9 ms·

How Estonia became a leader in technology

96 points by jayant123 11y ago

Sami_Lehtinen 11y ago
It's just like the lean startup process. In Finland and especially in Sweden, things are talked being talked about for years or decades. We need to plan, think, prepare, study, blah blah, whatever. You know what? Meanwhile Estonians did it, actually several years ago. Skipping (or doing really leanly) most of these major time and resource wasters.
- ido 11y ago
  I've never lived/worked in either but it seems both Finland and Sweden have really successful and huge tech industries though?
  - inglor 11y ago
    Finland was really hurt when Nokia fell - startups at scale and as a national priority are relatively new there. They're spending a lot of money and they have an excellent education system compared to a lot of other places but this sort of mental shift takes time. Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good, working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at founding a startup is considered a shame. Contrary to that - in Israel failure at founding a startup is considered great because you tried and forfeited a comfy life for a while which people will respect you for. Finland is spending a lot of money to change that perception - there are whole institutions that are working on it and they're doing a really good job but it takes time.
    - tsiki 11y ago
      >Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good, working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at founding a startup is considered a shame. Maybe 10-15 years ago. Now with the rise of successful startups and the national interest towards them, working at a startup is considered good and trendy and rather, most of the CS students avoid large companies. Even my mom was proud and supportive when I cofounded a startup, and she's always been the one to advocate for a good and stable job.
  - drawkbox 11y ago
    I haven't been to either but they have an impact for sure in gaming. Finland is home to Supercell and Rovio, arguably the two biggest juggernauts in mobile gaming. This has spawned many studios there. Sweden is also big in gaming as the home of Notch and his little multibillion dollar game company called Mojang with Minecraft. And of course PewDiePie with the youtube game review new era, it also has spawned all sort of gaming/tech interest there. They seem to have a play for entertainment as well with Kung Fury. Both countries are a force in creating content with technology, which is probably the winning strategy and both places have been ignited by it.
    - OlleTO 11y ago
      If we're looking at the swedish game industry you also want to add Paradox Interactive and Dice to that list. Our general technology industry is "restructuring", with pretty big layoffs at the large companies. The same week this spring Sony and Ericsson gave advance notice of upcoming layoffs to 1000 and 2000 people respectively. While not a catastrophe in itself, and a several companies stepped in to offer jobs, it's worrying as a general indication of the state of our technological industry.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  Which goes against the wisdom of that Norwegian story about the oil resource management from a few days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673157. > The politicians and senior bureaucrats had not caught oil fever. A serious mining accident had recently brought down a government, and most did not want to touch oil matters with a bargepole. “Everything I said was met with, ‘Oh, you think so? Mmm. Maybe. Let’s wait and see’,” al-Kasim recalls. “This characteristic saved Norway from the curse of oil: the fact that they are completely incapable of getting carried away by the oil dream. They were very sceptical – plain horse sense basically. They didn’t want to move until it was absolutely proven that it was the right time to act.”
shumo 11y ago
Estonia is clean from russians not like Latvia, that's why they are centuries far from other Baltic countries.
- Galanwe 11y ago
  This is stupid, and wrong. I worked several years in Estonia (at Skype) and I would say that more than 50% of programmers are from foreign countries. Mainly russia, but also Ukraine, latvia, Czech republic... In Tallin, half the population is Russian, or native russian speaker.
  - kuratkull 11y ago
    I'm an Estonian and would like to comment this with the results from the census: Tallinn has 55% Estonians, 36% Russians(who mostly live in specific sleeping/cheap/"slum" districts), and others.
    - mb_72 11y ago
      I'm glad you raised this to counter the mis-information posted by the parent. I also worked for several years in Tallinn (I'm half-Estonian, half-Australian), and the information provided by the parent ss simply not true. This reinforces my belief many ex-pats live in a bit of a bubble, especially if they don't learn the local language or try and integrate more. Back OT - I can keep my Estonian business ticking over from Australia entirely via the internet. I have a local (Estonian) accountant, but using my Estonian ID card I can digitally sign documents that need 'sending' or I can open such documents sent to me from government departments. Such possibilities really much life much easier as regards documentation, tax returns etc.
  - kuratkull 11y ago
    Also the percentage of foreign programmers is high in international companies. Local or small IT companies mostly hire Estonians - for no specific reason imho, maybe just to keep the atmosphere native.
inglor 11y ago
Estonians are everywhere - that's why they're successful. Everywhere I was in an accelerator, reporters and people from Estonia came in order to learn how things are done - this is a long and deliberate process. Once an Estonian journalist even wrote about our company - was fun! http://majandus24.postimees.ee/2080692/iisraeli-poisid-leiutasid-finantsnou-andva-telefoniaplikatsiooni http://majandus24.postimees.ee/2080692/iisraeli-poisid-leiut... Other countries in the area (namely Finland) also do this and fly around - we've had teams from Italy come visit us in Tel Aviv and other countries. I can only imagine how it feels in the valley and how much visits you get.
- atmosx 11y ago
  LOL, you got this all wrong. The government is pushing technology quite hard on Estonians (for a variety of justified reasons) THAT's why you see many Estonian teams floating around.
ivanhoe 11y ago
This link from the article comments is also worth reading to get a full picture, which seems to be not all that great: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/meet-doteebubble-the-mysterious-estonian-start-up-critic-who-throws-cold-water-on-government-backed-ventures/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/meet-doteebubble-the-myster...
- dear 11y ago
