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Success Quote by Trip Hawkins

"Digital Chocolate has 60% of its developers in Finland where the sun never sets in the summer and there is nothing to do outside in the winter, so we are very productive!"

About this Quote

Trip Hawkins sells Finland less like a country and more like a productivity hack. The line is classic startup banter with a sharpened edge: turn geography into destiny, then turn destiny into output. “Where the sun never sets” romanticizes the place just long enough to flip it into a joke about work discipline; “nothing to do outside” collapses an entire culture into weather-based incarceration. The punchline - “so we are very productive!” - is delivered like a wink, but it’s also a tidy executive rationale for why this studio can ship.

The intent is twofold. On the surface, it’s a light, disarming way to praise a remote team and signal global credibility: we’re not just a Silicon Valley shop, we’ve got Nordic talent. Underneath, it’s a managerial story about control and efficiency. Finland becomes an environment that “naturally” keeps developers indoors, quietly implying fewer distractions, fewer lifestyle demands, more hours at the keyboard. It’s a joke that normalizes grind culture by externalizing it: it’s not pressure from leadership, it’s the climate.

Context matters: Hawkins, a veteran of the game industry’s boom-and-bust cycles, knows investors and press respond to simple narratives. The Nordics have long been framed as software powerhouses (later supercharged by Nokia-era mystique and game studios’ success), so he borrows that aura while keeping it breezy. The cynicism is in the reduction: labor becomes a seasonal inevitability, and “productivity” is treated as the unquestioned moral outcome.

Quote Details

TopicWork Ethic
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Hawkins, Trip. (2026, January 15). Digital Chocolate has 60% of its developers in Finland where the sun never sets in the summer and there is nothing to do outside in the winter, so we are very productive! FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/digital-chocolate-has-60-of-its-developers-in-165946/

Chicago Style
Hawkins, Trip. "Digital Chocolate has 60% of its developers in Finland where the sun never sets in the summer and there is nothing to do outside in the winter, so we are very productive!" FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/digital-chocolate-has-60-of-its-developers-in-165946/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Digital Chocolate has 60% of its developers in Finland where the sun never sets in the summer and there is nothing to do outside in the winter, so we are very productive!" FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/digital-chocolate-has-60-of-its-developers-in-165946/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

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Trip Hawkins on Finland and Developer Productivity
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About the Author

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Trip Hawkins (born December 28, 1953) is a Businessman from USA.

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