Words matter. These are the best Taavet Hinrikus Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The world is getting smaller thanks to technology.
If we think about how long Google spent searching – I think they came around in ’98? And, OK, Gmail came in 2004, but it was literally built by one engineer as a 20%-time project. It was probably 10 years before Google started diversifying.
Securing and attracting the best talent is an obsession in the tech industry for good reason. It’s your main asset; it’s your edge.
Bitcoin and the whole discussion around it shows how big a need there is for innovation about what money is and how it is stored.
Building a business is a marathon, not a sprint. I don’t believe it when people tell me they’ve been working 80-hour weeks for five years in a row. I just don’t think that’s possible.
When a new hire is afraid to roll up their sleeves and get things done, it’s a clear sign it’s not going to work out.
The world is becoming more global. More than ever, people are proactively deciding where to live, where to study, where to work. Sometimes it’s out of necessity, sometimes it’s out of choice.
Changing behaviour is a very slow process.
I think that if Britain does decide to leave the E.U., that would be a disaster for the technology sector here and probably also for the broader economy.
You start a business being hungry, foolish, and a little bit naive. But more often than not, you end up being disrupted yourself. It happened to Skype.
Without immigration, nations would stagnate. It is key for innovation and for economic growth.
Traditional consumer finance has been unfair for decades. Banks have had a monopoly on financial services and have been able to overcharge and underserve consumers.
Banks are really bad when it comes to building consumer-centred products.
Climate change, migration… they transcend national borders and require an international response.
Bitcoin, I think we can say, is dead.
Doing something that empowers people makes you realise how boring it would be to work for a place where the goal is just to make more money. It’s much easier to get out of bed and look forward to 12 hours of work if you’re making the world a better place.
I think that’s the beauty of being a private company: you get to choose when you disclose something. You can play it in a strategic way or in a tactical way.
There are lots of people building the next TransferWise, not in a sense of competing with us but in a sense of building large, successful companies that are doing something important. I just enjoy helping these founders navigate the journey.
Competition and variety in financial services are always good things.
The technology is not an end in itself: it is a tool. It can make it easier for us to communicate or manage our finances. It can help us take care of our health or help policemen in their work. It can create jobs and boost growth. It can enhance transparency and accessibility to services.
There’s one thing a CEO should always keep at the front of their mind, and that’s customer needs.
Large incumbents become big and sometimes become lazy and set themselves up for failure in the future.
In 2011, when we launched TransferWise, it was our frustration with banks not giving us what we wanted or needed as customers. The motivation was a strong desire to solve a problem and not just fix something that was broken but create a better alternative and a new system for doing things.
The growth of FinTech has been driven by adoption across age groups, but the demand from the millennial generation to innovate and think about financial services differently has been a catalyst for change.
Talent is the lifeblood of a fast-growing company.
A seed depends on a whole host of factors to grow – from the fertility of the soil to the right mix of rain and sun to not being eaten by a passing bird. The same goes for an idea. For an idea to really take hold, other factors come into play, from timing to the emerging technology that makes it possible.
The attitude to failure is one of the characteristics that’s often called out as the difference between the U.S. and Europe. And we do need to be less risk-averse, more embracing of failure. Having failed makes you look bad in Europe. But in the U.S., it makes you look experienced.
Financial services have always been about trust. Perhaps the biggest barrier to entry has been getting new customers to trust an unknown brand or service, and that’s particularly true with digital disruptors who lack a physical presence on the local high street.
Most of my time at Skype was spent doing new things.
As consumers in general, and with Millennials in particular, we’re getting used to everything being cheaper, faster, better – and banks aren’t keeping up.
There’s always been a lot of interest in the tech community about how to foster innovation and creativity – both within a company but also in the ecosystem of a tech cluster. In both cases, creating opportunities for people who don’t encounter each other normally to meet and talk is key.
Being a ‘global citizen’ is not something reserved for the global elite anymore. Thanks to the democratising power of technology, it’s not a trend determined by privilege or even age but by attitude.
People bought bitcoin because they thought it would be worth more tomorrow. And a lot of people got lucky. But we’re not seeing real people use bitcoin. And we don’t know what problem it solves. Now, blockchain, I think, is a genius advancement in technology.
There’s the risk of a serious case of FOMO at a place like Davos.
Companies that are natively technology-focused I would trust more than a bank.
People need the financial sector to be safe; people also need the financial sector to go through a massive phase of innovation. That means delivering on the positive rhetoric, like around settlement accounts, not allowing Open Banking to be diluted, and leading the way on AML.
Hiring new people, opening up in new markets, all of that takes money.
We’re living in a world where international governance is failing to overcome borders, but technology is succeeding in removing them.
While in two very different sectors, both Skype and TransferWise were born out of frustration.
No amount of PR works if you’ve got a bad product.
International money transfer is a massive consumer rip-off. Banks and companies like Western Union have gotten away with it for too long.
At TransferWise, we started out as – and continue as – idealists. We start with what we can do to make things better and how we can solve problems, focusing on what people need. It turns out you can focus on building the best service and be successful as business.
‘Big’ problems are overwhelming, but when we distil them down to their simplest forms, then the solutions become simple, too.
With a smartphone, we have a supercomputer in our pocket and are always connected. The way we bank is changing as part of this macro trend.
We believe that the future of money is digital.
