What more can we do here to improve our brand even further? The next step should be to take a deeper look inside. Estonia reminds me somewhat of a peacock. If you take a close look at it, you can see that it is a really small bird. Its body is often little more than the size of a man’s fist, but when it spreads its wings it gives the impression of being a big, powerful bird.
The cool thing about the book is that it was published by Wiley, which is the number one business books publisher in the US. We noticed that The Internet had transformed a lot of different industries. For instance we don’t need walk-in travel agents any more, we can order taxis with an app etc.
Similarly, Estonia appears to be a major dynamic IT-focussed country boasting lots of startups, but in actual fact we have had just a few real success stories to our name so far. So we must do everything we can to ensure we get more GrabCADs and TransferWises in future.
This effect was spreading to the production industry as well. This is also the reason we created GrabCAD. We saw that there were a few hundred companies that were approaching production in a new way.
Do you plan to cast your eye around as a potential investor yourself now? I do indeed. I have just invested in a Boston-based startup Dunwello. Dunwello is a community for professionals inside existing organizations. They occupy the gap between Linkedin recommendations and Yelp. The community is definitely ahead of the curve, but I believe in the vision and the team. I plan to invest more in the future as well. Investing is a great way to give back what you’ve learned and help other starting businesses into the bargain. This also helps you to get to know new industries. I have experience in production, design and engineering, but it’s really cool to be learning about other industries now.
So is investing a business, a method of education or, alternatively, a charity? I hope it’s not entirely a charity! I do plan to get a return from my investments! But I don’t do it just for the money, but more to educate myself and help young entrepreneurs as well.
You’ve also published a book. How was that even possible with all your work in developing GrabCAD? Yes, the name of the book is “The Art of Product Design - Changing How Things Get Made”.
As it turned out, they were all clients of GrabCAD! So with the book we wanted to inspire the other 99.99% of companies also to do things in a new, more creative and more efficient way. Writing a book isn’t exactly the easiest thing I’ve done in my life. And writing a book at the same time as running a fast-growing company is really difficult. Luckily we had a great research team and we expressed our vision and story through our clients. In fact the second part of the book is about our vision on how to move on in the future.
And how has the book been doing? Very well, thanks it has fulfilled all of its goals in fact. I still receive emails from people saying telling me the book was exactly the thing they needed to inject new breath into their work. It has also gained a lot of attention for GrabCAD. We’ve been invited to attend many conferences, whereas we couldn’t have got an entrée to them without having published the book.
Finally, what do you plan to do after GrabCAD? I probably won’t work out my entire career down to retirement at Stratasys. When it’s time to move on, I will be sure to let you know!
SPRING 2015
I LIFE IN ESTONIA #37
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