Peanuts

work in progress

Peanuts and pennies. Eldorado launched this new campaign - with ironic “these are just games, you won't make money there". Fair enough, even founder thought the in-game item marketplace is capped at $20–30M GMV. But as they scale rapidly, the ceiling is more like $1B and beyond.

Which brings us to many new founders wanting to build premium, superior product, higher priced offering. While Baltic story repeats at the opposite - huge companies built by charging very, very little. Vinted is low cost items at 1 EUR shipping. Hostinger is website at EUR 2.99. Surfshark or NordVPN or Saily are also very affordable . Once you look around, many more consumer plays that allows.. save user spending. Bolt is (was?) cheaper than uber (and taxi for sure). Look how Ovoko accelerates with used car parts and how Eneba built huge marketplace for gamers.

The secret sauce is scale and retention. Millions of customers, and returning.

New. David emerges from stealth and Entrepreneurs First - welcome M11 Labs. Valts with Vuzza got accepted into Mastercard Lighthouse program. Jonas and Giedrius building Insaitus, AI-first data orchestration platform turning complex logistics data into profitability.

Climate. It's harsh how priorities stack up in the world. We just witnessed tragic floods in Nepal, and yet climate / sustainability is still in the back seat, waiting for wars to end and AI fully unfold, and whatever next thing comes (demographics?). Anna-Liisa shares openly the stress and anxiety it entails building in this space – remember to support fellow mission-driven founders.

On that note - the bank we are all proud of (and will share the profits, too) is Miškobank. Amazing initiative driving Sengirės fondas forward and protecting incredible nature for future generations. Our friends at InRento and Oxylabs backing it. Join them in any capacity.

Defence. Watch Kondra - new venture, addressing key PRC vulnerability. Mainline Network was launched, bringing Origin Robotics first to work with Mainline’s infrastructure layer. Tomas, RSI Europe talks about being ready for all kind of provocations - a funeral wreath was placed outside the company's offices. SpaceDrip from Estonia joins NATO DIANA Mission Track. ScaleWolf founder reflects how Lithuania pushed early into defence ventures; looking back, coordination and signaling was very important, thus Coinvest mandate and soon after dedicated venture funds gave impulse to dozens of founders to build.

Your service business needs a tech leader. Need someone to lead transformation, work with Legora's and Wonderful's of today. Otherwise, think about being acquired by some rollup that is turning consultancies, accountancies, agencies, law firms AI-native. That's the idea seeing Sorainen hiring Paulius as CTO.

People moves. Mik leaves Trace.Space - he was co-founder and COO - interesting to see what might be next. Luca Bocchio, Partner at Accel and Board Member at Vinted, is leaving the VC firm. Gabija steps into CMO role at Prime Prometics. Martin, ex-Clevon, joined Ark Robotics as CTO. Tadas joins Desktronic as the new CMO. Edgaras steps into Chairman role, replaced by Jurate as new CEO at Tamo Group. Juste, with impressive marketing background, is available at fractional / contractor capacity. Roberta, Chief of Staff at Hostinger, is saying goodbye. BCG has named Artūras Mizeras as its new Chief Operating Officer. Regimantas has joined Buck4Bug as Head of Sales.

Meet. Fundraising and winning in the US - event with our friends at Cloudvisor, Sept 15. Kristupas is bringing founder meetups to Vilnius, starting Sept 16. Make Kaunas Great Again - 70 people going - this Sunday. Google goes Cloud Day Lithuania on September 15th, and hands-on Security Workshop with Europe Cloud & Wiz on the 17th.

Correct - Startup Fair is coming, Sept 17th in Vilnius.

sponsors

Cloudvisor [scan your AWS account like a solutions architect and finds mistakes before they become expensive - new product, Refraxion.]
Hostinger [online presence accessible to everyone worldwide, hiring]
Google For Startups [cloud credits up to $350K, faster growth]
Ovoko [join to transform Europe’s €30B+ used car parts market]
Oxylabs [Step into the world of web data gathering]
VIALET [Business accounts for growth, hiring]
Surfshark [Top 50 among fastest growing in EU, hiring]
Eldorado.gg [world’s largest in-game trading marketplace, hiring]
Eneba [join the marketplace 20M gamers love]
InRento [Investments in real estate projects with income, growth, and impact]

rounds and capital

Creem acquires Askel.ai and most importantly - brings Joosep onboard as Head of Payments. Combined into one rocketship now (see turnover but it's gross flow)

Non-dilutive financing is rising among startups. Who is backing? Noted deals this year in the Baltics.

three questions

In August, Outfunnel was acquired by Pipedrive - returning Andrus where he served as Head of Marketing in the company’s early days

Why do Estonians start companies instead of taking a normal job?

Statistically, more Estonians take normal jobs, and that's a perfectly normal thing. I've spent most of my professional career as a salaryman. While I was thinking and dreaming of starting a business, my fear was bigger than my ambition. Luckily, over time, ambitions grew and fear subsidized.

I can't speak for the remaining 3000 or so Estonian startup founders. Maybe they just couldn't get a decent job?

Three people outside the company who made the biggest difference.

Pernille Hippe Brun came to mind first. There was a time when both the company and I were stuck. We had managed to get Outfunnel to cashflow neutral but with a tiny team. Our product experiments had been mostly unsuccessful and I personally had to do many tasks which I'd "grown out of". I didn't want to get out of bed in the morning and was close to burning out. Then luckily our investors at byFounders hooked me up with Pernille who shared that tedious boring things shouldn't make up more than 40% of your working time. Beyond this threshold, work can only happen at the expense of mental health. So I have myself the permission to not do these things that I borderline hated.

After a while of slacking off, the energy started flowing back. I even started doing the thing that I hated again – with the difference that I chose to do them instead of having to do them.

Speaking of byFounders, Eric and Tommy there are phenomenally good with advice and support and just generally being on your side, no matter what.

Finally, your fellow Lithuanian Omnisend founder and one of our angels Rytis Lauris was useful in many ways, among other things keeping me accountable for not getting too comfortable running a small profitable software business.

Weirdest part of walking back into a building where you used to be Head of Marketing

By today, Pipedrive has a new building. But what was weird in a good way is that many familiar faces are still here. God bless persistent people.

roleplay

brand + design

Designers are the unhappiest people in tech. Lenny Rachitsky tweeted data showing that designers and researchers feel more overwhelmed, anxious, and tired than any other function in tech.

The real problem is that designers are getting measured against the same productivity gains reached in engineering. Engineers report 10x, sometimes 100x, while design doesn't work that way. You have an idea, you try it, it sucks. You try again, it still sucks. The loop is incredibly messy add that to navigating endless human opinion, but that's the whole point. It needs human judgment, which is exactly why it’s hard to automate.

founder's guide

Remember how AI was supposed to kill sales, agents were about to find customers and handle objectons? Instead even 17 yr olds now make most money call calling customers to sell software.

further insights

Depth. Tyler Cowen pod with Sequoia's legendary Michael Moritz - almost four decades with the firm. Fascinating conversation, but no DPI and tripple double talk that we got used to: Moritz wrote the first history of Apple and an account of Chrysler’s near-death while he was a journalist at Time, a study of Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United in the middle of his 38 years at Sequoia, and now Ausländer, a family memoir, after leaving the firm.

ecosystem

Estonia has elected a new President - Ülle Madise. In the early 2000s, while working at the Ministry of Justice, she was involved in establishing Estonia’s internet voting framework - helping to shape what later became one of the most internationally recognised elements of Estonia’s digital democracy