TRIIN HERTMANN: My trip to Riga - lost my jacket but I gained some inspiration

It’s been a special week. Founders from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania got together in Riga to share cool founding stories, talk about challenges and to party. Not the regular meet up where we usually compare charts and discuss who is doing better in terms of new startups or VC funding.

The Baltic Founders Mingle was started three years ago by Sten Tamkivi, Taavet Hinrikus, Rytis Vitkauskas, Tomas Okmanas and James Berdigans. Hosted in Vilnius and Tallinn in last two years, the most successful and promising founders from across the Baltics gathered once again - this time with a rooftop view over Riga in FYUL’s (previously Printful+Printify) beautiful office. The event was hosted by Berdigans who is CEO and founder of FYUL and supported by Aleph, Plural, Tesonet and DIG Ventures.

I loved every bit of the content that flowed from defence cooperation to founders’ resilience topics. We were greeted by Latvia's new Prime Minister Andris Kulbergs who had his little son with him – obviously as the kindergartens are closed in July. It really resonated with the crowd when Kulbergs said in his speech, “there should not be small and large countries, but fast and large countries.” We all have always been super good with our limited resources and we should be even better in learning and cooperating with each other.

On the panel, which had a founder from each of the Baltic States (Estonia was super-internationally represented by e-resident, Brazilian Gabriel Ferrez!), one question was aimed towards our governments. “What would you ask from the prime ministers of your countries if you had one wish?” The answer was basically the same from all three, “Help us with our country’s PR abroad!” We understand that A good reputation can open many doors and bring customers.

The afterparty at Berdigans’ rooftop apartment was epic, too. Even though my leather jacket was taken by someone and I had to come head back to the hotel in the rain without it. But you know – what is a good party without some clothes or shoes not getting mixed up! 

Where Latvia kicks Estonian ass in startup ecosystem building – peek into Riga Startup House

After a long evening in Baltic Founders Mingle event, I got an ad hoc invitation to visit Riga’s Startup House from Roberts Alhimionoks. And of course, as a real estate, architecture and office space fan, I took the chance.

I’ve seen quite a few startup hubs over the years. Some are beautifully designed, some are chaotic, some are basically offices with a nice coffee machine and a few meeting rooms. After a while they all start looking surprisingly similar.

Startup House in Riga was different, although I couldn’t immediately explain why. 

Roberts Alhimionoks, who is the CEO of Startin.LV, (the Latvian equivalent to Estonian Founders Society) and Kristians Jenčiuss, who leads Startup House took me on a tour before we sat down to chat. We walked through coworking areas, private offices, event spaces and meeting rooms, but what stood out wasn’t really the building itself. It was how intentionally everything had been put together. They have built a whole infrastructure for founders.

Today around 75 startup companies like Monetizr, Adsmom, Costpocket, BirdyChat and DeepSpace Energy work from Startup House. Some are one-person startups, others already employ dozens of people. The private offices are full. There is a waiting list and they’ve already expanded into a second building, former Printful office. Now they are looking at an even bigger home of up to 10 000 m2 that could eventually bring the whole growing community together under one roof.

"Our mission is to get everybody into one room. We don't want to own the ecosystem. We want to make it easy for everybody else to build it,” Jenčs told me. 

The project was founded by James Berdigans and TechHub Riga foundation. Now RigaInvestment and Tourism Agency offers a type of ‘rent grant’ to partly cover eligible startups’ rent in Startup House.

Startup House houses participants from all areas of the tech community under one roof. Several VCs are located there inclunding Bad.ideas fund, outlast fund, buildIT, Change Ventures, TrindVC and LatBan. There is also StartSchool (similar to Estonian Kood/Jõhvi), and a few other supporting organisations too.

If someone needs funding, introductions, advice or simply another founder to exchange ideas with, there’s a good chance that person is already somewhere in the building.

Jenčiuss told me they host around 300 events every year. Only a small part of those are organised by Startup House itself. Most are initiated and organised by the community. It feels that Startup House is happy to let others create as long as they can provide the space and bring people together.

After the tour I sat down with Jenčiuss and Alhimionoks. We spent much longer talking than originally planned, mostly discussing the tech scene challenges in Estonia and Latvia. It really feels like we have quite similar challenges to Latvian founders. Even though the Estonian startup-scene is more mature and better in country-PR (that was mentioned during these 2 days several times by many Latvians and Lithuanians I met), some things came up in discussions repeatedly:

• Early-stage funding, (lack of) activity of business angels.
• How to encourage more people - experienced specialists, high-level operators from large scale-up’s, young graduates and scientists to become founders.
• How to attract more international investors and build the country’s branding. 
• How to help startups scale without losing the advantages that made the local ecosystem successful in the first place.  
• How to make politicians understand and support the fastest growing sector and remove some regulatory barriers of innovation. 

Alhimionoks also shared how the Startup Association has recently shifted its focus back from organising events and training, and more towards advocacy and representing founders’ interests. Most of the work they do is almost invisible to founders until something changes: a regulation improves, a new funding program appears or a government starts paying more attention to startups. Those things rarely happen by themselves, someone spends years pushing them forward.

Fomo in Latvia

Of course we also chatted about the Fomo.Observer’s possibilities to expand on to Latvian startup scene. We’ll see how that could work out in the future!

I have always felt the importance of physical communities. Surely remote work is here to stay. Founders can build global companies without ever renting an office. Investors happily take meetings over Zoom. But human beings are social creatures and we thrive when we can work and play together. I left even more convinced that every startup ecosystem needs a place where people naturally keep bumping into each other. Founders need natural collisions, just like the one that brought me to this tour and fascinating conversation with Alhimionoks and Jenčiuss.

I left with an invitation to Startup Barbeque in August and I just might take on the 4-hour drive for that, the vibe was just so lovely. Startup Barbeque started with a couple of guys grilling meat outside the office. Last year there were around 1100 people. 

Latvians really are catching up and doing it their own cool way!