Hi, I'm Erki, a serial entrepreneur from Estonia.

What makes every successful company different is not how they end. It’s where they start. I come from small country Estonia, that was occupied by soviet union until 1991. After getting freedom rapid growth started and Estonia managed to build the most digitized economy in the world. This had effect and unicorns like Skype, Wise, Bolt and many others were born. Now Estonia the nr 1 in the Europe in number of unicorns and investments per capita, As the ecosystem is very strong the knowledge how to build game changing worldwide companies is passed on to next generation web3 companies.

I started my working career next to high school assembling computers (Intel 386 microprocessor). After 1000 computers and broken fingers I switched screwdriver to keyboard and upgraded my programming skills from assembly to basic. At first I developed some games for fun and then got my first programming job and created warehouse software.

Next years I supported one of the largest construction companies IT infrastructure. It started with setting up e-mail (downloaded once a week with 56k modem) and ended configuring Microsoft servers. As this was 2000 dot-com bubble and everyone got rich overnight I didn't want to miss the train (I missed it) and started sending out one pagers with different brilliant :) ideas. Luckily there were people who valued more enthusiasm and invited me to join their team.

The first task as technical director of the biggest pager network was to close the network and sell the equipment. Together with the CEO we were left with 35 good telephone agents. After some investigation the decision was to pivot this to CallCenter. The US stock listed company was the owner and for them it was easier to exit, so we did a management buyout. The CEO left to run a much bigger company and I had my opportunity to start my first CEO role at the age of 22. There are not too many mistakes I left undone, but at the same time it was the best school. Several years and struggles later we restructured the company to Kontaktikeskus and I was lucky enough to pass the daily management to a very good team.

I had more time to explore new territories so experiments started:

• Time management trainings

• Speaking in conferences

• Craft Beer brewery

• Vitamin subscription business in Poland

• E-cigaret subscription business

• Online lead generation business

• Online broker for small loans

• Importing broken Porches from Japan, fixing them and selling them to Germany.

• Cryptocurrency

This cocktail led to the birth of Zlick together with Swiss and German founders. This was a very classical startup journey with an accelerator in Zurich, customer validation, failure, pivot, failure, pivot and funding round. We managed to raise 1M EUR funding from institutional and VC investors with MVP. The first month's GMV was 26EUR, revenue around 1EUR. Five years later Zlick is operating in 5 countries and has a very strong market position, monthly GMV is about 1M EUR and growing 70% yoy. There were times when I spent most of my week in airports and I even had a connecting flight in Tallinn airport (not to Saaremaa). Based on the subscription economy experience and customers' demand it was time to move on and start Popspot.com.

Estonian Cryptocurrency Association - Founder

Estonian Direct Marketing Association- Founder, Board member

Estonian Business Angels Network

Estonian Founders Society