  "In many cases, the companies that received government money were being run by people with no experience in the field. We wrote about an incubator for gaming startups, where none of the people running the incubator had ever worked in the gaming industry! Then there was the incubator that received nearly 700,000 euros from the government to set up in a small town of 20,000 people to promote creative arts startups, which as far as we can tell was just a few women making dresses and jewelry."
hornbill 11y ago
Estonia’s success is not so much about ditching legacy technology as it is about shedding “legacy thinking” This is the key. I think many people does not understand this or does not approve of this. By going digital (like e-governance), use of paper is avoided but the procedure remains same. Does it save time? Sure, it does. But the process remains tedious as ever.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  > By going digital (like e-governance), use of paper is avoided but the procedure remains same. Does it save time? Sure, it does. But the process remains tedious as ever. what's your point ? Ditching the process of having a government ?
  - Kaali 11y ago
    It seems that usually when moving from paper to digital forms, the original form is just reimplemented to be filled out on a computer. Where rethinking the actual process might actually reduce the actual interaction that is required from a person, to an automated system which can induce information that would otherwise be filled manually. In Finland when filling your tax forms online, the form comes prefilled with numbers that are calculated from your tax info of the previous year. If there are no changes in your salary or benefits, you can just agree to the the form and it is done, without typing out anything.
    - s_kilk 11y ago
      I've seen this first-hand. All they want is the same paper workflow they had before, but with less paper, even if the old workflow is bloated and/or nonsensical. Edit: A colleague phrased this brilliantly before: "We have these machines that can do literally anything we want them to, and instead we're using them as a poor imitation of paper"
    - kybernetyk 11y ago
      >It seems that usually when moving from paper to digital forms, the original form is just reimplemented to be filled out on a computer. In Germany as a business owner I'm required to file taxes electronically. But then in the last step I still have to print out some of forms and send them via snail mail to the German tax office. And don't get me started about registering a new company. It takes weeks and you need to visit a notary. (Coincidentally last week I created a UK Ltd to hold some intellectual property. It took 20 minutes and I paid the fee via PayPal. And the next day everything was ready to go.) There are really different school of thoughts when it comes to administration. And you can't just slap an electronic form ontop of an over-regulated dinosaur and automagically become a modern & agile institution.
EugeneOZ 11y ago
Didn't read because of huge popup window.
igravious 11y ago
Note to editors: this is from 2013!
trymas 11y ago
One little critique I have, is about Estonia's e-voting. That's a total black box technology. Basically what they did is said "ok, let's vote using internet, and we'll believe results are true". They do not know is someone hacked them, etc. Voting data from the servers was transferred using personal computer and flash drive of some random sysadmin. It's horrible. In my opinion, they do e-voting for the sake of doing it and being 'first'. Though big thumbs up for e-citizenship. IMHO, Baltic states are in the forefront of IT technologies. 3G works almost anywhere, 4G in cities. Internet is cheap and super fast (if you do not have 100Mbps connection - you have slow internet connection). You do your taxes, get your doctor appointments using internet and so on, for a very long time (since 2010 at least). All Baltic states have prominent startups, though Estonians where first to sell startup for big bucks (Skype).
- Kymps 11y ago
  I agree, the e-voting technology should be a lot more secure, but as long as they keep improving it, I don't see it as too big of a problem, but if they used the same technology in the states for example, I would be pretty worried. The influence Estonia has in the world is negligible compared the US, so if something was to go wrong, sure, it would be pretty bad, but compared to the same happening in a more influencial country, it would be pretty minor.
- tn13 11y ago
  In many countries and places this strategy of "ok, let's vote using internet, and we'll believe results are true" would work well. USA, India are not one of those places. All the mainstream media reports on such topics and especially technology should be taken with a boatload of salt.
- devdoomari 11y ago
  what about verifiable mix-net voting? wouldn't mix-net voting prevent from such things in the first place? if not, why/how? (*I'm learning about these stuff, and I want to know your opinions on them...)
  - pgeorgi 11y ago
jkot 11y ago
Estonia is basically one big city, no country side. It is easy to score high in broadband speed etc, if no rural areas are decreasing average speed.
- dullgiulio 11y ago
  Wrong. https://www.google.ee/maps/@58.6,25,7z https://www.google.ee/maps/@58.6,25,7z
- belZaah 11y ago
  Yup, one big city: http://blog.moment.ee/2015/06/pruunkaru-brown-bear-ursus-arctos-9.html http://blog.moment.ee/2015/06/pruunkaru-brown-bear-ursus-arc... http://www.zacekfoto.ee/?pid=3339 http://www.zacekfoto.ee/?pid=3339
DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
first time Estonia was on my radar was in 1998 on a Linux Conference in Singapore. The number of companies present from a small country like Estonia was astonishing. They have come a long way since and really know how to foster entrepreneurship and the local tech community. A lot of governments (sigh France) could learn from their hands-off approach.
flatfilefan 11y ago
Leader in technology, but laggard in population dynamics? (depopulated to the 1970s level recently) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eesti_rahvaarv_1970-2009.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eesti_rahvaarv_1970-2009....
ommunist 11y ago
@trymas/ "IMHO, Baltic states are in the forefront of IT technologies." <- I can only agree that they are in the forefront of using IT, not producing anything noticeable, with rare exceptions like Skype messenger, MikroTik routers and FlyZip algorhythm.
return0 11y ago
(2013). Also, how has Estonia as a country benefited from this so far? The GDP/person seems to be stalling , although generally growing fast since the 00s. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD/countries/EE?display=graph http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD/countries...
coolgirl43 11y ago
It's because they have willingly changed their culture to open up technology. I learn russian online skype at http://preply.com/en/russian-by-skype http://preply.com/en/russian-by-skype and my teacher said success starts with the mind.

