STARTUP ECOSYSTEM REPORT

GLOBAL COMPARISONS
TALLINN, ESTONIA
Population: 400,000
OULU, FINLAND
Population: 190,000
ACTIVE USERS
300M+
RAISED
$10.2M
VALUATION
$1B+
RAISED
$17.5M
EMPLOYEES
96
INSTALLS
400M+
Estonia is the 132nd smallest country in the
world by land mass yet it produces more
startups per head of population than any other
country in Europe. It has a population the size
of Copenhagen but has one of the world’s most
advanced e-governments. 24
Within Estonia all children are taught to code
until 16. In 2000, its government deemed internet
access a basic human right and free Wi-Fi became
the norm throughout the land.
It was the first country to offer voting for general
elections online and most Estonians file their
taxes within minutes on their mobile phones.
Their health records are stored in a digital cloud.
Estonia is said to have the world’s most digitised
government. 25
In August 2003, six people from Estonia, Sweden
and Denmark launched a new product in Tallinn.
On its first day, 10,000 people downloaded it. A
few months later, it had a million users. Ten years
later, it is used by 300 million people around the
world. The product is called Skype.
It is difficult to overestimate the snowball effect
Skype has had on Tallinn. “You need a local
success story to legitimise creating startups as a
viable business,” said Taavet Hinrikus, founder of
TransferWise, a currency-exchange service. 26
Skype also provided many young Estonian
programmers and software developers with share
options from the start — which meant that when
Skype was sold to eBay in 2005 for $USD 2.5
billion, many gained seed capital to start on their
own companies. According to Sten Tamkivi, early
employee with Skype, 36 people from Skype have
since founded their own business since leaving the
company 26 , most notable TransferWise, currently
valued at over $USD 1 billion.
Oulu was selected in the list of Fortune’s ‘7 Best
New Global Cities for Startups’ in 2012. The
Oulu region creates the most innovations per
capita in Finland based on statistics from the
Foundation for Finnish Inventions. 27
In total, there are about 400 internationally
scalable startup-companies founded in the Oulu
region. The years 1995-2010 were extremely
successful for sowing the seeds of a startup
ecosystem in Oulu as Nokia invested heavily into
the region through R&D investments to create a
truly world-class engineering talent pool. 28
32