AES co-hosting VES Talks in Vaasa: We were thrilled to have Pekka Hyysalo as our keynote speaker

Greetings from Vaasa! 

Two weeks ago, in the early mornig we took the train to Vaasa. For the second time in AES history, AES and Vaasa Entrepreneurship Society, hosted an event together. This time it was time to co-host VES Talks: Belief (External link) together with the awesome Vaasa Entrepreneurship Society (External link), VES team. We took an early train at 6.30am and arrived to Vaasa 10.30am. We met up with Markus Hangelin, the designer at VES and enjoyed a great lunch together. After that we just walked around in a sunny Vasa and started the preparations for the evening.

We wanted to cooperate with VES because we believe cooperation is the only way we can make this already strong ES-movement even stronger. This wasn’t our first event we cooperated. This tradition started last spring at Arcada when we hosted together a panel discussion, AESxVES: Suomi Nousuun! -vaalipaneeli (External link) before the parliamentary election, which was a great success.

The VES Talks event took place in the old theater called Kino Ritz. The venue was amazing and could fit 320 people, so we knew the event was going to be great because we had over 350 pre-registered for the event. The event started 5.15pm and our very own AES Chairman Rasmus got on stage a bit after that together with Miika Huttunen who is the Chairman of VES and Rami Ibrahim, the Vice-Chairman. On the stage they talked about the ES-movement and about the importance of cooperation. Aaltoes (External link) told us about their summer program Summer of Startups (External link) before the highlight of the evening.

The reason why we all came together in Kino Ritz was of course to hear the inspiring talk by Pekka Hyysalo, founder of FightBack (External link). Pekka is the most positive guy in Finland. The story of Pekka is very emotional and it really puts your own little problems in perspective. “One jump changed my life. It wasn’t the end. I’m fighting back, and I’m ready tell you all about it.” The accident meant that Pekka lost his ability to move, speak, eat or take care of himself and he was also faced with both short term and long term memory problems. The road to recovery has been rough as Pekka had no accident insurance, and no possibility to work or study. Pekka founded Fightback in 2012. Fightback’s mission is to support the rehabilitation of people with head trauma.

“Maybe I can never be strong, but I fight everyday to be as strong as I can be.” 

–Pekka Hyysalo, Fightback

We got tremendously good feedback from people and this will not be our last event together, next time we want to make something even bigger, and invite even more entrepreneurship societies to cooperate.

We still have a few events coming up this spring, so stay tuned and remember to follow us on Facebook (External link), Instagram (External link) and Twitter (External link) to know more!

Stay AESome everyone!

/Team AES