Recently I went to Techstart+SDG Helsinki, where tech start-ups and developers gather together.  In the same room where high level members of Finnish government discuss the most important decisions in various industries, I had the chance to listen to both inspiring and boring talks coming from evangelists of ICT/internet companies in Finland. Luckily the organizers managed to invite more interesting speakers than the boring ones, so despite the small size of it, Techstart+SDG was one of the best tech events I’ve attended so far.

Even so, I cannot help but to think about the poor evangelism here in Finland when I listened to the boring speeches. Let’s face it. Finland is still very far behind US in terms of technology innovation and activeness. We have great technologies here, great talents here, and great facilities here… Yet somehow we still lack good and outstanding evangelists.

I’m talking about Technology Evangelists here. They can be founders, executives, board members or employees of a company. Being an Evangelist means each of them contributes their 3”E” (Energy, Effort and Emotion) to raise awareness, stir up enthusiasm or improve adoption rate…etc. in the general market/community.

According to Wikipedia, “Technology Evangelist is a person who attempts to build a critical mass of support for a given technology in order to establish it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects. Professional technology evangelists are often employed by firms which seek to establish their proprietary technologies as de facto standards or to participate in setting non-proprietary open standards. Non-professional technology evangelists may act out of altruism or self-interest…”.

For me, a Tech Evangelist is simply someone who understands and talks about technologies. But above all else, he has the power to change other people’s perspective of technologies.

An Evangelist is absolutely not someone like this

But someone like this:

…or, for a more formal example, this:

Funny, interesting, enthusiastic, somewhat immune from embarrassment or stage fright… all can be considered good traits for an evangelist. I understand that Finnish companies are better doers than talkers. But there are things, great things that can only be achieved by companies that are good in both ways. That said, besides talented engineers, talented evangelists are crucial parts of any startup and business.

The top 10 speakers/evangelists of ICT and internet industry in my list are currently Steve Jobs, Guy Kawasaki, Steve Ballmer, Jason Calacanis, Bill Gates, Taneli Tikka, Marc Davis, Morten Lund, Joi Ito and Tuomas Syrjanen. Up until now I have met/talked with half of them (the last half). Hopefully within 5 years I would have met and talked with all of them, and co-operate with at least 3 of them. At least, that’s one of my humble goals :).