96 points by jayant123 11y ago

It's just like the lean startup process. In Finland and especially in Sweden, things are talked being talked about for years or decades. We need to plan, think, prepare, study, blah blah, whatever. You know what? Meanwhile Estonians did it, actually several years ago. Skipping (or doing really leanly) most of these major time and resource wasters.

ido 11y ago
I've never lived/worked in either but it seems both Finland and Sweden have really successful and huge tech industries though?
- inglor 11y ago
  Finland was really hurt when Nokia fell - startups at scale and as a national priority are relatively new there. They're spending a lot of money and they have an excellent education system compared to a lot of other places but this sort of mental shift takes time. Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good, working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at founding a startup is considered a shame. Contrary to that - in Israel failure at founding a startup is considered great because you tried and forfeited a comfy life for a while which people will respect you for. Finland is spending a lot of money to change that perception - there are whole institutions that are working on it and they're doing a really good job but it takes time.
  - tsiki 11y ago
    >Finland has a cultural problem: working for a big company is considered good, working for a small one is considered being unsuccessful and failure at founding a startup is considered a shame. Maybe 10-15 years ago. Now with the rise of successful startups and the national interest towards them, working at a startup is considered good and trendy and rather, most of the CS students avoid large companies. Even my mom was proud and supportive when I cofounded a startup, and she's always been the one to advocate for a good and stable job.
- drawkbox 11y ago
  I haven't been to either but they have an impact for sure in gaming. Finland is home to Supercell and Rovio, arguably the two biggest juggernauts in mobile gaming. This has spawned many studios there. Sweden is also big in gaming as the home of Notch and his little multibillion dollar game company called Mojang with Minecraft. And of course PewDiePie with the youtube game review new era, it also has spawned all sort of gaming/tech interest there. They seem to have a play for entertainment as well with Kung Fury. Both countries are a force in creating content with technology, which is probably the winning strategy and both places have been ignited by it.
  - OlleTO 11y ago
    If we're looking at the swedish game industry you also want to add Paradox Interactive and Dice to that list. Our general technology industry is "restructuring", with pretty big layoffs at the large companies. The same week this spring Sony and Ericsson gave advance notice of upcoming layoffs to 1000 and 2000 people respectively. While not a catastrophe in itself, and a several companies stepped in to offer jobs, it's worrying as a general indication of the state of our technological industry.
johnchristopher 11y ago
Which goes against the wisdom of that Norwegian story about the oil resource management from a few days https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9673157. > The politicians and senior bureaucrats had not caught oil fever. A serious mining accident had recently brought down a government, and most did not want to touch oil matters with a bargepole. “Everything I said was met with, ‘Oh, you think so? Mmm. Maybe. Let’s wait and see’,” al-Kasim recalls. “This characteristic saved Norway from the curse of oil: the fact that they are completely incapable of getting carried away by the oil dream. They were very sceptical – plain horse sense basically. They didn’t want to move until it was absolutely proven that it was the right time to act.”

shumo 11y ago

Estonia is clean from russians not like Latvia, that's why they are centuries far from other Baltic countries.

