 Well, hello, everyone. It is so good to be here. Thank you, Markus and Tavett, for joining me on stage today. Today, as you know, and as you probably heard, we're talking about what is in the water in the Baltic region. But before we dive into our theories about what is the secret sauce to the many great successes we've seen, I thought why don't we start with sort of your more personal stories? Maybe Tavett, how did you start your journey? What was the beginning of it? What was the insight? And maybe give us a bit more background on how your path evolved. Thank you, and great to be on stage again with you and Markus. So, I was really lucky to be part of the team that built Skype. So, I met Niklas Javan, who started working with Skype. I was the first employee. So, little did I know, back then when I was 21 years old in an ex-Soviet Republic of Estonia, what's possible. Cutting this part out, moving on after Skype, now you get this itch of, kind of like, it's very hard to go and apply for a job in a bank or a job in a telco once you've been through that journey. So, the question really was, kind of like, can I do it myself? And I realized, you know, we shrunk the world with Skype, letting people communicate, somehow moving money still wasn't simple. So, it was really a question of, there's a huge problem that I think we can fix. Can we do it? Yeah, and I'm guessing that sort of having been inside a company like Skype also, kind of informed you and trained you and you'd seen someone else start a company and doing it and then kind of being inspired. So, maybe role models and the forces of inspiration have been important. I think, absolutely. In, I had a pretty good idea what's about to happen and I think that prepared me pretty well for what came later. Yeah. And Markus, tell us about your starty. How did you get started? First, optimistically and then brutally. So, I'd say that starting as a company is a 19-year-old. I was first very optimistic that how hard can this be and the whole technology world is growing so quickly and there's a lot of space for everyone. And then three years in, Uber suddenly raised more money than any internet company in history and it became extremely brutal competition for every customer out there and now it's been going on like that for the last seven years. So, that's been our journey. But to get more specific, I'd say that there's obviously pros and cons to starting very early. So, I've never worked in any other company than Bolt. So, I started straight out of high school, which means that on one hand I'm probably making some of the mistakes other companies have done, but in other ways I think I'm also not stuck in the paradigms of how a company should be built and I can figure everything out from first principles and design their company in a way that I think makes the most sense. Yeah, would you say also that coming straight out of school and being 19 years old, kind of you have a certain naivety to it? Do you think that has helped you? Absolutely. And it's actually one of the core values we have at Bolt as well that we should always be thinking from first principles, not try to reason by analogy and looking at what others have done but really think through what can actually be done in this sector. Whether it's designing the organization or how we should be building the product and so on. And that's actually been of tremendous value to us. I think if we were just replicating what everybody else would be doing in the industry, we would have never made it because everybody else had 10 times more money than us. So, we had to be very creative. Can I pick up on the naivety? I think that's such an important ingredient. You need to be, not foolish, but you need to be a fool to get started because if you knew how hard it's going to be, you would never do it. I think nobody would ever start. So, I think you need a very big dose of naivety and foolishness to get started. Like, if you would probably look at history and there's been very few examples of people who've done it who've been in the same industry. Marcus knew nothing about what he built. I knew nothing about FinTech. So, I think you need to have that naivety. This is such an important ingredient to getting started. I actually agree. I have a background at Spotify and at the time none of us came from the music industry and I think that was one of the things that actually made it work and we had a saying internally that was let's hire based on drive rather than resume because as you were saying, if you hire people that have an idea of how it's done before, then you're not going to think about it in new ways. So, I think that's a good key point to take away. All right, so then I'd love to hear your thoughts on why do you think there's been so many big and successful companies coming out of a relatively small country like Estonia. Is there something in the water? Is it something in the culture? Or is it being a small neighbor to a very big country that needed you to be more resilient or have more integrity? What are some of the things you think have shaped the ecosystem today? I think the startup world goes in a way in kind of circles of connections and people and ecosystem and ecosystems get a tremendous acceleration after the first success stories. So, when we were building Skype, I remember hiring people was really hard, you know, you hire a very young smart engineer, you steal them away from a bank and that engineer goes home and tells their parents, I went to work for a startup. It's like, oh. What is that? What is a startup? Like, are you stupid or what? So, and once Skype was sold for the first time, so Skype was sold in 2005 to eBay for a few billion, which was unheard of at the time. After that, the tables turned. It kind of became obvious that this startup sink, whatever it is, people still didn't understand it, but whatever it is, it is actually legit. And I think there was a huge acceleration effect coming from that. And, you know, we can trace back the next couple, couple great Estonian success stories, say all link back to Skype. There must have been such a great alumni network of people that had been part of that journey and gotten that vibe and inspiration. Absolutely. We had a 20-year Skype anniversary party a couple of months ago. Yeah, it's awesome photos on Instagram. It was great to see. It was amazing to see the people. Everyone looked a little bit older, but better. But also, if we look at the number of companies that have come out of this universe, it's