A speech delivered to Chairpersons of EU affairs committees of European Union parliaments, at their COSAC meeting in Tallinn, Estonia on July 10, 2017. — Esteemed Chairpersons, Delegates, dear fellow Europeans, I stand before you here today because I build companies in Europe. I founded my first one at the age of 18, a few years later had the honor of contributing to the early years of startup called Skype, and most recently sold my…

The past five days where such a whirlwhind of an example what startup life can be that I decided to just capture the memory of the moment for myself. …

As Twitter's algorithm changes have messed up linear viewing of tweetstorms, have to paste two good ones from @Richard_Florida here for easier sharing. As my interest sparked by the ones that I find applicable also in European politics, omitted some specifics about US candidate analysis — if interested, see the whole threads here. Feb 14:

“This is just the beginning!” as every single founder of any startup ever created would tell you at a similar point. Nevertheless it feels like a good time for a bit of reflection on what we’ve learnt to date. I was initially intending to write this down just for Team…

Silicon Valley generally believes it’s the ideal place to be for all software developers. Against the backdrop of the Valley’s well documented success, Paul Graham wrote an essay calling for the US government to let the 95% of great software developers not in Silicon Valley join the 5% who already…

I’ve been a long time opponent of anonymous, unauthenticated comments fire-hosed into mainstream online media decidedly without editorial review. They are an unfair and easily manipulative tool for beating down anyone who dares to stick their neck out and state their views in a public forum under their own name…

I picked up The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup by Noam Wasserman after he spoke about it in the ETL speaker series at Stanford back in November '12 (see my study notes of that week here). With all the regular school reading in…

Several entrepreneurship-related classes at Stanford refer to a simple conceptual framework developed by Professor William A. Sahlman of Harvard for planning and evaluating new ventures. In short he proposed looking at People, Opportunity, Context and Deal of a venture and analysing how they Fit with each other in this particular…

Thinking about the linkages between US and European tech investment and startup scenes ahead of a speech for Slush conference, I found an interesting paper by Pandya and Leblang of University of Virginia: Deal or No Deal: The Growth of International Venture Capital Investment (PDF here). Recommended reading in full…