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 latest startup Teleport to a global tech company MOVE Guides. Our team is now working side-by-side with new colleagues in San Francisco, London and Hong Kong.

All these businesses combine people and technology. In simplest terms, my job is to bring together the smartest people I can find (or afford)…

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. And as sometimes has happened before, I find that some notes are not confidential enough to stay in the confinement of Evernote.

Just for the record of Teleport history, or as an inspiration for anyone pondering "what is it really like to build a new company", this is what happened in ~120 hours crossing from May to June in 2016:

• Keynote for EstBAN annual Investor Day, showing how Teleport's data supports…

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 Teleport, but then chose to publish more broadly. First, some specific learnings might be beneficial for fellow entrepreneurs targeting some aspect of the human mobility space. But secondly, we would love to hear any further reactions from our users living the increasingly location independent lives. …

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 are.

This immigration discussion has a tendency to become patronizing, to be about “allowing” some people in and “keeping” others out. In my experience from building Skype’s 10 offices across 16 timezones, clearly top tech talent needs to be chased and courted, not just “allowed” to move anywhere. …

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 — either by writing themselves, or getting written about. Healthy societies need intelligent public discussion, contradicting views and debate-driven consensus, or at least educated compromises. I just don’t get how this cowardly bashing gets flagged as free speech while the opinions it suffocates get dismissed despite being that too.
An absurd…

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 parallel it took me 2 months and 2 vacation trips to dig through the material, but coming out on the other side it is a highly recommended read for anyone in the tech startup scene. …

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 combination at hand. You can read all about the model from his article, Thoughts on Business Plans (on Google Books) which in turn comes from an essay collection Sahlman edited in the 90s.

What inspired me in this material was a systematic use of simple, but carefully targeted questions. I…