Recent content on Sten Tamkivi's Seikatsu Blog Archive
On how two military veterans are building dual-use software to revolutionise operations in high-stakes environments As an Estonian, coming from a country on NATO’s Eastern flank, you naturally think a lot about defence and national resilience. And as an Estonian investor, it follows that you see a lot of defence tech companies. But a lot of the investment into this sector is becoming crowded,…
It hasn’t happened often that Plural backs a direct-to-consumer startup. Building new consumer products from scratch is super hard. But when you meet founders that have already built one of the best-selling mobile phones in history and have hardcore engineering experience at one of the world’s most valuable tech companies – and THEY present such a plan to disrupt a traditional industry that serves…
Six years ago, sci-fi author Daniel Suarez published Delta V, a novel about a group of commercial pioneers going to space to mine asteroids to transform humanity from an Earth-bound species to a space-faring one. And while the idea has captivated writers of futuristic fiction for decades, it’s now becoming a reality, and a potentially highly valuable business proposition. The rise of commercial…
“There are only two industries. This has always been true,” said Madame Ping, enfolding a lovely porcelain teacup in her withered fingers, the two-inch fingernails interleaving neatly like the pinions of a raptor folding its wings after a long hard day of cruising the thermals. “There is the industry of things, and the industry of entertainment. The industry of things comes first. It keeps us…
I am wrapping up my paternity leave with the end of March. April 1st, formerly known as the international day of humour, has become a symbolic date for new beginnings for me. 7 years ago we incorporated Teleport on this day. 4 years ago, Teleport became part of what we now call Topia. Topia My years as CPO of Topia have been a whirlwind since. We bought two more tech companies and integrated the…
Intervjuu Lennart Ruudale, ilmus ajalehes Postimees 6. augustil 2020. Allpool meie vestluse pikem üleskirjutus toimetamata kujul. (Foto: Sander Ilvest) Otsustasite juunis jätta päevatöö ja minna isapuhkusele. Kuidas see aeg läinud on? Kuna see on meie neljas laps, pole lapsesaamine ja mähkmevahetus mulle midagi uut. Olla täiskohaga kodus muidugi on. Aga mulle väga meeldib. Suvi on olnud super.…
Hüvastijätusõnad Toivo Annuse ärasaatmisel Akadeemia tee 21 ehk Küberi maja ehk Skype esimese kontori maja saalis. Siin saalis on Toivo olnud palju kordi varemgi laval. Tõsi küll, ilmselt ei ole publik kunagi varem olnud nii viisakalt riides nagu täna. Nendel toolidel on paljud teist kuulanud Toivot üldkoosolekutel, kui siin majas kasvama pandud Skype veel ühte tuppa ära mahtus. Siin laval andis…
This Monday will be different. Instead of waking up to the pile of Slack messages and emails from the weekend, and calendar full of late night US calls ahead, I plan to hang out with baby Stig and the rest of my family. I am taking a paternity leave and stepping away from my CPO role at Topia until the end of the year. I will stop the day job, but will keep the minimal load of my board seats.
When my self-hosted Wordpress instance sent me an alarm the other day about everything being broken again due to some PHP upgrade two generations ahead of what I knew existed, I didn’t feel like having the time and energy to get into fixing it. Instead, I took a few nights and looked into the fantastic world of static site generation. Imagine, no PHP, no databases, no out of sync plugins or…
Life quality score – Tallinn Life quality score - Tallinn So there you go. In Teleport Cities we have accumulated 300+ dimensions of income, cost & quality of life data about 260+ cities around the world. And now you can embed quite a few subsets of those, formatted and visualized as widgets about your favourite cities anywhere in your own content as you like. Enjoy:…
To learn more about what Sten Tamkivi is up to these days, see tamkivi.com.
