Kristjan Maruste, co-founder of CoModule, spoke with Indrek Põldvee about building an Estonian-founded startup in Berlin.

This startup is building a cloud platform for light electric vehicles – like bikes and scooters – enabling the end customer to connect with their vehicle through a smartphone app and the manufacturer to connect with their customers.

CoModule promises to kill all the main anxieties people have with adopting electric vehicles: range anxiety, by visually displaying the available range and navigating the users to their destinations; security worries, by allowing tracking of the vehicle when it is stolen; and worries over battery lifetime information, by monitoring the cycles and performance of the battery.

At the same time, the CoModule platform has a strong offering for manufacturers. Monitoring will help manufacturers minimise battery warranty issues, by supplying super-accurate information about battery performance. It will allow manufacturers to directly connect with their customers to increase loyalty and generate after-sales, and it will enable agile product development.

“At a fleet management level, CoModule combines diagnostic and geolocation information to improve industrial processes, like spare part handling and vehicle redistribution, while analysing components’ performance,” it says.

The young team has been working on battery technologies for years, and the main investor in CoModule is a big German VC firm, providing confidence for the future of the startup.

We spoke with Taizo Son, during his visit to the Latitude59 conference in Tallinn last year, about creating a movement, taking Slush to Japan and how he became an entrepreneur.

What brings you to the Nordic countries so often? We often see you at Slush and now you’re here in Estonia.

The first time I visited Helsinki was about four years ago, to join Slush as one of the keynote speakers. I was so shocked that there was such a ‘hot’ event being held in such a freezing country! The atmosphere is really cool – it’s like a rock concert.

At the time, it was run by Miki Kuusi. He was a very young guy – only young guys can run such great events by themselves. At that time, there was so much Japanese media there and everybody kept asking me questions like: why do they not hold this kind of Slush events in Japan? I turned the question back to them and we all agreed that we should be introducing this kind of movement to the Asian people.

After I returned to Tokyo, I spoke to others who shared those same passions. So, I emailed Miki, suggesting that we introduce the Slush movement to Japan and other Asian countries, and inviting him to come and help launch the movement in Tokyo. Miki was excited by the idea but we had to help fund it from Japan to make it possible for Slush to come to Tokyo. That was in January and we decided to hold the event in April – such a short period of time to make it happen!

That was the beginning of my relationship with the Nordic countries. This is the first time I have visited Estonia and I’m finding it is one of the ‘hottest’ countries in the world. I don’t know why the Nordic and Baltic countries are so hot in innovation compared to other areas of the world. Perhaps it’s because the countries are small, so they have to be global from the beginning. Everyone here speaks fluent English too, so naturally, they can become international with more ease. If their mindset is global from the beginning though, then they can be very innovative, because they are always looking at the global market and how to be popular in the global market. You need to be very innovative for that.

How successful have you been with your mission to take Slush to Japan? It’s not a 15,000-person event, right?

We learned from the people at Slush that the most important thing is to create a community where we can share our passions and vision, rather than holding big events in a big venue. At the beginning, I started involving passionate people in Japan, but I found that although many people were passionate, they didn’t have any clue how to be motivated about it. Once I brought Slush to Tokyo, everybody became really excited – it ignited a fire.

Going back a little, what ignited your fire for entrepreneurship? What was the moment when you thought, ‘Hey, I have to be an entrepreneur’?

I asked a similar question to the Finnish people at Slush. They said that five or 10 years ago in Finland there was a similar situation to Japan today – big companies like Nokia were powering their world. Then all of a sudden, because the market situation changed and Nokia started to break up because of Google, Apple, Microsoft and so on, they felt that they had to do something new for their society.

In Japan, a similar thing is happening. There are so many great establishments there: Toyota, Honda, Sony and so on. Most of the time people work for a big company, but these days, even the Japanese establishments are not doing so well. Some big companies are no longer profitable, so some young designers and entrepreneurs have started thinking that they need to do something new for society.

Since Slush has such a cool atmosphere, like a rock concert or a club music event, young people are allured and attracted to it – all the entrepreneurs are such great, cool figures.

Before launching Wolt, Elias Aalto first built a successful software consultancy, Qvik, and created an early hit game for iPhone.

How did you become an entrepreneur?

I was working as a consultant at Digia and someone showed me what they billed for my hours. It was 120 euros an hour and I was getting paid about 17.  I thought: that’s over seven times more. I was, of course, naive in thinking that – as if there were no overheads in running a business and no risk associated with it. But that kicked off the emotion for me that I could sell myself doing the things I was doing at Digia. Why not cut out the middle man? Although I’m not saying that everyone should start their own consultancy, even if they’re working in software development.

I remember, years ago, listening to you speak about your game, Wooden Labyrinth 3D, and how you struggled to make money from it.

