My personal review of the year 2021
This has been a super educative, constantly accelerating year, preparing me for the supersonic speeds and evermore fun.
In 2018, I started a new tradition to share my personal review of the year, covering experiences, achievements, learnings and other important parts.
Read the last editions via these links: 2018, 2019 & 2020.
In a word, the year 2021 has been “thrilling” — full of excitement, changes and new beginnings, being a prequel to what’s happening next.
It’s fair to say that it has been the best year of my life, again — we spent lots of time at our family ranch, my wife and I learned we are expecting a second kid, and I finally got my mojo back after we started building a new company, diving into a new brave world of web 3.0.
Overall, 2021 gave me the chance to start learning about unexplored domains while taking me deep into virtual communities — I will explain it further next.
My highlights in 2021
On September 5, we launched the World of Freight community on Discord. Three weeks later, we sold our first NFTs. And by now, we have brought together a community of 600+ people who believe in our future objectives, with an extra 1000 or so who are in our Discord server, lurking and waiting.
All this has given us the opportunity to start building our next venture, Supplain — the blockchain-based infrastructure for the whole supply chain. And with this, I have regained the adrenaline source that was missing for almost two and a half years.
At the same time, learning that we will become second-time parents, expecting a brother for our daughter has also been exhilarating. Complete set incoming and new challenges along with it. We’re ready!
Other than that, I’m delighted to have had the opportunity to travel again after two years of no travelling, visiting Germany, Italy & the United States.
Activities 2021 — Part I, Part II & Part III
This year can be divided into three, nearly equal parts — like a good trilogy.
Part I — Preparation phase
At the start of the year, I was running a flourishing marketing agency, preparing the subsequent investment round for the logistics company with whom we had merged in 2019 and working on a new startup idea.
(Not Supplain)
However, I realised that neither of them was going as planned.
- The marketing agency produced good money but didn’t provide the excitement I was looking for when launching it.
- The logistics company had too many internal hardships on the management level about which we learned after merging with them.
- The new startup idea simply did not match the team’s initial expectations and was killed in its infancy. (here’s what I learned & more AI product ideas)
At the same time, I found a new interests…
In early 2020, I had finally started diving into the blockchain rabbit hole — starting with buying some Bitcoin & Ethereum, but it was only this year when I chose to look into Altcoins, DeFi, NFTs and the rest of the web 3.0.
(The first time I examined “crypto” happened in 2015; however, before this year, I had only spent 20–40 hours looking into the domain — which is almost nothing)
That said, in the first part of the year, I was merely scratching the surface, buying various Altcoins, consuming lots of audio, video and written media, and playing around with CryptoKitties.
Other than that, I also made my first direct investment into a promising firm — Ender Turing, an Estonian startup building enterprise speech-to-text software, available in 24 European languages.
I’ve previously invested in other startups as well. However, these have all been investments through the Funderbeam platform where someone else has done the due diligence. This time, my father found an incredible team we started working with, leading to us eventually helping them put together their first investment round — expecting almost 10x valuation growth in one year!
Part II — Planning phase
On April 19, we had the first video call with our soon-to-be co-founders.
By that point, my father had just sent out his resignation letter to the company we had merged with a year and a half before. And with him leaving, nothing held me there any longer. After all, I returned to Shipitwise to help facilitate the merger with the hope of working with my father again — which was still the plan.
We had already had some previous communication with Artur & Keirin. However, this particular April day was when we started imagining a potential alliance to start working on an e-commerce logistics-focused product, which has evolved into Supplain.
Next up, we had 15 additional meetings before agreeing to go for it!
And as time progressed, we understood that building yet another logistics product could succeed but would not help us reach the goals we had had since 2015. That’s when the initial idea started morphing into what it is now.
At the same time, I was continuing my journey in the world of crypto.
- I “accidentally” bought a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT at the end of May when it still cost 0.64 ETH (roughly $1750) with a plan to sell it soon. (Thankfully, I didn’t, and by now I have no plan to sell it — ever)
- Over the summer, I invested all my fiat into various crypto projects.
- And I realised that we needed to start by building a solid community before everything else, resulting in the World of Freight NFT launch.
During the summer, we also learned that we were about to become second-time parents, attended two fabulous weddings of our dear friends and spent a lot of time at our family ranch in Hiiumaa.
Part III — Building phase
The final part of the year started with my first trip abroad since 2019. Returning to the same event in Germany where I had been to pre-COVID — Pirate Summit. It was great to leave the country again!
Next up, we launched the World of Freight community, followed by the launch of our NFT collection. Both were a success for us… Not with a quick sell-out, yet still establishing a solid community of like-minded people. Exactly what we had envisioned at the start.
After all, our plan had always been:
- Launch the NFT collection.
