The Pursuit of Scrappiness

Merit Valdsalu is the Co-founder and CEO of Single. Earth, a revolutionary blockchain-based ecosystem of earth’s carbon sequestration and biodiversity monitoring, tokenization, and trade. Before starting this highly ambitious project, Merit led localization efforts at the Estonian unicorn Pipedrive. In this fascinating conversation, we talk about the need to digitize the earth’s nature and create...

Taavi Rõivas is the Chairman of Auve Tech, an Estonian producer and operator of self-driving vehicles and autonomous transportation systems that are already operational on public roads. He is also former Prime Minister of Estonia, a long-time member of the Estonian Parliament, and an international public speaker on e-government, cyber security, AI, and other related topics. In this episode, we dis...

Davis Ziedins is Co-founder and Business development lead at Beetroot Lab, a game development studio in Riga operating since 2014, whose biggest hit Dystopia is made in partnership with Conor McGregor and recently hit the 1 million downloads milestone. In this super-high energy episode, we talk about the fundamentals of the game development business, building a very specialized skillset team in th...

Juan Borras is the Founder and CEO of Outvio, an Estonian startup whose mission is helping eCommerce improve the shipping experience. Outvio raised $2.5m just now to expand their product across Europe. An engineer by training with experience from the European Space Agency as well as having started several businesses, Juan now leads Outvio on a rapid growth path towards being a household name in th...

Kaspars Dancis is the CEO and Co-founder of Whimsical, a content collaboration tool that facilitates teams thinking together. Being fully bootstrapped, the company boasts Vinted, Intercom, Hashicorp, Loom, Washington Post, Monzo, Oura, and others as its clients. In this episode we talk about Whimsical and how it helps teams collaborate on content creation, building a product that users love, boots...

Tuomas Kosonen is a partner at Inventure, one of the leading VCs in the Baltic Sea region. Inventure has invested in such familiar Baltic companies as Nordigen, Scoro, and Whatagraph as well as Finnish juggernaut and one of the most used apps in the Baltics - Wolt In this episode, we talk about the Baltic Sea region as one of the leading global tech hubs and the future outlook of the Baltics and t...

Helmuts Bems is the co-founder and CEO of Sonarworks, a company making individually perfected sound for creators and listeners used by Grammy-award winning producers. Having recently raised a fresh investment round of $6 M led by Almaz Capital (and $13.8 M in total to date), Helmuts and his team are working tenaciously on getting their software into your headphones and changing the way you listen...

Andris K. Berzins is the managing partner of Change Ventures, the first and largest pan-Baltic seed investor. With an MBA from Stanford and 20+ years of tech experience in all kinds of roles from founder to executive, to an investor, Andris brings a uniquely nuanced opinion on the Baltic startup scene through the eyes of a VC. He is also credited for being one of the most visible shapers and champ...

Carlos Paniagua is the co-founder and CTO of Glia - one of the leading digital customer service providers that to date has raised $107 million in VC investment. Coming from Guatemala originally, Carlos has spent a third of his life in Estonia, where he also resides currently and runs the technical team of Glia, while his co-founders and the rest of the team are based in the US.  In this episode, C...

Jone Vaituleviciute is Partner at Startup Wise Guys that was just named The Hottest Startup Accelerator in Europe. In this episode Jone shares the perspective of the accelerator - with 1-2% acceptance rate, what are they looking for in business models and founders. We also discuss why investors like to invest in B2B SaaS and the value that early-stage support organizations can bring to startups in...

Jekabs Endzins is a serial entrepreneur, currently developing Roibox, a digital marketing tool that revolutionizes the potential of geolocation data. He has co-founded several profitable businesses, including Mogo Finance (now Eleving group), Tapbox, TweetDeleter, Finitera. He has also failed close to 10 other ventures over the past 10 years and has some ‘war stories' to share. As a true seri...

Meeri Rebane (EE) shares her experience of launching a company in one of the hottest Insurtech markets in Europe - Germany. Having pivoted away from a bicycle identification platform, Meeri together with her co-founder Risto Klausen (EE) is building a consumer-friendly insurance app in the heart of the Berlin tech scene with an edgy brand inspired by Red Bull In this conversation, we talk about th...

