Day team. They call themselves Kolm Õuna (Three Apples) and continue to share their experience and energy to make the event scene a little more lively every day. Naturally, they have no escape from the sTARTUp Day team as they continue to develop their crazy ideas for every event. We’d like to see them try to leave…


Written by sTARTUp Day's previous Head Organizer, Mart Lättekivi.