Mõnikord mõtleme me Gustavi ja Ettaga välja unejutte. Hakkad otsast harutama, pakud juurde tegelasi ja olukordi ja vaatad, kuhu lugu välja jõuab. Eile õhtul tuli kokku üks selline lugu, et oleks patt seda mitte teistele lapsevanematele kasutamiseks jagada: Jänesetüdruk Viivika oli väikest kasvu loom, aga igas mõttes üle keskmise: nutikas, kannatlik, uudishimulik ja ilus. Ta kasvas täiesti…
Jalutasime sõber Magnusega veebruaripäikeselist California avenüüd pidi bento-lõunalt kontori poole tagasi ja korraks läks jutt valimiste peale. “Ma pole üldse jõudnud veel lugeda ja otsutada, aga valima ju peab,” ütles Magnus. Kuna olen poole silmaga katsunud ikka kodustel asjadel silma hoida, siis mõtlesin, et saadan talle portsu linke, millest endal on olnud kasu.
Had some great interview questions from Arkadii Zaitsev, who is writing a piece about Estonian e-residency for a Russian-languaged publication called Meduza (worth checking their design!), operating out of Latvia for freedom of speech reasons. As it took a while to get these thoughts together decided to publish them directly in English too:
As it isn’t a good tone to have a blog sit stale for a year, I figured this place deserves at least a brief set of links as an update on what’s been happening. The EIR period at Andreessen Horowitz was not only amazing on personal level, but also fruitful professionally. Even though I wrapped up there only in May, since beginning of this year I’ve been working on my next startup venture: Teleport.
As a follow-up to my post on what an EIR does , I promised to share a little more detail on how I practically go about filtering ideas. Effective filtering, choosing what to engage in and what to respectfully decline fast can be the pillar of effective time management in any case, but even more so when you are growing your own startup ideas list or get bombarded by incoming shiny new things…
The fabulous Slush crew has posted a 13 minute video of my speech on how does European tech scene look from Silicon Valley these days: If you rather prefer long form reading (and to contribute to discussion), this short version later expanded into a series of 3 blog posts : On Bridges, Part 1: Realizing how Europe and Silicon Valley are drifting apart On Bridges, Part 2: Why Should Europe Care for…
This has been a persistent question since I started my Entrepreneur in Residence gig at Andreessen Horowitz , and one that I have had to both figure out for myself and explain over and over again. If you explicitly search for it, you can find an occasional article or Quora thread on the topic – but as people rightfully point out in those, it is a rather vague role that varies in each case and from…
This is the final post of 3 contemplating how Silicon Valley and European tech scenes could get closer to each other. The series are an expansion of a short speech I gave at Slush conference in November 2013 – video of which should be online soon. I believe this topic calls for more discussion and thinking along than 15 one-directional minutes on conference stage allowed. To get up to speed, read…
This post is 2nd of 3 discussing ways Silicon Valley and European tech scene could get closer to each other. The series are an expansion of a short speech I gave at Slush conference in November 2013 – video of which should be online soon. I believe this topic calls for more discussion and thinking along than 15 one-directional minutes on conference stage. As an intro, see Part 1 here ._ Europe’s…
This post is 1st of 3 in the series aimed at discussing ways Silicon Valley and European tech scenes could contribute to and gain more from each other. The series are an expansion of a short speech I gave at Slush conference in November 2013 (video of which should be online soon) but I believe this topic is calls for more discussion and thinking along than 15 one-directional minutes on conference…
Thinking about the linkages between US and European tech investment and startup scenes ahead of the Slush conference in 10 days, I found an interesting paper: Deal or No Deal: The Growth of International Venture Capital Investment (PDF here) by Pandya and Leblang of University of Virginia. Recommended reading in full for anyone who cares about intercontinental talent and capital flows, but I just…
Ajujahi konkursi korraldajad küsisid, kas paari aasta taguse zhüriiliikmena oskaksin toona nähtu põhjal üldistada mõne soovituse tänastele äriideede nuputajatele. Panin kirja alljärgneva, ilmus Ärilehes ka.