humongous. Yeah, oh, it's super impressive. Marcus, what are your thoughts on it? I'd expand on the idea a bit in the sense that for this ecosystem to actually take hold, the people who actually built the companies also need to stay there so they can build up the next generation. And I think if you sort of contrast, for example Estonia versus Ukraine or Russia, then they've also been like tremendously successful entrepreneurs and companies that have sort of been started by the people there, but they all moved away. But I think Estonia has been pretty lucky that a lot of the people who are actually building up these companies actually stay there and they sort of help the next generation of companies also grow up. So I think that's something that's been sort of a big advantage for Estonia compared to most other countries in the region. So these successful companies actually breed new ones. And as mentioned, Skype was obviously the first one, the major one that kicked it all off. But then after that, there was Wwise and Pipe Drive and then Bolt and now there's the next generation of companies. And what we observe is that actually talent is increasingly moving back. So when we look at a lot of the talent that was moving out of Estonia into US or UK over the last 20 years, we see a lot of those people are now coming back to build companies and help the next generation. So I think that's been like a really great trend to see. But obviously what we didn't even touch on is what are the prerequisites for Skype to even happen in the first place, which is that you of course need people with good technical education. You need sort of a stable place where people actually want to live and actually build this company. And of course, if the government is pretty digital and has low bureaucracy, then that's a positive factor as well. But obviously, those are all the foundational components. Many countries have those components. You need this bit of sort of magic or this sort of one miracle to happen which was Skype that kicked off the whole revolution after that. And one thing to add, I think, is also attitude towards risk. So I think where we compare Estonia and the Baltics to maybe the old Europe, I think there's a difference in attitude to risk. And I think that's something which I can see changing over the years in kind of old Europe. But I think Estonia and any country going through transformation, I think, was much more tolerant of failure. And people, in a sense, were more hungry. They were hungry for success as they were willing to take these leaps of face and try to build something. I think that's something about countries which are going through a transformation otherwise as well where this is easier to happen. And again, people didn't have much to lose. So if you look at the 90s, the average GDP in Estonia was less than $3,000. So obviously, relative to the rest of Europe, Estonia was extremely poor. So people just really wanted to work themselves really up to sort of get to a higher level of income and it made a lot of sense. Yeah. So true. And maybe talk a bit about sort of starting out in Estonia, but having the ambition to build a global company kind of reaching world domination. How do you plan for that? Let you start. I think the key here is figuring out what are the pluses and minuses of Estonia. I think the overarching thing here is that Estonia is tiny, 1.3 million people. It's not a market on a map. So you just need to be really, really smart about what's good about Estonia, lots of technical talent, great place to live, lots of nature around. And what's bad about it? People don't know how to do sales. There are no customers. So it's really a question of configuring your business in a way that allows for this. So I think a very kind of common way of doing it is that you have a lot more kind of sales and marketing functions outside of the country, closer to customers. So stuff like this which you need to think about, you know, Markus can maybe share about the way Bolt was thinking of it. Yeah, I think there's two more themes here. One is obviously about talent, which is that there's pretty much no big companies in Estonia or at least was 10 years ago when we were getting started in the world of tech or actually in any other sector. And today Bolt is literally the biggest company in the whole country. So we can't really go out and hire more experienced talent from any other company because they just don't exist in the country. So that sort of gives you two options. Like either you can go and try to recruit people from other countries and move them to Estonia, which is something we've been actually pretty successfully able to do. We have 76 nations of different people now living in Estonia that we brought over. But obviously there's a limit to how much you can do that. Or your second option is that you can actually go and try to build up your talent internally. So we've rather most of the time took the bet on that. That we know that you can't find experienced people, but what you can do is find people who are really talented, really hardworking, and then it's actually just amazing to see how quickly they can learn. So in a couple of years they can actually get to a level that oftentimes even out competes what others in the sector have done who have had a lot more experience. But then the benefit is that if you give people this opportunity to grow and they actually go for this massive transformation personally, then they're obviously very loyal to the company because the company has given them this opportunity. So they actually stay for much longer. So what we observe generally is that the people we've given these chances to, that they're actually, the retention of them is just so much longer than anybody else who would hire in other parts of the world. Oh, that's such a good and interesting point. And my next question was, what do you believe have made your company so successful? And I think we all agree on that talent is one key component. But love to hear your thoughts. What have been some of the key components in your success stories for wise plural and bold? I think besides the talent part, what really made wise work was focus on customers. So we started by solving a customer problem which was our own, but then continuing to be really close to the customers, figuring out the pillars of speed, price, and continuing to drive these down, having dedicated teams to work on all of the customer facing issues. So I think overall just being very customer