The conversation brought together Taavet Hinrikus, Partner at Plural and co-founder of Wise, and Olavi Lepp, CEO of Swedbank. The session moved fluidly between past experience and future-facing questions.

Curiosity before certainty

Looking back, Taavet described his entrepreneurial path not as a master plan, but as a series of curiosity-driven decisions. Learning to code early, joining Skype as its first employee, and later co-founding Wise all followed the same pattern: encountering a problem that felt large and broken — and deciding to try anyway.

A recurring theme was naivety. Not knowing how entrenched industries worked allowed founders to question assumptions others took for granted.
Everyone who knows the industry will tell you why it can’t be done.

Not knowing those reasons can be an advantage.
– Taavet Hinrikus

In payments, deep domain expertise often came with strong reasons why things could not change. Approaching the problem from the outside made it easier to imagine a radically different solution — even if the path ahead later proved painful.

What investors really look for

From his perspective as an investor, Taavet outlined three signals that consistently matter more than polish or pitch decks.

First, the size of the problem. Many startups tackle small, neat problems. Truly impactful companies go after large, global markets where change actually matters.
Second, the magnitude of improvement. Being 10 percent better is not enough. It needs to be ten times better.

Incremental gains rarely justify switching behaviour. Without a clear step-change in value, customers and markets simply do not move.

Third, the founder. Not in terms of charisma, but in terms of inner drive. The most compelling founders tend to be stubborn in a very specific way: they keep going when others would stop.

Building a company is mostly uphill, often lonely, and usually uncomfortable.

You need motivation that comes from inside.
– Taavet Hinrikus

Speed as a survival mechanism

One of the clearest insights of the session concerned speed — not as a vanity metric, but as a mathematical reality.

Venture-backed startups typically operate with 18 to 24 months of runway. If a team takes six months to build a prototype and another six to launch, it may only get one real iteration before running out of time. Teams that can iterate monthly, by contrast, get dozens of chances to learn and adjust.

Key ideas around speed included:

• iteration speed matters more than initial correctness
• overfunding can reduce urgency and slow learning
• manual solutions are acceptable early if they enable learning
• structure should follow traction, not precede it

When chaos turns into structure

The discussion also addressed a common tension: when does speed need to give way to structure?

Using Wise as an example, Taavet described how many early processes were entirely manual — not because they were scalable, but because they allowed the company to grow fast while understanding the system deeply. Only when human limits were reached did automation and formal structures become necessary.

If there is real opportunity to grow, optimising too early can be more dangerous than inefficiency.
– Taavet Hinrikus

There is no universal moment when chaos must end. The shift depends on whether growth opportunity exists — and whether the organisation is starting to hit real constraints rather than hypothetical ones.

Entrepreneurship in uncertain times

The conversation then turned outward, to geopolitics and Europe’s future. Taavet framed the current moment as both unsettling and full of opportunity. Long-standing assumptions about security, infrastructure, and global dependency no longer hold.

In this environment, entrepreneurship becomes more than an economic activity — it becomes a form of responsibility. Areas highlighted as critical included defence and security technologies, energy independence, space capabilities, and financial infrastructure. Taavet pointed to local examples with global potential, like the development of Kasvuhoone in Tallinn that will create an ecosystem that would help companies to grow and that will certainly make an impact on the startup sector in Estonia and beyond. "In times of global uncertainty, not investing in Estonia right now is like giving up," he added.

From the perspective of a large financial institution, Olavi Lepp added that predictable cash flow and real contracts are what allow banks to support growth sustainably.
For us, it becomes exciting when cash flow is visible and contracts are real.

That is when growth can be supported responsibly.

AI as both opportunity and risk

Artificial intelligence featured prominently in the closing part of the discussion. While AI offers enormous productivity gains and new business models, it also carries risks — particularly around skill degradation.

Taavet compared AI to navigation tools: useful when combined with understanding, dangerous when used blindly. Outsourcing thinking entirely risks weakening the very skills founders rely on.

Impactful companies are not built by following formulas. They emerge when curiosity meets urgency, when founders iterate faster than their doubts, and when teams stay adaptable long enough for timing to align.