I have recently been intrigued about the evolving science of social network analysis (SNA) and the potential novel yet practical applications of it in growing businesses. So the timing of the 3rd Annual Stanford Conference on Computational Social Science , hosted by IRiSS could not have been better. Fun day with very cool thoughts, from the keynote of the superstar in the field, Duncan “small…
On August 29th Skype is celebrating its birthday. As it did as a small European-rooted startup, so it does as a product in the portfolio of Microsoft. This time it is a round one, too: first 10 years. Sending the best wishes to all the friends who have built and are building Skype over these years, I figured it would be a good time to give in to an idea that has been in the back of my mind for a…
August 1st marked the end of my 8+ year journey with Skype, after returning from an academic break at Stanford. As expected, the top incoming question following my departure tweet has been “what’s next” – so let me share a bit more.
As it happened, pressed publish on today’s post on Medium instead.
The below text was not born as a blog post for broader audiences originally, but as something I wrote for the class yearbook a month ago. Given that my final exam just slipped into a lockbox without looking back, the class is about to gather for getting their yearbooks in beautiful printed form and to properly conclude the quarterly summaries tradition (see Summer , Autumn , Winter here) – I’m…
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 10 (40), Spring quarter Our last two days of five classes were almost all about presentations with a few wise final words from each professor. Pictured above is the last of my last moments, with Professor Charles Holloway , co-founder of Stanford’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies , and a driving force behind many startup-focused academic initiatives in this…
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 9 (39), Spring quarter The Memorial Day week was the only one compressed to four long days this quarter, with the main theme on finalizing group projects. We submitted an operations case on optimizing pre-season parka ordering from China by a ski-wear fashion brand. And are relatively ready to present in the coming short and very last class week: a lightly…
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 8 (38), Spring quarter This week kicked off with Maker Faire , the ultimate geek fest of robots, drones, noisy machines, 3D printers, lasers and eco-conscious handicraft. I could picture tiny versions of this kind of events as a science faire in many technical universities around the world, but it is quite something to experience the scale of the creativity and…
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 7 (37), Spring quarter This week was completely overrun with two homework projects that refused to surrender even when groups of Sloans & MBAs spent hours sitting in the room and cranking through logistic regressions and ROI analysis for marketing channels of a pharma company, or trying to calculate the optimal inventory cost of the supply chain of HP injet…
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 6 (36), Spring quarter Somehow the notes from this week are lighter – and not for the lack of activities, but rather a different kind. Somehow felt pointless to try to capture heated in-class ethics discussions or hours spent on preparing group work presentations in bullet point form. Instead, I took some time to dump a new load of photos of school life to the…
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 5 (35), Spring quarter Could be that my future co-alumni will look back at this week from the future as historic: the school came out to the public with news that there will be no more Sloan Program. The competition for the title of the Best Sloan Class Ever (est 1958) will finally be over – as us in the 2013 cohort will remain the Last Sloan Class Ever. The…
I recently shared some thoughts on how surprisingly hard it has been to adjust to how mundane and bureaucratic everyday activities still can be in otherwise tech-advanced Silicon Valley, compared to back home in Estonia. The video from Stanford GSB YouTube channel : This is probably the longest-prepared short speech I’ve ever delivered, as a finale of a whole-winter-quarter-long LOWKeynotes…
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 4 (34), Spring quarter No bandwidth to say much more that you will find not one or two, but three beautiful graphs I drew this week with my two little hands below the fold. And that the sales game hinted towards last week concluded with a triple win by Sloan Fellows (who sold $4.1..$4.7M/each over a quota of $2.6M; among those your’s truly being #3). The two…
Speak of coincidences – or a pileup of pressure: over the weekend one topic came up (as it does in a recurring way) with a group of classmates, yesterday there was this article ( The Anxiety of the Unanswered E-Mail ) making social media rounds and to top it off, Dave & Jason were having a ping-pong on usage of auto-responders on Twitter today (also see the Quora thread for context). By “the…