driven and then expansion in a pretty fearless way. I think these are the two things which may transfer wise or wise the company is today. Completely agree. And you? Yeah, I actually agree. I think what I observe is that for many Estonian companies we're extremely pragmatic and that seems to be the just local Estonian culture. So I think we're generally very good at optimizing things that are directly measurable. So for us obviously we focus on how do we get the prices to be as low as possible? How do we get the pickup times to be as fast as possible and so on? And we're very good at optimizing those things that the very sort of clear customer value propositions. And I observe most Estonian companies are generally not great at branding and marketing. So sort of all of this like soft stuff around it of how do we make the brand seem really attractive? That's I think a skill most Estonians don't have and this marketing skills we need to build up. But we're generally very good at optimizing the clear pragmatic analytical things. That's sort of a pattern I see actually very often across Eastern Europe. Cool, thanks. And for the founders in the audience, I'm sure they love to hear about your journeys. What have been some of the highs and some of the lows? Because it is a bit of a roller coaster to build your company. It's not always like this. It is a bit more of a bumpy ride. Maybe you want to share some of the highs and lows. I think the key to understand as a founder is that the highs and lows are following each other so quickly that you don't really have a moment to really start understanding this. One moment you walk on stage and you fall down. The next moment you just need to get up and continue. And then it may take you years until you start really realizing what happened. So I think the thing to keep in mind is the focus on stuff happens really quickly. And you just need to keep on getting up whatever happens and keep on going. And you have to keep on believing in the mission yourself and having the team around that believes in it and supports you. And vice versa. You absolutely agree. As an entrepreneur you need to be extremely resilient because the journey doesn't happen overnight. We've now been building both for 10 years. Still almost every day there's some new chaos or some new crisis that emerges and then we need to deal with it. So that's just the constant part of the entrepreneurial journey. And I think there's two good short illustrative stories I have of that. One is that I started this company assuming that I'm going to be focusing on building the greatest product. And I'm going to polish and obsess over the details of how the app is going to look and maybe the algorithms in the back end and so on. And then what I realized over the last 10 years is that actually most of my time that I'm quite worried about is like how do we actually get drivers and restaurants on board and actually get the supply side to be as great as possible because that's what really customers care about. So ultimately the app is just an interface to the service. So you can have the most beautiful app in the world but if you don't have drivers there who are going to be picking you up at the right time then all the rest doesn't matter. And we still live in an age where it's you still need to just go out to the physical world and build these relations with drivers and the fleets and the restaurants in order to get them on board. And I mean a couple of years ago I mean I was going to Serbia myself you know one-on-one to sell some of these taxi companies to get on the platform and you know you realize one that actually they don't care about the software functionality at all. So you know there was this taxi company owner that effectively was just a mafia guy who you know I walk into the office he has a pistol on the table and you know I'm trying to sell him of what are the benefits of our software. You know you can tell the guy doesn't care about that at all. So you know building a technology company oftentimes turns out to be very different than what you what you expected. And sort of second I think similar illustrative stories us actually launching here in Finland which is that we've launched here five times. Yeah tell me about that it's. So it was also very bizarre I mean the first four times we failed largely because of regulation. So it wasn't anything to do with the product. The product is pretty much the same as it was back then when we tried to launch many years ago. The problem was that the regulation back then was so strict that there was very few drivers in the market. So actually we tried to launch four times and we failed because there wasn't enough drivers. So actually instead of us building software instead of us even doing sales to companies what we had to do was focus a lot on public policy to convince the local politicians that actually this law should be revised because it's actually not serving the customers in a great way. So again you know 10 years ago I wasn't thinking I'm going to be spending a big chunk of my time meeting politicians or you know meeting taxi company mafia owners and trying to convince them to join. I was expecting kind of a building software but that's absolutely not the case oftentimes you know you got to adapt to the situation. And I think that's so true for many startups. I mean there's probably a bunch of pure I don't know B2B SaaS companies where you can do things purely on software but many other companies now given the tech is taking over everything they interact with so many other things. If I go back to why is and you know we want to make payments cheaper and faster that means changing regulation that means working with banks working with central banks changing laws which why is a stand in a number of countries. So it's so much more than thinking about what is the interface of the product look like and kind of thinking about the UX and UI which many people associate to what is a product. So really how to go I think through the full stack and that's what makes the company successful in many cases. Super cool so you mentioned resilience and I was wondering how have you kind of developed your leadership styles or yourself as leaders while building companies that are growing incredibly fast because I can imagine it's hard to grow a company fast unless you also grow as a leader. I can start I mean overall I think one needs to always try to keep up with the pace of the company or exceed it and that's obviously very hard to do if the