Our Goals

Estonian Founders Society was founded in 2009 to boost local startup community, strengthen direct relationships between founders, meet face to face in a social setting, share experiences and empower new young founders.

We expect our club members to get to know each other and cooperate closely. We use Slack, Facebook group and Twitter via #EstonianFounders hashtag.

How everything started

Estonian Founders Society (Originally: Estonian Startup Leaders Club) was formed in January 2009 by a group of entrepreneurs, leaders of Ambient Sound Investment portfolio companies. They participated in a 4-module startup leaders’ training program in autumn 2008. After the training program finished, the participants wanted to continue sharing their challenges, experiences and getting advice from people working on similar early stage startups.

Back then the main goal was to share experiences — intimate details of failures and success — and therefore the form of a pretty intimate club seemed most suitable. Most startups and young CEO-s face similar daily issues — hiring good people, product development, funding, sales, setting up compensation models and stock option programs, establishing UK/US entities, IP & patents etc.

Today half of our club members are already experienced startup founders. We still share information and experience on daily basis. Close relations also lead to founding new startups together or joining each other’s startups — and the majority of awesome startups have been founded by people who know each other and have done something together well before starting the company.

• One way we accomplish this is by encouraging regular meetings via our partnership with Donut in our slack community of Estonia's top 200 founders.
• Another way is to meet personally, so we introduced "Feed Fellow Founders" (FFF) monthly meetups, where one founder hosts a dinner for 4-6 other founders in casual environment.

Looking back now, our society has really served it's purpose on boosting Estonian startup ecosystem :)

2020 and beyond

The club was renamed to Estonian Founders Society in early 2020. This reflects the next phase of startup ecosystem and growing ambitions for the new decade. Our role has evolved from purely networking organization to wider representation of startups in Estonia and beyond.

Currently startups employ 1% of working population and create 3% of Estonian GDP. We explain the value and future economic opportunities created by startup ecosystem, which is not yet understood by many Estonians.

We work together with Startup Estonia, EstVCA, EstBAN, Association of IT & Telecoms, law firms, Estonian Prime Minister and different ministries to continuously boost Estonian legislation for startups:

• keep more startup headquarters in Estonia
• create simple and transparent stock option programs
• enable global talent relocation to Estonia
• employment regulation related to modern ways of working (remote work, gig economy etc)
• solve legal issues related to KYC and shareholder transactions

We are grateful for Startup Estonia for cooperation during 2019-2021.