One Week in a Startup Founder's Life

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 the notion that startups can be built anywhere.
• Two days of Latitude59 conference, which vibe-wise felt like Slush a few years ago when still held at Kaapelitehdas in Helsinki: eager and joyful (which Slush has not lost either), but feeling still intimate at 1500 people. Individual conversations with about ~50 old and new friends from Estonia, Finland, Latvia, UK, California, Japan, Florida, Russia, Luxembourg, Germany, France, Denmark about progress at Teleport. And with a slightly smaller subset of entrepreneurs about their startups' stories and challenges.
• Hosting a main stage panel with HRH The Duke of York, Tim Draper and PM Taavi Rõivas on the topic of Countries Attracting Talent. I was somewhat worried how to keep such esteemed and outgoing speakers to any time constraints, but they even complied with timeboxed 60 second pitches on why a startup should move to London, Silicon Valley or Estonia!

Image courtesy of Toby Stone.

• A live interview for Kuku radio morning program given at 7:35am while at the wheel driving kids to school.
• Five (5) conflicting evening event invitations on Tuesday, out of which I intended to make four (stretch goals, right), but managed just two: a gala dinner, about which I should have read ahead it was intended to be black-tie, and an apartment party with splendid views on the Tallinn Bay into which the Sun really doesn't set fully this time of year.
• Publishing the video we did at a recent team week, reading some of the nastiest feedback comments out loud. Good reminder to remain humble and ego-less while building for the people working through their real and personal issues with location.
• Hitting our 150,000 user accounts milestone. Glad that the feedback heard from most of them has not been mean at all, quite the opposite. The NPS is still fluctuating through the intake spikes, though.
• Cheering for Ede on her first 1000+ person audience presentation in the CEO role for Eesti 2.0, and attending a daytime launch event of their new initiative to deliver littleBits electronic sets to 100 Estonian schools.
• Five hours of team meetings and a few 1:1 prep conversations to further narrow down our focus and short term product goals to be on track with what we need by the time of our next fundraising.
• Finally going public with the news of the one and only Parag Khanna joining Teleport as an advisor.
• In person interviews to .Mic and a few others.
• An inspiring brainstorming session with a partner so passionate that they were willing to get up (or stay up?) for a call scheduled at 4:30am.
• A date night for the premiere of NO99 theatre's latest take on Shakespeare with a multimedia-driven raw reality shift.
• Toying with an alpha version of our next gen internal data tools that make analytical snapshots like this or this a breeze.
• A presentation and a discussion panel about what knowledge workers look for when choosing their best place to live and work to the 170 people signed up for the Nation and City Branding Conference, organized by our friends at Tendensor and Nordic Place Academy. Also a nice catchup chat with Peter Kentie from Eindhoven, a brave early client of Teleport with their innovative city marketing, who also just recently released his pro bono proposal for cool country branding of Estonia.
• Teleport got nominated for The Europas Awards this year for the best European startup in Travel space. Also, the World Summit Awards where our Teleport Flock tool made it to the finals last year is having another public vote ahead of the big ceremony in Singapore in June.
• Walking into the office to learn a new paid feature experiment has been pushed live by the team, before I knew it was even being planned. Cherishing the independent initiative and fast moving attitude, but also taking a moment to think about the cultural impact and communication nuances for our distributed team.
• A flat tire on my car after picking it up from the office parking lot after jetting around with Taxify for 4 days to not spend time on parking issues (as a result — just one ticket this week).
• A surprise Friday night feature by Lifehacker driving a spike in weekend user intake.
• About 24 hours of sleep in total.

Whew.

Now on to next week: more product strategy, then off to Berlin for Startup Europe Summit and Teleport + Wire User Meetup, before heading on to Brussels. Bring it on, #startuplife.

PS: If you leave requests as comments above, I'll try to dig up slides and/or videos of specific events.