company balloons from 10 people to 100 people to now we have about 4,000 people in the company in the span of 10 years it is obviously very hard to keep up but I mean there's no other alternative I mean you have to do it otherwise the company is going to fail but actually one of the sort of even side lessons I've learned from this is that I think growth hides a lot of problems. So if the company is doing really well and the numbers keep on growing up every month then people are actually willing to tolerate a lot of other things that are broken in the company. So for example if I think five years ago we pretty much had like no structure in the company in a formally speaking way in terms of like we didn't have any training programs for people we didn't really have like whatever career paths mapped out we didn't have a lot of process and we gave a lot of freedom to managers and individuals to do whatever they pretty much wanted within a general framework but just that business numbers were you know growing so quickly we were growing 400% a year the people didn't care they were like okay everything is you know so great in terms of growth my compensation is gonna go up you know new career opportunities will pop up and so on so didn't care but then obviously if your growth gets to a more stable place like 20 or 30 percent a year then all that benefit goes away and you actually need to be very thoughtful about how do you keep people engaged how do you train people you know how do you plan their development up front and that's been a very big shift and I think it's something that hits many founders as a big surprise that you know they don't realize the shift that everything is fine and then one year actually all a lot of other people are unhappy and they don't understand that it was only fine because the company was just growing like a rocket ship before I think it's a question of who can you learn from so thinking back building transfer Y starting in 2011 there was not many people to learn from there was a limited number of successful tech companies in Europe there were no investors in Europe who built companies to learn from so I was always thinking about how can I get people to invest invest in transfer wise who have built companies who are the people ahead of me who have scar tissue whom I can talk to and speak to to learn from so I think that's kind of one big thing to the question to think about that who can you learn from where do you find them and who have you learned from who have been your mentor 10 years ago we had to go and raise money from the US because that's where we found investors who built companies you know today we're in a different position and we have these people in Europe as well and now they fly in here and now they come to slush exactly excellent so on the theme of the ecosystem what are some of the important pieces of the infrastructure for founders when building companies and what do you think have inspired so many more to keep on building and maybe also compared to when you started out because I'm guessing it was probably a bit premature not so much infrastructure in place and maybe now there is because there's more angels and meetups and stuff what are some of the components that you think is important I'd start off with investors because ultimately that's for most entrepreneurs the most important element and if I contrast to where Eastern Europe or even most of Europe was 10 years ago it was obviously a very different scene funding was many times less available than what it is now and that has its pros and cons I mean on one hand one could argue that that's a good thing because you have constraints and it forces you to be more efficient more frugal in how you develop your company on the other hand if you have a business where you have winner take all dynamics and then your US counterparts are able to raise many times more money than you are able to raise then obviously you're going to be in trouble so it's been great to see the development of the European ecosystem over the last 10 years I think now we're getting to a state where the differences are still there but they're significantly less than what they used to be and that I think still remains a problem in many parts of Europe I mean I'll continue on capital for a moment like very much believes at the availability of capital and availability of capital who can really help you so I think for early stage companies it makes a ton of sense to say investors have previous experience of working or building startups I agree and that's something which up to this day actually doesn't really exist in Europe so when building Transnourse I went on an annual pilgrimage to Sandhill Road to raise money from Zari luckily that's something that I've learned and I've realized that for the next part of my journey I'm building a venture firm in Europe called Plural where everybody has built companies that is investing so you have a strong operator DNA in Plural and know what it is about and I think that's the best thing for the most ambitious entrepreneurs in Europe yeah coming from an operational background myself now being an investor I tend to agree I think you connect with founders in a different way when you know what it is to be in their shoes but maybe to think more about kind of also what worked in Estonia I think you know we were pretty lucky to have forward-looking digitally savvy government so I mean even up to this day there is a regular meeting between the startup community and prime minister to think about like what can we change so I think yeah like while generally I believe that government should get out of the way there is always a number of key things I need to change yeah like the citizenship and like but that's maybe we can talk about that even separately but like there's always something about immigration like a lot of things that the government can change that are easy that are make going to make the environment a lot better for the startup and gross companies and again I wouldn't want to like overemphasize it because ultimately like a company needs to be successful agnostic of what the government does but it's obviously very helpful if the government is getting roadblocks out of the way yeah and I have one of the best illustrative stories of this from the last three years when for example in many countries in Europe you have this notarization so like every time you basically do any type of share sales like people actually physically need to go to a notary's office at sign