During one of the last sunny weekends in Estonia, Sten sat down in Saaremaa with Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder and CEO of TransferWise.
Taavet has a long history of building awesome companies as well as frequently traveling around the globe. He became the first employee of Skype and started out by spending 7 years on that - from jotting down ideas on the back of a napkin to the first million customers. Ever since that adventure, he’s been busy building TransferWise and is now based in London, where the company’s headquarters are - in addition to an office in Tallinn, Estonia. By the way, if you haven't tried TransferWise yet, do so - it's a must for everyone on the move!
We discuss his busiest times - practically living on a plane while constantly traveling to different parts of the world, and his realization that the world is a lot more than the place you were born in. And of course - moving around doesn’t mean leaving your home country behind - you just have to take it with you!
We talk about London and the benefits of building a global business from a well-connected European tech hub with a great ecosystem, find out exactly how many investors have said that TransferWise should be based in San Francisco or New York - and discuss why that hasn’t become a reality.
As successful remote work is a huge part of what Teleport is trying to promote, we couldn’t stay away from discussing TransferWise’s strategy on on distributed teams. The explanation is an interesting mix of a bit of everything - a balance between having an office and being around one table as much as possible as well as providing enough flexibility to the employees to keep them motivated.
Working around a huge amount of traveling and living a multisite life while dealing with a growing family at the same time is also something Taavet is familiar with - and if you’re in the same situation, you’ll get some tips on how to make it work - hint: it’s not as hard as it sounds!
And, last but not least - summing up his personal moving and travel experience, Taavet shares with us the biggest issues and unnecessary frictions he has come across in living a multisite life.
Happy listening!
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