- Bring together like-minded people.
- Begin the development of Supplain together.
That’s precisely what we’ve achieved by now. Only through taking these steps, we’ve put together an excellent community, including senior logistics experts, e-commerce specialists and professional investors, and other awesome folks.
It’s been a wild ride until now, and it’s just getting started!
By now, we’ve launched two NFT collections, a racing game w/ upgradable vehicles and are preparing to release Supplain’s whitepaper.
Next up, we’ll be putting together the private investment round for Supplain while continuing the development of the blockchain and the racing game, and organising a live NFT Tallinn summit that will happen in Spring 2022.
Besides the trip to Germany, I went abroad twice more, going to New York, attending the NFT.NYC event & promoting World of Freight, and a trip to Italy along with the most imminent family.
In other numbers, this year, I managed to maintain the total amount of my work-related meetings & video calls at 222 (excluding the community AMAs & team calls), plus the World of Freight and Supplain related endeavours, while attending ten professional events, offline and online.
At the same time, this year was terrible for personal fitness — gyms were repeatedly closed due to COVID restrictions, and I pulled my lower back muscles while working with weights. Yet I kept exercising, either at home with my Nintendo Switch or by starting to go to callisthenics.
Ultimately, I still had 117 training sessions, AKA 2.25x per week.
(44 times at the gym, 39 with the Ring Fit and 18 callisthenics sessions)
We even managed to go to the cinema four times and the SPA twice!
+ plenty of evenings were spent with board games and friends.
As for my blog, I got even less done than in the prior years — publishing merely nine articles with 5096 views and 1738 reads.
(If anything, I’m feeling hopeful for 2022)
Overall, it’s been an incredible year, and it’s only getting better nowadays!
Defeats & setbacks
This year was honestly almost perfect! Of course, there was some hardship and a few tough decisions here and there, yet nothing remarkable.
If anything, we had set out a plan to buy our first real home, which failed, mainly because the real estate prices were rising faster than we had expected. For example, in the first part of the year, an 80–90 sqm apartment cost about 250,000–300,000. The same apartment now costs 100,000 extra.
That said, I’m sure things will normalise, and we’ll get the new home in 2022!
My personal development
This year, the most significant part of my personal development has happened around the blockchain industry — with me learning about the concepts behind DeFi, NFTs, DAOs & web 3.0.
It’s been one of the most stimulating times in my life, joining Discord servers, listening to podcasts, reading articles, talking to people & watching videos. On average, I must have spent 20+ hours weekly collecting new knowledge. And most of it has been consumed at 2x speed to accelerate the process.
As one friend said once, it’s a rabbit hole that swallows you and that he knows no one that has peeked into it and left — once you go in, you stay!
For those only starting to look into it, here’s where you should start from:
- Not Boring blog by Packy McCormick (Read: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 & 10)
- Modern.Finance & Proof by Kevin Rose (Start listening from the first ones)
+ The other sources I follow on this topic are The All-In Podcast, The Defiant, Inside Cryptocurrency newsletter, Altcoin Daily channel, Bitboy Crypto channel, JRNYCrypto channel, The Pomp Podcast, a16z Podcast, Colossus Podcasts, The Deep End Podcast, What Bitcoin Did Podcast & way too many Discord servers.
Books to read for 2022
In 2021, I went through many fantastic books. But there are 50+ more that I would need to go through next year. Plus, 75+ in my Amazon’s wish list.
Based on those I read in 2021, I would recommend you to read:
“The Daily Stoic” by Ryan Holiday (Stoicism — daily easy reading)
“12 Rules for Life” by Jordan Peterson (Philosophy — provoking read)
“Only The Paranoid Survive” by Andy Grove (Management — must read!)
“Invent & Wander” by Walter Isaacson (Management — writings of Jeff Bezos)
“Rework” by Jason Fried & DHH (Management — all about remote working)
“The Startup of You” by Reid Hoffman (Startup — it starts w/ the individual)
“The Alliance” by Reid, Ben Casnocha & Chris Yeh (Startup — all about talents)
“Mastering the Market Cycle” by Howard Marks (Finance — Market Cycles)
Plans for 2022
Next year is looking to be even more fast-paced than this one!
On the one hand, I’m expecting us to accelerate the development of Supplain and World of Freight even more — raising our private investment round, travelling across Europe, the United States and perhaps even Asia to meet various possible partners and investors, and we’ll be launching new products.
On the other hand, our family life seems to be becoming more incredible with our second child’s birth and Scarlett becoming more self-reliant. Hopefully, we’ll travel more and finally buy our first real home. And in the meanwhile, we’ll surely keep spending lots of time in Hiiumaa.
That said, I’m very excited for 2022!
