Sten Tamkivi
I co-founded Teleport, led it as CEO through a series of seed stage experiments for remote working digital nomads and eventually shifted to a B2B business model which Topia acquired in 2017. I stayed with Topia as CPO for raising a $48m Series C, two more acquisitions at the other side of the table, scaling product, engineering and design teams up and down by 100+ people. In 3 years we launched a coherent platform Fortune100 companies now run their global mobility programs on.
Previously, I joined Skype about 18 months in at 50 people as an early executive. I stuck around for 8 years until the $8.5B exit to MSFT, through a rollercoaster of investors from VCs to US corporates to PE whooshing by at “3 CEOs in 4 months” level of crazy. I grew the original Estonian R&D office to 450 people, and had many different jobs around global operations, product and engineering over the years, the most fun of which was running product engineering for Windows, Mac and Linux clients with 300M+ MAU. I learned how badly tens of millions can get pissed when you turn their familiar small chat app into full screen to fit large video calls.
My first CEO title came at the age of 18, founding the first digital media agency in Estonia in 1996, clearly without any clue what that job is. We had the high of leading our market and selling into DDB Worldwide and eventually the low of crashing the company along the dotcom boom.
Incentives predict what people do: this principle is most obvious in recruiting people for your fledgling startup, of course. But if you think about it, it runs through every superhuman effort a founder faces - seducing your first customer before you have a product, getting the most valuable investor to your round, scaling partnerships, etc. Always start with the basics of what makes the specific individual you need to get on board, tick?
I value a tolerant, open and creative society in the broadest sense. Teleport’s tag line was “free people move” and our mission was to make governments compete for every citizen. This thinking captures both my company building, some public roles (like advising President Ilves of Estonia or sitting on the boards of Estonian E-Residency program and Vabamu, the Freedom Museum) and definitely many of my investments around the future of work, collaboration, governance. I’m spending a lot of time thinking about Web3 as the stack for the future of more citizen owned internet. Sometimes I get giddy with far out scientific advances around synthetic biology, genetic engineering or asteroid mining where I don’t understand half of what the founder says, but it feels they might need some company building help. And sometimes there is just such a fantastic click with an absurdly brilliant founder… that I might even lead a vertical B2B SaaS or intermediary marketplaces investment.
