Nice find. I had used VCGuide before (mentioned in another comment) but I see a different set of reviews than I see in VCGuide -- always good to have more data here considering how thin it is!
I'd suggest asking what is uniquely beneficial about Tallinn that will make your business more likely to succeed. Lots of places are cheap and the two exceptions you identify, talent and capital, are absolutely critical to the success of high-growth tech companies.
Very good point. I am actually visiting Tallinn later this year to try to meet with people in the entrepeneurship scene and learn more about the city.
While you're right that talent and capital are important, it's also true that no place on the planet has more capital and software talent than SV. So you're never going to beat SV measuring only those metrics. The challenge of an entrepeneur who wants to found a startup outside of the Bay area is to pick a location that is beneficial in other ways while not sacrificing too much in terms of capital and talent. I'm not too sure about the local capital in Tallinn (not that you necessarily need to raise money locally) but I do know it has a pretty strong developer community by european standards, maybe in the top 5 in europe. And it also excels in terms of government support for entrepreneurship and, afaik, local cybersecurity talent. So it's not just a cheap place, it's a cheap place that also has basically every other thing that makes founding a software business attractive with the possible exception of capital.
I was reading about the best places to be an expat on something like nomadcapitalist.com and Estonia kept coming up due to the ease of immigrating + starting a business there. And I've just done personal research from there. For example https://ccdcoe.org/ is also based there which is a huge draw for software talent.
Other cities I've been considering - Lisbon, Riga, , Bucharest, Berlin, Prague, Dublin. Mostly was just looking for cheap places with developers that are in the EU and not too hard to immigrate to. Prague in particular seems like a pretty big nexus for EU developers and it's pretty inexpensive. There's undoubtedly many other cities that fit well in this category, I just haven't heard of them. But Tallinn punches above its weight in terms of software presence and it's basically the easiest to immigrate to so I focused on that pretty early on in terms of good places to found an EU-based company.
Nomadcapitalist sells residency services. His info is good, but he has an angle and shouldn't be used as a single source of truth. I like Wroclaw (which gives you access to Ukrainian programmers also) and Lisbon myself. Since Portuguese is easier to learn, and I already have people there, it will probably be Lisbon.
Yeah, I'm aware he's a consultant of some kind but from what I can tell it shouldn't be too hard to navigate the process on your own. A lot of what he focuses on are capital gains/taxes which I don't really care about too much.
Thanks for those links, super helpful, didn't know so many countries offered startup-specific visas. In that google doc spreadsheet it's missing some important investor visas (the startup visa for Estonia looks cool but since the investor visa has such low capital requirements, without digging deeper, it still looks like a better deal). And do you know the name of the program you are referencing with Wroclaw? Does Poland have some special program where you can sponsor Ukrainians' work visas there?
Just curious, what about Lisbon is so attractive to you? I know Spanish and can read most basic Portuguese but still was mostly ruling out Portugal due to what I perceived as too-small tech and entrepreneurial communities. Spain and Portugal seem like great places to work on an MVP with a couple other cofounders but I had kind of ruled them out for a place to really launch.
There's a host more investor visas of various kinds and "if you feel like it" visas. If you're a US national, you can basically stay in most EU countries if you want to. Each one will be a little different, but ultimately you have to work pretty hard to get tossed out of the EU. Some of these visa regimes are informal, like "OK, you seem like a nice guy and you're not going to go on the dole here." This is the kind of info that you WON'T get from concierge residency guys like NomadDude -he's trying to steer people towards things which he actually provides.
Lisbon: I like the food, climate and architecture better than Poland, and I have more friends who live there. Pretty simple, really: people on the ground trumps any information you're going to get on the internets. The projects on my horizons are all fairly high skill (ph.d. in math), low head count projects, and it's a lot easier to convince high skill people to move to Lisbon than Wroclaw or Lviv. There's also a decent nomadconsultant scene which has interesting social aspects. If I needed head count for a Bay Area type startup, I'd probably go straight to Ukraine, as I got people with top connections there. It's a beautiful country, and lots of the talent wants to stay there.
I believe you independently derived a very old, but lurcrative, idea. Kontera started off back in 2003 although I don't recall when they actually got to double-underline links. Viglink has been doing this more subtly as a commercial service since 2009, and AOL actually had a flavor of this built into Instant Messenger. There were also a number of affiliate networks that built this infrastructure to parse the Commission Junction offers database and update their networks with match/near-match products & services.
I think these are all excellent points but may suggest that you would not be an ideal customer for an early stage company. On the other hand, painless mutual disqualification as fast as possible is a win for both parties.
May I ask what you find compelling about Sunshine? I really, really wanted to love the film and I did for the first 2/3. But it felt like the final act lost its way.
Maybe I just like Garland's films but not his signature. If you have other recommendations I'd be interested.
I don't have high hopes for historical accuracy but i'm excited to see The Current War which puts some of these topics to film:https://youtu.be/wMECv6yLOFM
Actually there are three criteria:
1) Information is material
2) Information is not public
3) Breach of duty through the "trust and confidence" clause.
It would be highly unusual for the CFO not to have the burden of confidence but even for a division president it's not clear they'd have corporate officer responsibilities.
During compliance training in my old life they covered the classic "overheard in a coffee shop" example as a way to highlight that a barista does not owe confidentiality to a random public company. However, I don't think it's ethical behavior regardless of whether it'd result in a conviction.
yes if your employer loses all trust in you its one of the things they can sack you for and this also can be collective ie I know one of my team stole xx£ you can fire all of them - which surprised me when I first heard about it.
Read with a critical eye as I, obviously, wasn't present: in this case it seems likely the Financial Advisor screwed up or simply misunderstood the industry. "Shopping the deal" is only anathema if you've signed a term sheet. Many companies receive/solicit multiple term sheets and accept their favorite.
Or perhaps the Financial Advisor was also a friend or advisor to the venture capitalist, hence if they got them a really good deal they would have solid well paid work for the next few years.
While possible this doesn't feel likely to me (not that my feelings have any bearing on what actually happened). It would be a breach of fiduciary duty, or at least compromised advice if the advisor wasn't a fiduciary.