A lot of people saw that speech because I did it a couple times. It turns out that no one understood what I was saying though. This was before in-app purchases were really happening, but we had figured out how to make money using mobile games – it was the time of premium applications. What I discussed in my talk was how I had failed to monetise through advertisements and in-app purchases. Actually, the game sold quite well through the premium site, so in the end it made about half a million euros in revenue, prizes and so on. It was downloaded about 13 million times.

How did you decide to jump into Wolt?

I had been at Qvik for over five years. When you do consultancy it can be hard. Most times the projects that you do are not really that successful. Most products in the world fail. They’re not spectacular failures, but they’re not breakout international successes either. On the other hand, if you manage to create a project that is really successful, you’re then a bit annoyed that you don’t actually own a piece of it. You think: “Oh well, that was nice. Now it’s big and great but … well, I got billed by the hour.” I was looking back on the success of the game I had made, Wooden Labyrinth 3D, and thinking how it would be cool to make something again – something where I could say: “This is mine and this is the best.” So when I was contacted by Miki Kuusi to form a company I jumped at the chance. We had a meeting over coffee and I promised to get back to him over the weekend, but I called him back 30 minutes later to say “let’s do it, let’s give it a shot.”

When did that happen?

It was early 2014. At that point it was just me, Miki and Mika, our designer. We spent the summer building the proof of concept and gathering the rest of the team, then we founded the company. It was announced at Slush 2014.

We have seen quite a boom of food delivery startups across Europe. Wolt takes food to homes. We have been doing this for a hundred years. Where’s the startup? What’s the revolution?

First of all, there are two things here. We are not, and we never were, strictly a food delivery startup. That was not the thing that we were going after, and we’re still not. We’re in the business of restaurants and creating a digital interface for restaurants. Part of that is the delivery business. A delivery business provides instant gratification. You have this magic power to get something that you couldn’t get before – having something delivered that isn’t delivered naturally. But we also feel there’s an even bigger piece of the puzzle in the rest of the restaurant business, whether eating at the place or picking it up for yourself. We are trying to look at the restaurant business as a whole and sell all of that. The restaurant partners that we work with didn’t get to the industry just to found a kitchen. During delivery, they’re essentially just the kitchen, but they wanted to be restauranteurs. They want people to enjoy not just the food but the atmosphere and the spirit of going there. We want to help with that as well.

Finnish startup Emonum creates a unique value. But the customer has to die first.

Have you ever thought of what happens after you die? How does your digital life continue on Facebook? How do you send messages to your children if you are not here?

In movies, you sometimes see final testaments being issued as video tapes.

In a way, Emonum brings testaments into the social media age. You sign up for the service, you record messages and set release dates for them, and after Emonum has confirmed the death from the official registries, the system starts to send out your messages. Just sending your family all your passwords would be really helpful, right? Or making sure your child gets a personal message from you when he or she turns 18.

For CoFounder Podcast No 3 Indrek Põldvee sat down with Emonum’s Ville Hyyryläinen to discuss the early days of building the afterlife cloud service.

How did you come up with an idea like that?

The idea has been developing over the last two years. I was doing some research and thinking: what really happens in the digital world? I realised that there are a lot of dead people that are still in many services. There is no clear process as to how it should be done. What bothers me, personally, is that nobody even asked the users how they would want their account treated if they died.

There is no real system that separates living users and dead users – that’s the main issue.

Also, we’ve been hearing stories that a lot of content disappears. For example, someone at a university might have been doing a lot of research, but all this work they have been doing for years is locked behind passwords so that nobody has access.

How did you come to found the company?

We saw that it was a real need. Once we had started to get a bit more understanding about what was really going on in the industry, we did a lot of preliminary studies. We met over 700 people in 18 countries. It was interesting to hear stories about the experiences these people had been having. The problem is huge.

So how have you solved it? How does Emonum works?

We have a user interface where people add and upload all their meaningful content in one place – this might include passwords, documents, their big emotions, life stories, and all kinds of other things. The service is built for daily use, so the user can use it for himself or herself too.

We also have integrations, so that when we receive information that the user passed away we lock the account and the publishing features are activated. During their life, the user has been managing the system and deciding what content is going to who, and when it will happen.

It’s like a digital testament?

It has common aspects to insurances generally. One way to see this is like a personal diary, because I believe that when you have a diary the main point is that you use it for yourself. You are thinking about, and analysing, your own life, thoughts and things happening around you. But with our system you can also decide what will happen afterwards: who will see the information and exactly what information they see. You might have some content that you want destroyed. That is all possible.

How do people react to this kind of idea? It’s a topic that people don’t like to discuss.

In Finnish culture, people are not brave when it comes to talking about love or death. These are issues that we are often only brave enough to talk about with a best friend or within a couple.

However, with those 700 people who we met – after some initial confusion – people started to share some really personal and deep things about their family and the relationship they have to death. People are ready to talk about it, but somebody needs to be the one to open the topic and let people talk about it. Generally, we don’t talk about this deep stuff with strangers.

In CoFounder Podcast No 2 Indrek Põldvee sat down with Martin Rand, founder of Monsanto-owned agricultural startup Vital Fields.