papers and you know for like especially US investors they're just like what the hell is this I mean we're for sure not gonna come over to deal with all this paperwork and so on so what was the case in Estonia was that this was always notarized because nobody had just thought that it shouldn't be because there was very few secondary transactions happening so we eventually got to a state where we had so many of these transactions going on we just went to the government and were like hey like we don't think this makes sense this is actually limiting sort of economic growth in the country and we were able to change the law in six months so the government was like hey actually for secondary sales we should actually have an exclusion so people don't need to do this paperwork they don't need to go to notary like you can just do that as in many other countries you can just sign the papers yourself and be done with it and I don't think there's many other countries in the world where you can do a change like that in just six months not in six months that's very impressive what a startupy government you have great to hear I actually during dinner last night met a really talented and well-sought after journalist and he told me that the Estonian government had been like calling him and inviting him to come to Estonia to write about the tech startups I thought that was also an interesting sign of kind of their proactivity I think we've taught Estonians a thing or two about marketing sorry say that again we have taught Estonians a thing or two about marketing instead of including the government cool so if you're looking back what are some of the advice that you would give yourself that could be helpful for the founders in the audience to think about when starting a company many lessons but I would say that the most important thing is to ultimately do whatever you think is needed to make the company grow and is completely fine to ignore the sort of common practices that you think others are doing so one of the good and illustrations of that this is our fundraising so when we were starting the company the metrics we had were actually doing really well we probably were in among the best startups in Europe and we met all the VCs traditional ones in the Nordics and in London and so on and not a single one of them invested I had more than a hundred meetings what was the feedback you got was it like oh we already had Uber or so the feedback generally was actually I mean you seem like a great guy the team seems really strong but this is not the sector for us like we think this sector is done so come back to us with your next company I was like okay that's really helpful feedback to get and I mean one could have just given up and that that moment and be like yeah we can't raise money from VCs but I mean I was like no I'm really bullish that this company is going to work so I was like where are we going to raise money so we actually tried to raise money from people who were willing to invest so I mean I went and they raised 200,000 euros from the local railway developer in Estonia who had done zero tech investments before you know I raised like a few hundred thousand euros from like local telecom who had like also done no tech investments before because I mean that was the only way to raise the funding that was needed to grow the company and what I realized is that most founders are somehow stuck in a paradigm that you know there's a standard way how you should build the company and this is how you are supposed to do it but actually there's no I mean if you need to raise the money you do whatever it takes to to get there raise the money and save the company yeah very good point David I think it's simple you know have a 10x better product idea for a big market then surround yourself with people who have scar tissue and get started I think a lot of people fail in the get started point so they're like hey I have this idea like you just need to get going you have to hand in the resignation letter to your previous employer and after that you know you're often it's either going to work or not but it's going to make you even the experience will make you so much better next time yeah to not overthink and just get into the doings of the things don't don't overanalyze how it can fail no you know if you have a 10x better idea for a big market yeah there's a lot of ways it can succeed yeah we had a saying at Spotify that Martin one of the co-founders coined and he always said the sum of the value of the company equals the size of the problem we're solving so if you have a big problem in front of you and you have a good solution then you're going to build a company that has some massive value I agree but I think what's actually very hard to do up front is to assess how big the problem is so I think when we started we had one estimate of how big this market could be I think all of our hopes have been outgrown by 10x in terms of the the numbers of how much actually we think we can actually still grow just in the core right-hailing product that we've been building for 10 years so I do agree with the sentiment but I think these markets can oftentimes turn out to be much larger than anyone expected and that was probably one of the reasons why most of the investors weren't also willing to back us 10 years ago because they were like okay it's this strange taxi company software thing in Estonia how big that can that market be well turns out I mean the right-hailing market just in Eastern Europe can be multiple billion dollars and nobody knew that 10 years ago so I think that again like investors in some cases just need to be more ambitious more optimistic about these markets as well yeah and a bit more open minded and also like tunnel vision yeah good I see we have 40 more seconds before we need to round off do you want to send off with any advice to the audience otherwise I would love to say thank you to all of you who's been here listening and thank you for joining me on stage and sharing some of your valuable advice thank you very much cool and we look forward to see many more success stories from the Baltic region and Estonia especially I think we will you know today Estonia has the biggest number of unicorns per capita and I feel very good about this is about to continue like looking at the pipeline of companies coming you know there's gonna be we'll stay as a record holder for a long time we need to share deal flow you and I off stage super inspiring yeah cool thank you guys so much thank you