Unfair Advantage

Before heading off for a summer break with our podcast, we wanted to talk to Vytas Paukštys of Eskimi about their business, which isn't all that usual for a Baltic or for that matter a Nordic startup. Eskimi is doing business in Nigeria and Ghana mostly, but has users from other parts of the African continent as well.

And how exactly are they doing? Fantastically, in short. They have some 7.7 million registered users and they're showing more than 1 billion ad impressions a month. In the last month, they signed up a million new users to their service. This company is definitely taking off.

We're also going to be taking a small summer break after this episode. We'll be back with more interviews in August.

Getting close to 20 full shows we decided to interview Kaspars Dancis, the CEO and co-founder of Cobook. The company creates an app that goes by the same name and can now be found in the App Store for download. Cobook App is the best, most simple and beautiful address book application out there. As you can see, we at ArcticStartup are quite fond of it. The app has been developed in Riga, Latvia by Kaspars and his brother. They have also joined the European startup accelerator HackFwd just recently and are looking to release a bunch of new things in the coming weeks.

This week we talked to one of the most well known serial entrepreneurs in Finland - Taneli Tikka. He's been part of many startups, but also built some of his own companies and also bankrupted a few. We talked to him about the ride along all the years and what he has learned, both from the success cases as well as bankruptcies. In addition to this we also discussed a little how the startup environment has changed in the 10+ years from the perspectives of investors and entrepreneurs. Did you know he got 5 million euro investment on a 20 million pre-money valuation on his first company, just based on slideware?

We've managed to get to 16 episodes already! This week on Unfair Advantage we talk to Mike Reiner, one of the people behind the Estonian Startup Wise Guys accelerator program. Startup Wise Guys is an early stage accelerator aimed at interesting companies who want to tap into the potential of Scandinavia as well as Russia from Estonia. The accelerator announced their first batch of companies a while ago and they're coming from all over Europe. We talk to Mike about the program, how many applications they received and where they plan to take. Join us for another exciting episode and if you like it - please tell your friends and rate it in iTunes, we appreciate it!

In our 15th episode we talk to Tine Thygesen of Everplaces, Copenhagen, Denmark based startup. We discuss location based services and how Tine got into entrepreneurship through her first startup in the e-commerce space in Australia. After selling that to an Australian company she came back to the Nordics to take on more entrepreneurial challenges first with Venture Cup Denmark and later with 23 Video before starting her own company Everplaces. She is also one of the founders of Founder's House, a co-working space in Copenhagen that now has 17 startups and some 70 people working there.

This show will crack you up! We interviewed Antti Ylimutka and Ville Simola of Startup Sauna today. We discussed the backgrounds of the incubator/accelerator as well as where it will go in the future. Startup Sauna is one of the most well known and most respected accelerators in Northern Europe that has helped companies raise more than $12 million over the couple of years it has been in existence. Quite impressive, considering how it all got started.

In our thirteenth show we talk to Carl Waldekranz, the CEO and co-founder of Tictail. Tictail positions themselves as the easiest, prettiest and most social way to sell stuff online. In the show we talk to Carl about what led them to start Tictail and how they actually went about building the team. There are a lot of great small stories there, we strongly suggest you listen to them. In addition, the company has also worked with Spotify and Wrapp, designing their typeface for both of the companies.

Tommi Holmgren of Cabforce is our guest this week. Cabforce is an online service for booking a cab and pre-paying it before the ride. This is an obvious advantage to business travelers as they can pay the ride with their credit cards and get all the receipts electronically. The service is out in 14 cities in Europe at the moment, but it will be going live in tens of cities during this year.

We missed last week due to some scheduling challenges, but we're back this week a little earlier with our talk show. This week we talk to Petteri Koponen, the co-founder of Lifeline Ventures as well as the former co-founder of Jaiku and First Hop. He's got a colorful past with this companies and in living through them, built up an enormous amount of experience. Lifeline Ventures has also become one of the prominent early stage investors in Finland through their 19 investments.

This week, well, this week was different on Unfair Advantage. Our guest on the show is Antti Vilpponen, the Co-Founder and CEO of ArcticStartup. We work in the same office, but haven't talked in detail how ArcticStartup got started and why it does what it does. Instead of having this discussion over lunch or beer, we decided to record it and make it into an episode of Unfair Advantage. We discuss the backgrounds of ArcticStartup, the role of media and also what are some of the ways ArcticStartup sees itself going forward.