Martin Koppel is the CEO and Co-founder of Fortumo. Before iOS and Android existed they offered various SMS services. Now they are solving payment challenges for Google, Spotify, Amazon, Tencent, Epic Games in emerging markets. And they invented Android in-app payments before Google did. Fortumo is truly one of the biggest success stories coming out of Estonia (Tartu to be precise) and Martin shar...

Ieva is a marketer with a decorated career in product branding. We meet, however, to talk about her 180-degree career change - deciding to become an entrepreneur and joining Antler VC London cohort. After successfully graduating from the program and raising investment Ieva currently is in charge of growth at FlowSpace - a marketplace she has co-founded where teams meet co-working spaces in London....

Donatas is one of the most well-known investors in the Baltic startup scene. Having hustled in different businesses and investments, he started VC investing 10 years ago and has been part of such success stories as TransferGo, Trafi, Ziticity, Sonarworks, and recent headline maker Interactio In a super high-energy conversation, we go back in time to compare what the startup scene was like 10 years...

Sandris is the CTO of one of the hottest Baltic fintech startups, Jeff App,  however, in this episode, we focus on Codelex developer school, which he created a few years ago. With Codelex Sandris has added north of 130 able-bodied developers both men and women across different age groups to the market after subjecting them to an intensive 3 months developer Bootcamp. In a very direct and no bullsh...

Anastasija is the CEO of one of the most recognized tech companies in Latvia - Twino. Having started out in investment banking and M&A advisory, she now manages one of the largest P2P lenders in continental Europe with a team of 400+ people in 6 countries. Having led the company through the pandemic as a shock to investor confidence across asset classes worldwide, Anastasija now builds Twino i...

Rolands is a grade-A hustler who realized early on in his career that he must build companies and products to fulfill his dreams as well as overcome some grudges. Hustling several business ideas, Rolands found himself in the fintech space crunching credit risk numbers from bank statements and now has evolved the business model into providing free open banking and building a crucial piece of financ...

Petr is an ex-banker turned serial entrepreneur with several startups under his belt prior to founding Lokalise, including Odnoklassniki, Megogo, and Roamer app. The latter turned out to be the source of the product for Lokalise. With a no-BS mentality, Petr and the Lokalise team have achieved fantastic product-market fit with many top Tech names (e.g. Revolut, Bitpanda, Notion) as their loyal cus...

David is a retired US Marine Lt. Col. with real combat experience in Somalia and Iraq, where he commanded a unit of 1 200 soldiers. He then served as the Defence Attache to Latvia in Riga. Since retiring from the military David has been applying the lessons he shares in this episode to both secure millions of USD in contracts for the businesses he worked for as well as to teach leadership both in...

Liudas, a fintech heavyweight, got into RegTech and ID verification as he saw an industry with an exponential rise in relevance for global commerce. Having led a team of 1000+ people before (ex-CEO of Paysera), he is now scaling the Ondato team with rocket speed having grown 6x times in the last 12 months. Liudas shares his management secrets to keep his team aligned on one vision By listening to...

Raising $400 M in the first year of existence? This is the story of 4 companies in 2020 who grabbed a piece of $2.6 Bn investment pie. With 2 million third-party sellers on Amazon responsible for ⅔ of sales on its platform, the market is ripe for consolidation. The “John D. Rockefellers” of the Amazon black gold mean business and are buying and building Amazon sellers left, right, and center. We a...

Elviss, a prodigy entrepreneur started Airboard at the age of 16 and takes us through his amazing story of following his dream of putting a man on a drone. Having raised initial funds in Latvia, Elviss shares his experience in the Silicon Valley over two accelerator programs, being mentored by Tim Draper and raising funds from angels from different parts of the world. He also shares his pivot from...

Global Education and Training is estimated to be a 7tn$ industry by 2025, but only 4% of it is digital. S^&t is about to go down.  We also list ways to get financing for your startup without getting diluted, give a quick tip on how you can become a VC by buying shares in a Baltic Nasdaq listed investment fund, and try real hard to recall a successful Kickstarter campaign that has since grown i...

Vytautas, a serial entrepreneur, and investor caught the crypto bug in 2015. After realizing that, like most things, his P2P lending business should not be put on a blockchain, he went and established a completely different business in crypto. After spending the last 3 months working from Bali and learning to surf, Vytautas has had revelations that fundamentally changed the way he looks at the off...