In November 2016, The Climate Corporation, a subsidiary of Monsanto Company, announced the acquisition of VitalFields, a European farm management software company based in Tallinn, Estonia. “Founded in 2011 and available in seven European countries, VitalFields offers an easy-to-use tool for farmers to plan, manage and analyze their field activities, including simplified tracking and reporting of all crop inputs to help ensure compliance with European Union environmental standards,” it described the acquisition target then.

VitalFields’ tools will continue to be sold in Europe. Climate plans to expand the VitalFields user base to help European farmers uncover valuable field insights and use field data to improve productivity.

“We share The Climate Corporation’s vision of providing one connected digital ag platform for farmers across the globe,” Martin Rand, chief executive officer and co-founder for VitalFields, said then in s statement. “We look forward to the opportunity to expand the availability of the tools we’ve developed to help more farmers across Europe broaden their experience of the value digital tools can provide toward greater efficiency and sustainability.”

Prior to this acquisition, Monsanto Growth Ventures (MGV), the venture capital arm of Monsanto Company, saw promise in the developing company and was an early investor in VitalFields, incorporating it into the MGV portfolio;that includes a wide-range of independent companies active in key areas of agricultural productivity.

WeatherMe OÜ, which does business as VitalFields, is a digital agriculture company that offers an easy-to-use farm management system for farmers to plan, manage and analyze their field activities, including simplified tracking and reporting of all crop inputs to help ensure compliance with European Union environmental standards. Founded in 2011 and based in Tallinn, Estonia, VitalFields is available in seven European countries: Austria, Estonia, Germany, Poland, Romania, Switzerland and Ukraine.

Jon von Tetzchner opens up in CoFounder Podcast No 1 about founding the first Nordic unicorn, Opera Software. We talked on sidelines of Latitude59 conference about how he reached the ultimate startup dream, an IPO, on how he was forced out of the company he built, why he is so keen on the web that he founded another browser maker, Vivaldi, and what is wrong with startup funding.

Let’s start from the real beginning. You originally built Opera inside Telenor, but the company decided it was not for them and wrote reports on how it would fail. What gave you courage to not listen and launch the company anyway?

I have always thought that we are all from a small place in some ways. Why should it be that just because you’re from a big country you should succeed and if you’re from a small place you don’t. There’s been a lot of thinking in the Nordics that we can’t succeed, but I thought: Why not? Are we more stupid than these guys? I don’t think that’s the case. We are as smart as they are, so we should give it a try. Is the available software so good that we can’t make anything better? No. So let’s start a project.

I was lucky enough to be working with a truly smart coder, Geir. He taught me that I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. We had a strong team from that perspective: we had a really strong coder and then me – I wasn’t too bad. We felt we were building a product that could be really good and started on a prototype to give it a try. We didn’t feel there was too much risk – we just tried it out to see what would happen. We believed we would be able to get enough usage to make it work.

Across the Nordics we’ve had a social security system there to save you.

I think in many ways it is a positive system. Some people think you should be driven by fear but I think fear stops you in some ways. Yes, we had to make sure that we could pay the rent and other bills, and we did have months without making any money, but in general we’ve felt secure in what we were doing, believing that if we failed we could either get our jobs back or find another job. We didn’t take out any loans – we just put in the minimum amount of money that is needed to start a company, which was 50,000 NOK – so our downside was reduced. We could only lose that 50,000 NOK and the time that we spent on the project.

When did risk first enter the picture? Did you need to take out a loan when you started to hire people?

Obviously we had to make enough money to make ends meet. We started hiring people in 1996 – we hired our first person in 1996 and the second in 1997. We grew at a pace where we were effectively doubling each year. From that perspective, we kept adapting to the situation and didn’t need to have external funding.

Our first loan, which was a convertible loan with little real downside, only came in 1999. We managed that situation well, converting that loan in our next round in 2000.

Of course, we had close calls along the way. We almost had investors in 1996, 1997 and 1998, and we were almost sold during that period too. I think part of our success was that it didn’t happen.

How did you protect the company in the early phase?

We just built the company. I think we were very close to making significant mistakes along the way, because we didn’t know what we were doing. In 1996 we signed an intention agreement to have an investor come in. They gave a very good talk: told us how they were long term investors and would support us all the way, pointed out all their investments where that had happened. We signed the deal in the afternoon and the next morning I got a call; the investor had asked one of their other companies that made modems to bundle our software. That company said no, so the investor told us we should kill the browser and become a consulting company on the web. Luckily,

CoFounder is the only magazine built for the startup ecosystem. In 2014, at a time when most of the media were throwing themselves fully into becoming click-based advertising platforms, we launched a print magazine for the first digitally-native generation of readers.

The CoFounder Podcast builds on that – we are talking with founders about their early days, the painful experiences on their way to success.  Some of our guests have built unicorns, others are only at the beginning of their careers as entrepreneurs.

In the Episode Zero Tarmo Virki speaks with Indrek Põldvee on why this podcast series was created.