Growing up in Soviet Union and witnessing its downfall, clearly demonstrated that life is about changes and taking charge. Programming in Pascal and FORTRAN was probably not what most expected Soviet kids did in their free time, but hey what else do you expect from school where your schoolmates are four of the Estonian founders of Skype. During the early days of my professional life I was advising on and structuring various privatisations in the country, from waterworks and landfills to shipping companies. At the same time we started to be active as first VCs in the country riding the early wave of tech revolution here. I personally decided to join one of our portfolio companies , Privador, as founder and CEO. Privador and Insitute of Cybernetics were instrumentral in creating the backbone of today’s much heralded e-Estonia – we introduced PKI , digital ID-cards and digital signatures to the country. From this project emerged GuardTime, world’s leading keyless signatures provided, where I am also a proud angel.
Good part of the last decade I have been running Tallinn office of the largest Private Equity funds in Baltics. I currently serve on nine different boards from insurance, media to branded foods companies.
In my free time I have started an art gallery and art non-profit foundation, breeded life into the oldest art house cinema and set up strongest art house distribution company in the region and run a culinary school.
I am an active Angel Investor and I am very proud of my little portfolio consisting among others Plumbr, Digital Sputnik, Fleep, Teleport, Lingvist.
For the last 2 years I have been a Jury member of Ajujaht, a localized version of Dragon’s Den.