Taavet Hinrikus

@taavet · Co-Founder CEO, TransferWise

@andreasklinger Hey Andreas hope you are well - long time no see! - biggest lessons learned so far One of the things I’m proud of building is our culture, it’s definitely been a part of how we’ve been able to grow (and move fast) - More here: https://t.co/LnD99nb6lO Biggest lessons learned about this? Full autonomy is chaos. Leadership still has an important role to play in giving the team context. And you need to empower your teams. - How cross functional are your teams? Very. When teams aren’t independent they fail. Hence when launching new markets or products/features making sure teams have everything they need to succeed within the team is critical. - What good and what bad/funny moments can come out of this "decentral" structure? No one ever has a view of EVERYTHING going on, which is quite fun as CEO. I sometimes find out precisely what our buzz team want me to do when I turn up ..

4 share tweet・a year ago

Corley

@corleyh · COO @ Product Hunt

@taavet thanks for joining us today. I am an active user of TransferWise - it's how we pay people outside of the US. A few questions for you. 1. What was your initial inspiration for TransferWise? What made this your next big problem you wanted to solve? 2. How are you thinking about fraud, money laundering and the complexity that comes with transferring money? 3. How do you think about exchange rates, risk and float? Yep, you guessed it - finance / math / tech geek. I realize these are all big questions, so feel free to keep your answers brief and directional. I just wanted to get a sense for these things.

4 share tweet・a year ago

@taavet · Co-Founder CEO, TransferWise

@corleyh hey and thanks for the first questions! 1 - we really built TransferWise to solve our own needs at first. Me and my co-founder Kristo were both expats and needing to xfer money... And having some experience building Skype we realised that this money xfer thing can be done much better than the banks. Long story short here we are now. Here's the story in more verbose format so that I can answer more here :) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busine... 2 - all these are super important areas that we need to be great at - we have dedicated teams for working on most of these, the key is to simplify it for yourself and break the problem apart to bite sized chunks! 3 - the whole point of TW is that exchange rates dont matter. if we could predict the way the exchange rate moves we'd be doing that instead :p you're much better off finding a provider that charges least in fees versus trying to guess the exchange rate. the reason for building TW was that banks were charging 5-10% in their fees (hidden and non hidden).

Willie Tran

@willietran_ · Product, Testlio

Hey @taavet! Thanks for doing this. My question is regarding the Estonian startup scene. I've spent some time in Estonia (I work at an Estonian startup), and I was wondering what do you think it is that causes so many startups to appear there despite having such a small population? Did you feel that being from Estonia had any problems (or benefits) while building and growing Transferwise?

@taavet · Co-Founder CEO, TransferWise

@willietran_ I think Estonia has a lot to thank Skype for. When we built Skype in 2002/2003 startups were virtually unheard of in Estonia. But by building a global success story we did three things: * we proved that entrepreneurship is legit - people should not automatically gravitate towards telcos/banks/etc, there's a better way to have impact * there are 1000+ people now who either work or worked in Skype in Estonia - all these people know what it takes to build a global business and many have gone on to build their own businesses or join others * it also brought some money to the scene - lots of people were paid well and could save something to bootstrap first year of their startup and people made money with skype options as well (in addition to the engineering founders who later on went on to launch the venture capital company Ambient Sound Investments)

upvote share tweet・a year ago

@taavet · Co-Founder CEO, TransferWise

@taavet @willietran_ forgot to add there - the importance of Skype is about having a local success story. these usually move the ecosystem forward in a major way

💖

Ryan Hoover

@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt

BIG TransferWise fans at Product Hunt. Curious to hear your thoughts on bitcoin and cryptocurrency, Taavet. Any plans to support these new payment methods?

@taavet · Co-Founder CEO, TransferWise

@rrhoover If only there was demand from consumers for that... at times it really does seem to me that bitcoin has evolved into a system for greed, much like the banking system. Too little user benefits so far... and not sure we'll even see them (what has happened in the bitcoin world in the past 12 months?)

Harry Stebbings

@harrystebbings · Podcast Host @ The Twenty Minute VC

@taavet thanks so much for joining us today. I actually spoke to Ben Horowitz about your amazing journey when he was last in London! Big fan of yours, my question is; what has been the single biggest determinant of TransferWise's success? Also, how did the investment with a16z come about? P.S Would be such an honour to have you on @twentyminutevc and share your story!

@taavet · Co-Founder CEO, TransferWise

@harrystebbings Thanks, Harry! The main thing is that we’re focused on our mission. And we have an awesome team making it happen. Re a16z investment - we actually met the team at a16z at the end of our Series A round but they wanted us to move to California...that didn’t interest us because we were getting this thing going in the UK. Then when we went back two years later and we told them how we were getting on, they got involved.

2 share tweet・a year ago

Junius

@juniusfree

Hey @taavet My question is related to product development. How will you spend your time if you've got one hour to solve a user problem/need? Thanks!

@taavet · Co-Founder CEO, TransferWise

@juniusfree the best way to spend an hour probably is by talking to customer(s) to understand the problem really well - what you see from your gutfeel is often wrong so understanding that the thing is about is first and most important

Billy ZHOU

@billyflh · Billy. International traveler

@taavet @juniusfree your gut felling is often wrong. Indeed! Thanks.

Gloria Lombardi

@lombardi_gloria · Founder and Publisher of MARGINALIA

Hello @taavet and lovely to meet you. My question is about leadership and management. As a CEO, how do you approach team communications? Many thanks.

@taavet · Co-Founder CEO, TransferWise

@lombardi_gloria When a company’s scaling fast, it’s definitely one of the challenges. I spend a lot of time chatting to people in the office, on email, slack, team calls…

Gloria Lombardi

@lombardi_gloria · Founder and Publisher of MARGINALIA

@taavet @lombardi_gloria Thank you very much for your answer. I also appreciated the answers you gave others participants on the criticality of the internal culture. Wishing you and TranswerWise all the very best.

upvote share tweet・a year ago

Apoorv Khatreja

@ap00rv · iOS/Android Developer, Splitwise

@taavet As a relatively new user of TransferWise, I find it to be so much better than anything else that's out there! My question is that what are the biggest challenges that TransferWise is facing right now? What comes next at TransferWise? Are you simply working on expanding to more countries/currencies/payment methods, or is there anything in the pipeline to improve the user experience or product itself for existing users with popular exchanges (for eg USD to INR)?

@taavet · Co-Founder CEO, TransferWise

@ap00rv thanks for using TW. Do you have any feedback to share? Its really about continuing what we're doing - we have 5% market share in UK now, next up is doubling/tripling this. And then doing the same in other markets. The challenges are mostly about the team - we're 450+ now, the way we worked 2 years ago does not quite work any more. Also we're in 5 offices today and adding more. Making sure the team is empowered to move at lightning speed, but still has enough context.

Jaan Pärtna

@jaan_partna

@taavet @ap00rv Taavet, you mentioned the way TW worked 2 years ago does not quite work anymore as the team has grown significantly. Can you elaborate on how you would expect it to impact the TW culture and is it likely to change the current flat to structure to more standard hierarchical? Is there something specific in the work environment that you wound definitely not change to avoid becoming like most of the other corporations? Thanks again.

Emily Hodgins

@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt

@taavet what have you learnt about investing since you first started? Are there any lessons you've learned from experience that have had an effect on your investment strategy that you can share?