1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrus Oks, Founding Partner of Tera Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How do the Estonian culture and entrepreneurial momentum play into your investment strategy? Are you looking for people to have developer shops in Estonia or some kind of backend in Estonia?

Andrus Oks: Estonia is very special. To put in context, it is a small country with a population of 1.3 million. We actually have 10 Estonian unicorns. Last year, it was more than a billion dollars in investment. This year, it’s already more than a billion dollars. This is very helpful. We achieved this quite fast as well.

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20-Year Journey of a Fat Startup with Major Pivots: Scott Sellers, CEO of Azul (Part 1)

VCs invest in startups that go from zero to $100M in 5 to 7 years. It has taken Azul almost 20 years to make that journey. Scott discusses the pivots and strategic shifts that have made the journey possible. With patience and persistence, and with an excellent two-pronged Open Source strategy, Scott has built Azul into a compelling business with many exit options from IPO to various acquisition paths.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrus Oks, Founding Partner of Tera Ventures (Part 1)

Andrus Oks is Founding Partner at Tera Ventures, based in Estonia. We have a great discussion on entrepreneurship in the Baltic and Scandinavian countries in particular.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Tera Ventures.

Andrus Oks: I’m one of the founding partners of Tera Ventures. Tera is an Estonian-based seed fund. We currently invest from our €45 million second fund. We are halfway through. We have done 15 deals. We are doing another 15. We support our portfolio companies throughout the rounds. We like to be early. We’re often the first investors.

Video FAQs

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Florian Eggenschwiler, Chief Product Officer of Xovis (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How many partners do you have?

Florian Eggenschwiler: About 200 plus of various sizes.

Sramana Mitra: Is it more of the smaller ones?

Florian Eggenschwiler: I would say there is a slight skew towards the smaller companies. They tend to be locally focused and are quite flexible to react to local requirements.

Catching Up On Readings: Big Tech’s Talent Bonanza

This feature by Christopher Mims on The Wall Street Journal discusses how the tech crash could be a talent bonanza among the Big Tech. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.

Colors: Printemps I

I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Printemps I

Printemps I | Sramana Mitra, 2020 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 9  x 12, On Paper

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Florian Eggenschwiler, Chief Product Officer of Xovis (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is there an online-offline data overlay as well? You’re not trying to map that customer to a real customer in retail to be able to market to that person?

Florian Eggenschwiler: When you’re online, you don’t tend to be anonymous. In our basic setup, you’re an anonymous dot with attributes like gender.

Sramana Mitra: In retail, you do have the opportunity to make it non-anonymous. You can correlate POS with behavior. You can market to that person using data.

576th Roundtable Recording on May 26, 2022

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here: