Sten Tamkivi's Seikatsu Blog Archive

On how two military veterans are building dual-use software to revolutionise operations in high-stakes environments As an Estonian, coming from a country on NATO’s Eastern flank, you naturally think a lot about defence and national resilience.

It hasn’t happened often that Plural backs a direct-to-consumer startup.

Six years ago, sci-fi author Daniel Suarez published Delta V, a novel about a group of commercial pioneers going to space to mine asteroids to transform humanity from an Earth-bound species to a space-faring one.

“There are only two industries.

I am wrapping up my paternity leave with the end of March.

Intervjuu Lennart Ruudale, ilmus ajalehes Postimees 6. augustil 2020.

Hüvastijätusõnad Toivo Annuse ärasaatmisel Akadeemia tee 21 ehk Küberi maja ehk Skype esimese kontori maja saalis.

This Monday will be different.

When my self-hosted Wordpress instance sent me an alarm the other day about everything being broken again due to some PHP upgrade two generations ahead of what I knew existed, I didn’t feel like having the time and energy to get into fixing it.

Life quality score – Tallinn Life quality score - Tallinn So there you go.

To learn more about what Sten Tamkivi is up to these days, see tamkivi.com.

Mõnikord mõtleme me Gustavi ja Ettaga välja unejutte.

Jalutasime sõber Magnusega veebruaripäikeselist California avenüüd pidi bento-lõunalt kontori poole tagasi ja korraks läks jutt valimiste peale.

Had some great interview questions from Arkadii Zaitsev, who is writing a piece about Estonian e-residency for a Russian-languaged publication called Meduza (worth checking their design!)

As it isn’t a good tone to have a blog sit stale for a year, I figured this place deserves at least a brief set of links as an update on what’s been happening.

As a follow-up to my post on what an EIR does, I promised to share a little more detail on how I practically go about filtering ideas.

The fabulous Slush crew has posted a 13 minute video of my speech on how does European tech scene look from Silicon Valley these days: If you rather prefer long form reading (and to contribute to discussion), this short version later expanded into a series

This has been a persistent question since I started my Entrepreneur in Residence gig at Andreessen Horowitz, and one that I have had to both figure out for myself and explain over and over again.

This is the final post of 3 contemplating how Silicon Valley and European tech scenes could get closer to each other.

This post is 2nd of 3 discussing ways Silicon Valley and European tech scene could get closer to each other.

This post is 1st of 3 in the series aimed at discussing ways Silicon Valley and European tech scenes could contribute to and gain more from each other.

Thinking about the linkages between US and European tech investment and startup scenes ahead of the Slush conference in 10 days, I found an interesting paper: Deal or No Deal: The Growth of International Venture Capital Investment (PDF here) by Pandya and…

Ajujahi konkursi korraldajad küsisid, kas paari aasta taguse zhüriiliikmena oskaksin toona nähtu põhjal üldistada mõne soovituse tänastele äriideede nuputajatele.

I have recently been intrigued about the evolving science of social network analysis (SNA) and the potential novel yet practical applications of it in growing businesses.

On August 29th Skype is celebrating its birthday.

August 1st marked the end of my 8+ year journey with Skype, after returning from an academic break at Stanford.

As it happened, pressed publish on today’s post on Medium instead.

The below text was not born as a blog post for broader audiences originally, but as something I wrote for the class yearbook a month ago.

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 10 (40), Spring quarter Our last two days of five classes were almost all about presentations with a few wise final words from each professor.

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 9 (39), Spring quarter The Memorial Day week was the only one compressed to four long days this quarter, with the main theme on finalizing group projects.

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 8 (38), Spring quarter This week kicked off with Maker Faire, the ultimate geek fest of robots, drones, noisy machines, 3D printers, lasers and eco-conscious handicraft.

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 7 (37), Spring quarter This week was completely overrun with two homework projects that refused to surrender even when groups of Sloans & MBAs spent hours sitting in the room and cranking through logistic regressions a…

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 6 (36), Spring quarter Somehow the notes from this week are lighter – and not for the lack of activities, but rather a different kind.

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 5 (35), Spring quarter Could be that my future co-alumni will look back at this week from the future as historic: the school came out to the public with news that there will be no more Sloan Program.

I recently shared some thoughts on how surprisingly hard it has been to adjust to how mundane and bureaucratic everyday activities still can be in otherwise tech-advanced Silicon Valley, compared to back home in Estonia.

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 4 (34), Spring quarter No bandwidth to say much more that you will find not one or two, but three beautiful graphs I drew this week with my two little hands below the fold.

Speak of coincidences – or a pileup of pressure: over the weekend one topic came up (as it does in a recurring way) with a group of classmates, yesterday there was this article (The Anxiety of the Unanswered E-Mail) making social media rounds and to top it

Already weeks into the final stretch I was comfortably settling on the fact that I’ve rushed past the opportunity of writing a reflective summary of Winter quarter (as I did with Summer and Autumn before).

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 3 (33), Spring quarter Head down in two inches of readings for this week and a fresh flow of first written project deadlines, like a two-degrees-deep analysis of your friends and advisors social graph or a set of regre…

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 2 (32), Spring quarter The highlight of the week was really non-academic: we got to host the Class of 2014 for the orientation we received in April a year ago.

After a quick 2-day trial hop to visit a few firms like Boeing and Starbucks in Seattle in November, the Sloan Class of 2013 spent a full week of our spring break on East Coast.

Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot speaking… via a robot Spent half a day today at legendary research hub SRI International, for Xconomy-organized robotics forum (see full agenda here), listening to an impressive lineup of industry pioneers of mass-market appeali…

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 1 (31), Spring quarter For some weird reason the GBS classes after the Spring break kicked off on… a Thursday.

Here I am, staring into the bittersweet 10-week end sprint, the final Spring quarter of my Stanford year.

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 10 (30), Winter quarter Originally planning out March I was quite sure that next week will be a complex one, after all, it is still labelled in calendar as the “exam week”.

Last week, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins was speaking in the View From The Top speaker series at Stanford GSB.

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Weeks 8-9 (28-29), Winter quarter So there: it takes about 28 weeks in Stanford to finally have someone mention Europe in any other context than a semi-joke about Greek macro environment in the short term.

With the end-of-quarter groupwork frenzy I am behind on posting the academic lecture notes – hope to get to that this weekend.

Stanford GSB Sloan Study Notes, Week 7 (27), Winter quarter After the public holiday last Monday (which I realized could not have been more eclectic between sick kid babysitting, running, building a unit economics model for a startup business plan assignm…

I was honored to speak last night at the Estonian Independence Day reception thrown by the local Estonian society, aka Eesti By The Bay.