Name: How Finland Survived The iPhone
Uploaded: 2020-03-07T16:05:16.000Z
Duration: 13 min 39 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I think I've got some good stuff for us. All Nokias.

Wanna celebrate the Finnish pride. I got some classics here.

Yeah, we've got a few of these. And then I thought you might like this one. This is like...

Do you want to go sorta, you know, almost underarm like that? Or this is just pure overarm?

I don't know. I think I will go overarm, because I'm used to that one.

I'm looking forward to you embarrassing me.

It is said - not by me, but by their Nordic neighbors - that Finnish people are weirdos.

They're aloof and do not engage with strangers or conduct small talk.

Their hobbies include competitions such as wife carrying, air guitar playing,

And yet, here I am on a cool Helsinki morning,

hanging out with Finland's future Olympic javelin thrower, Lassie Etelatalo.

I like this one because I had also one when I was younger.

All I had to do to make this happen was slide right into his DMs and promise to bring some old Nokias.

It turns out that the Finns are, in fact, very hospitable, and that their cell phones are sturdy...

Something bigger being said about Finland's nosedive into a technology apocalypse,

and subsequent rise as a vibrant, inventive force in the technology industry?

I'm not sure, but I'm gonna go with yes, and try to prove it to you with what comes next.

But here in Finland, something really unusual happened: it became more of a company nation.

During the early to mid 2000s, Finland's economy boomed, driven almost entirely by Nokia.

In its heyday. Nokia accounted for 40 percent of all mobile phones sold,

and one out of every two smartphones sold.

Then in 2007, something terrible happened to Finland: Apple released the iPhone.

I've come here to Helsinki to find out what happened in the aftermath of Nokia's decline, and what startups have risen to take its place.

For starters, I'll need a primer on the decline and fall of Nokia.

And as luck would have it, this long-haired gentleman, David Cord, wrote a book by that very title.

He also happens to be an American, but nobody's perfect.

You know, when I was researching this episode or just telling people what we were going to do,

especially some of the younger people had already, they were like, was Nokia that big of a deal,

because I remember them being the kings of the mobile industry.

Well Nokia was huge in Finland. They were integrated in everything in the Finnish culture.

Finns were very proud of what Nokia did. It was our success. It was Finland's success.

Nokia started way back in 1865 as a paper products company. Plush toilet paper was its first hit.

It got into boots, tires, cables, all kinds of stuff, and then began making cell phones,

first for this cool guy in the 60s, and then for all of us.

Can you hear me now? The new iPhone is cool and all.

Life was grand for Nokia, and for Finland.

From these glorious headquarters by the Baltic, Nokia poured money into the Finnish social system.

And then this raging capitalist named Steve Jobs came along and ruined everything.

Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

The iPhone was crazy, right, because I remember in this like ridiculously quick period of time,

it's not like the company was wiped off the face of the earth, but I mean, it just lost the phone industry.

When Nokia started to stumble and started to fail, many people took that very personally.

There were thousands of people who were unemployed - the factory workers, the software developers.

In its moment of greatest desperation, Nokia's phone division suffered that greatest of dishonors:

Yeah, it was tough. There's a town called Nokia in Finland, which actually the company was named for,

and the day the announcement broke, a vandal went and changed the town sign to Microsoft.

People were upset that we used to be on the top of the world, and now it's all gone.

Nokia, of course, still exists and makes things,

namely telecommunications and data infrastructure gear.

But where the company used to employ 35,000 people in Finland, it now only employs 3500.

After Nokia, everyone was always talking about, what's the next Nokia?

What is the next big company that will be able to go international and have such a big impact on Finland?

And many people at the time thought maybe that was Rovio.

Rovio created Angry Birds, one of the first gaming megahits of the iPhone age.

But while they had a few hot years, it soon became clear that Nokia-level success was not in the cards.

Eventually we came to decide, that's not going to happen again. We need to be more diverse.

Instead of having one gigantic company, we need to have a ten good, profitable, mid-sized companies.

The birds may not have replaced the Nokes, but they did kick off a gaming boom in Finland,

one that came to be dominated by Supercell,

the maker of all your favorite games and the master of your time.

Supercell has only 300 or so employees, but it raked in about 1.6 billion dollars last year.

One hundred million people play its games every day,

some of them spending thousands of dollars to upgrade their compounds and farms.

And all of this winning happens in a strictly shoes-off workplace,

a common trope among Finnish startups that Supercell claims to have invented

Ilkka here, the CEO, is beloved by his countrymen for creating Finland's biggest post-Nokia success story.

I'm here to find out how he did it, and hopefully score some free upgrades in Clash of Clans.

When you guys started Supercell, what were you trying to do, maybe, in the gaming industry that was different?

You know, it seemed to us that most games companies were organized very like, in a very traditional way.

Basically, they had this hierarchy, and the underlying assumption is that the leadership knows best what to do.

But in games business, I feel that it actually is the game developers who are, obviously they're closest to the games.

They know best what type of games the company should do.

So therefore, we had this idea that, what if you would like flip this traditional model, like,

you know, the game developers would own the vision of what type of games they would do.

This strategy has made Supercell one of the most coveted places for game developers to land a job.

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How Finland Survived The iPhone

tough

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decline