There’s a moment early in a founder’s life where the difference between moving forward and giving up often comes down to whether someone who’s done it before picks up the phone.
In Estonia, that phone call is at the heart of what is known as the relay mindset – a culture in which successful founders pass their experience, connections and capital down to the next wave of builders.
“I can say I’m a proud product of the relay mindset,” Tiffany Tuisk, co-founder of Gen Z Founders Estonia and partner at Wave Ventures, says while speaking on a panel titled ‘Relay Mindset: What London Can Learn From The Estonian Scene’ during SXSW earlier this week.
The 25-year-old Estonian founder was describing the people who shaped her journey, including those who have invested “not only their capital but also their time and access” into her own path from the start.
Now, she’s operating on the other side of the loop, running a €10 million fund alongside a team of other 25-year-olds, backed entirely by unicorn founders from the Nordics.
That culture of paying it forward has produced results that are hard to ignore. Estonia, with a population of just 1.3 million, has produced more unicorns per capita than any other country in Europe, including the likes of Skype, Wise and Bolt.
In 2024, its startup sector generated €1.8 billion in added value, which is equivalent to 4.3% of GDP, three times more than five years prior.
How Estonia built velocity
To understand how the relay mindset took hold, you have to go back to the 1990s. Sten Tamkivi, a partner at early-stage VC fund Plural and one of Skype’s earliest executives, traced the country’s entrepreneurial roots back to a post-Soviet reset.
Tamkivi, who also spoke on the ‘Relay Mindset: What London Can Learn From The Estonian Scene’ panel, said he graduated high school in 1996 just in time to begin his career in a country that was rebuilding itself from scratch.
At 18, he started his first company, which was Estonia’s first digital media agency, at a time when, as he puts it, “basically, everything was new.”
That reset coincided with the arrival of the consumer internet, and for Tamkivi, the combination of the two was everything.
“There was this sort of mix of cultural liberation of an entire society, resetting of their economy, people coming out of school, and now this enabling technology that meant anything you can build in this tiny place can actually conquer the world,” he says.
The relay in practice
For Estonia, Skype was the first proof of what could be possible. When eBay acquired it for $2.6 billion in 2005, it created a generation of entrepreneurs who knew what global scale actually looked like.
One of them was Taavet Hinrikus, Skype’s first employee, who went on to co-found money transfer platform Wise, Estonia’s third-ever unicorn.
Martin Sokk, who also joined Tamkivi and Tuisk on the Relay Mindset panel at SXSW London, spent five years at Wise as its first product person before leaving in 2020 to build retail investment platform Lightyear.
When he did, Hinrikus led the £1.5 million pre-seed round alongside Tamkivi, the same people who had helped shape the ecosystem now backing his next step.
“Our investors are Skype founders, Wise founders, Bolt founders,” Sokk says. “All the founders who have been successful in Europe in one way or another, they’re coming together and helping the next generation.”
What makes this kind of culture work for Estonia, Tamkivi argues, is how small the whole system is. “If you’re having trouble reaching anyone with any talent or any skill or any advice or whatever, you will really struggle finding somebody who’s one more than one hop away.”
The relay, in this environment, runs on trust – and trust runs on accountability. The people writing cheques are the same people who built the companies, know the founders and will be in the room at the next rounds, so the incentive to do right by people is built into the system.
For Tamkivi, that means being honest about risk. “If you’re transparent upfront about what kind of risks you’re taking with their money and support, that’s very different from not taking risks at all,” he explains, adding that the ecosystem doesn’t penalise founders for failing.
That accountability cuts both ways, Tuisk says. As someone who backs founders at the earliest stage – often before they have a track record, sometimes before they have a company – she has had to develop her own signals.
“It’s the relationship,” she says. “You know the founder before. You have multiple points of contact to understand what they’re like to work with.”
A global mindset from day one
The point the panellists kept returning to was that none of this is really about Estonia. It’s about the culture built within it – one where founders stay in the game, back the people coming up, and treat access as something to pass on rather than protect.
Sokk, for one, started Lightyear because he saw that investing in the UK and Europe was broken. But building the product that could fix that meant going where the talent, customers and access was – and in this case, that meant London.
“London has world-class everything,” he says. “If you want to build a financial business, Estonia doesn’t have anything on that.”
With offices in both London and Tallinn, he’s built his teams the same way, by putting local knowledge at the centre of every market he enters.
“I’m building a product for Spain, and I have a Spanish engineer in our London office who knows how to actually go there,” he says.
“London has so much top talent, and using that talent to go after global products and businesses is a superpower – and it’s often underrated.”
When asked what London could steal from the Estonian playbook tomorrow, Tamkivi said it’s all “about ambition.”
“It’s not about building a good company for London or a good company for the UK or Europe,” he says. “It’s like, how do we build more global champions in some fields that just happen to come from these places – and that’s flipping around the mindset.”
The relay mindset, at its core, is not a policy or a programme. It’s a choice that founders make to stay in the loop, pick up the phone, and treat the next generation’s success as a continuation of their own.
Estonia’s lesson for London is that ecosystems don’t scale through infrastructure alone. They scale when the people at the top decide the game isn’t over when they win.
TFN was on the ground at SXSW London throughout the week as part of a media partnership, covering the conversations shaping Europe’s tech ecosystem.
