An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
A prophet is never respected in his hometown. If you do something really influential, you will get loads of criticism, especially from narrow minded people. Accept useful feedback and ignore the rest.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Taavi Kotka, CEO and Co-Founder of Koos.
Taavi is a serial entrepreneur and was named one of the Brightest Business Minds in Northern Europe in 2016. He was the first CIO for the Government of Estonia, was an angel investor in Wise and was a special advisor to the European Commission VP Andrus Ansip on the European Digital Single Market. He started Koos, which received $4,5m in funding in April this year, to disrupt the equity model.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I started my career as a programmer, rising up to be the Managing Director of the largest software development company in the Baltics, WebMedia — now known as Nortal. As an engineer, I then moved on and drove forward a number of initiatives, which included working with the Estonian government as their first CIO, to oversee the country’s development as the most advanced digital nation. While there, I co-founded the country’s national e-residency programme, which was the first of its kind globally and also worked on things like data embassies, country-as-a-service (CAAS), the no-legacy policy, VAT fraud detection and so forth.
Since then, I’ve moved back into the private sector, helping startups develop and consulting large enterprises and governments on digital transformation.
I also worked as a special advisor to the European Commission’s Vice President Andrus Ansip on the European Single Digital Market.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
We think that communities are not properly used in modern capitalism. Every company has a community of fans, helpers, friends, customers etc, but only few are able to properly use their energy and effort. The industry standard at the moment is to ask free-lunches — for example emails asking for feedback, but instead of bothering your customer-base, unleash the energy by offering micro equity-stakes in your company.
Giving equity-stakes has been difficult and that is why it has not been used widely. We at Koos.io have solved that problem.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When developing Estonia’s eResidency programme, we made an interesting mistake in that we developed it for people outside of the EU so they could easily run their company and do business wherever they lived. It turned out that 70% of Estonian eResidents are from the EU and this strategy didn’t make any sense. Looking back, it makes sense now — entrepreneurs in Germany and other EU countries deal with a lot of bureaucracy. I guess a learning from that is, in the beginning, you never know where the sweet spot is for your business.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors?
In the early years when I was starting out my career as a programmer, I was lucky to be mentored by some of the best programmers in Estonia. The stuff we built together was amazing, even though I was likely more of a distraction than an asset!
Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
In software engineering, it is very important to find a balance between the business needs and the product’s capabilities. You need to understand that companies grow and their business changes, but there is no point in building a rocket at the beginning! You need to design and plan your outcome carefully and you need to be willing to throw it away sometimes and completely rewrite it, which can be frustrating. Legacy can kill innovation.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Disrupting an industry is positive when the end user benefits from the new model. The benefits can vary from convenience, personalisation, cost or efficiency, for example. A fairly simple example would be online banking — for years, customers used bricks and mortar bank branches, which were more effort on the customer’s part and today, a customer can simply access any banking services on their mobile phone, wherever they are in the world.
On the other hand, a negative disruption is one that doesn’t pose much additional benefit to the end user. Most of the time, I believe this stems from a disconnect between the idea and the real world. It may be that the idea is great but the product is more difficult to use or integrate with other products, or that it’s expensive and not accessible to most of the end-users, for example. It’s why testing a product with its key users and getting ongoing feedback is key.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
- It is not important what you dream, it is important what you actually do or execute!
- There is no point being a know it all about lots of different things — become a specialist in what you know.
- If you see something that is wrong or missing and you can do something, go for it.
- A prophet is never respected in his hometown. If you do something really influential, you will get loads of criticism, especially from narrow minded people. Accept useful feedback and ignore the rest.
- Never expect any glory.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
For now, I’m focusing on Koos, specifically, working with early adopters to show all the different types of use cases for our platform. Social capitalism is the future. Watch this space.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
It wasn’t a book, but at the age of 19 I had Hodgkin’s disease, a form of cancer. I spent a year in the hospital and had loads of time to think. It was 1999–2000 and what genuinely bothered me the most was the waterfall development model in software engineering and I kept thinking about how bad it was. Endless time was spent writing documents before coding. I also wasn’t sure how much time left I would have in this world, so I decided to start looking for an opportunity to do software in a new way, focusing on prototyping and early releasing. Today, this kind of approach is totally normal, but 22 years ago it was not used. My high-school desk-mate started a new company which gave me an opportunity to try this out and after 4 years, we were the biggest software engineering company in Estonia.
Can you please give us your favourite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Focus on execution, not ideas!
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
My wife and I started a girls-only technology school in 2018. It is fully funded by our family, with locations all over Estonia and we have 2 200 girls studying, with a long wait list. We wanted to prove to the politicians and government officers that girls want to study technology and “lack of teachers or funds” cannot be an excuse. So I guess, back to my previous point — ideas are nothing, execution is everything!
How can our readers follow you online?
Visit https://prior.koos.io/platform or follow us on LinkedIn
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us.
Meet The Disruptors: Taavi Kotka of Koos On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