Already weeks into the final stretch I was comfortably settling on the fact that I’ve rushed past the opportunity of writing a reflective summary of Winter quarter (as I did with Summer and Autumn before). Where you lack internal pressure, the will be external one – and as our fabulous Yearbook committee has been recycling those texts in the past they convinced me to not drop the habit this late…
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 3 (33), Spring quarter Head down in two inches of readings for this week and a fresh flow of first written project deadlines, like a two-degrees-deep analysis of your friends and advisors social graph or a set of regressions to be run on profitability data of a bank who has no clue if there is any connection between the demographics and profitability of their…
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 2 (32), Spring quarter The highlight of the week was really non-academic: we got to host the Class of 2014 for the orientation we received in April a year ago . In a proper student timing fashion, when a day before the event you’re not sure what will come out and some of the slides getting still edited by the speaker at the time he is being introduced on stage…
After a quick 2-day trial hop to visit a few firms like Boeing and Starbucks in Seattle in November, the Sloan Class of 2013 spent a full week of our spring break on East Coast. This time it was less about the particular companies and public organisations we saw, but more about the people, the leaders we met and their learnings and ideas. All of our hosts had a little theme tip on “resilience”…
Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot speaking… via a robot Spent half a day today at legendary research hub SRI International , for Xconomy -organized robotics forum ( see full agenda here ), listening to an impressive lineup of industry pioneers of mass-market appealing robotics talk about their businesses. Some speakers were still physically on stage, others embodied inside telepresence robots, of course.…
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 1 (31), Spring quarter For some weird reason the GBS classes after the Spring break kicked off on… a Thursday. Just 2 days of classes gave a glimpse into what is to come – some very brief notes (and a few good book links) below. Posting anyway, to avoid letting the routine die before I get to finalize the half-finished East Coast study trip report draft sitting…
Here I am, staring into the bittersweet 10-week end sprint, the final Spring quarter of my Stanford year. Coming out of the academically intense Winter quarter you kind of want to replicate the feeling of a whirlwind, yet at the same time leave some space to deal with the inevitable prep for re-entering the real world soon. Here’s what lies ahead:
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 10 (30), Winter quarter Originally planning out March I was quite sure that next week will be a complex one, after all, it is still labelled in calendar as the “exam week”. In reality, the Winter Quarter pretty much culminated today, with the last Finance class where the entire Sloan class was together in the same lecture. We do have one more core in Spring,…
Last week, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins was speaking in the View From The Top speaker series at Stanford GSB. (Video is yet to come online, but I shared some notes here.) As part of his speech, John gave his book recommendation to the audience and in return asked the audience to email him 3 book suggestions back. I got curious and, as I sent in mine, also asked if he would share back what the…
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Weeks 8-9 (28-29), Winter quarter So there: it takes about 28 weeks in Stanford to finally have someone mention Europe in any other context than a semi-joke about Greek macro environment in the short term. And these two weeks suddenly opened the floodgates: there was the first European company case this far, we spent some time on the (quite miserable) comparative…
With the end-of-quarter groupwork frenzy I am behind on posting the academic lecture notes – hope to get to that this weekend. But meanwhile, as the flow of new thoughts from extracurricular guest visitors in just last seven days has been mind-blowing I’ll post them for your enjoyment. See further for tips, startup plugs, book recommendations and videos from: Jonathan Abrams (founder of…
Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 7 (27), Winter quarter After the public holiday last Monday (which I realized could not have been more eclectic between sick kid babysitting, running, building a unit economics model for a startup business plan assignment and babysteps in hacking social graph analysis in Mathematica ) there was no breathing room throughout the rest of the week. Eric Schmidt…
I was honored to speak last night at the Estonian Independence Day reception thrown by the local Estonian society, aka Eesti By The Bay . The below are my speaking notes, not a full transcript. Happy 95th Birthday , Estonia!