Galanwe 11y ago
This is stupid, and wrong. I worked several years in Estonia (at Skype) and I would say that more than 50% of programmers are from foreign countries. Mainly russia, but also Ukraine, latvia, Czech republic... In Tallin, half the population is Russian, or native russian speaker.
- kuratkull 11y ago
  I'm an Estonian and would like to comment this with the results from the census: Tallinn has 55% Estonians, 36% Russians(who mostly live in specific sleeping/cheap/"slum" districts), and others.
  - mb_72 11y ago
    I'm glad you raised this to counter the mis-information posted by the parent. I also worked for several years in Tallinn (I'm half-Estonian, half-Australian), and the information provided by the parent ss simply not true. This reinforces my belief many ex-pats live in a bit of a bubble, especially if they don't learn the local language or try and integrate more. Back OT - I can keep my Estonian business ticking over from Australia entirely via the internet. I have a local (Estonian) accountant, but using my Estonian ID card I can digitally sign documents that need 'sending' or I can open such documents sent to me from government departments. Such possibilities really much life much easier as regards documentation, tax returns etc.
- kuratkull 11y ago
  Also the percentage of foreign programmers is high in international companies. Local or small IT companies mostly hire Estonians - for no specific reason imho, maybe just to keep the atmosphere native.

inglor 11y ago

Estonians are everywhere - that's why they're successful. Everywhere I was in an accelerator, reporters and people from Estonia came in order to learn how things are done - this is a long and deliberate process. Once an Estonian journalist even wrote about our company - was fun! http://majandus24.postimees.ee/2080692/iisraeli-poisid-leiutasid-finantsnou-andva-telefoniaplikatsiooni http://majandus24.postimees.ee/2080692/iisraeli-poisid-leiut... Other countries in the area (namely Finland) also do this and fly around - we've had teams from Italy come visit us in Tel Aviv and other countries. I can only imagine how it feels in the valley and how much visits you get.

atmosx 11y ago
LOL, you got this all wrong. The government is pushing technology quite hard on Estonians (for a variety of justified reasons) THAT's why you see many Estonian teams floating around.

ivanhoe 11y ago

This link from the article comments is also worth reading to get a full picture, which seems to be not all that great: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/meet-doteebubble-the-mysterious-estonian-start-up-critic-who-throws-cold-water-on-government-backed-ventures/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/17/meet-doteebubble-the-myster...

dear 11y ago
"In many cases, the companies that received government money were being run by people with no experience in the field. We wrote about an incubator for gaming startups, where none of the people running the incubator had ever worked in the gaming industry! Then there was the incubator that received nearly 700,000 euros from the government to set up in a small town of 20,000 people to promote creative arts startups, which as far as we can tell was just a few women making dresses and jewelry."

hornbill 11y ago

Estonia’s success is not so much about ditching legacy technology as it is about shedding “legacy thinking” This is the key. I think many people does not understand this or does not approve of this. By going digital (like e-governance), use of paper is avoided but the procedure remains same. Does it save time? Sure, it does. But the process remains tedious as ever.

johnchristopher 11y ago
> By going digital (like e-governance), use of paper is avoided but the procedure remains same. Does it save time? Sure, it does. But the process remains tedious as ever. what's your point ? Ditching the process of having a government ?
- Kaali 11y ago
  It seems that usually when moving from paper to digital forms, the original form is just reimplemented to be filled out on a computer. Where rethinking the actual process might actually reduce the actual interaction that is required from a person, to an automated system which can induce information that would otherwise be filled manually. In Finland when filling your tax forms online, the form comes prefilled with numbers that are calculated from your tax info of the previous year. If there are no changes in your salary or benefits, you can just agree to the the form and it is done, without typing out anything.
  - s_kilk 11y ago
    I've seen this first-hand. All they want is the same paper workflow they had before, but with less paper, even if the old workflow is bloated and/or nonsensical. Edit: A colleague phrased this brilliantly before: "We have these machines that can do literally anything we want them to, and instead we're using them as a poor imitation of paper"
  - kybernetyk 11y ago
    >It seems that usually when moving from paper to digital forms, the original form is just reimplemented to be filled out on a computer. In Germany as a business owner I'm required to file taxes electronically. But then in the last step I still have to print out some of forms and send them via snail mail to the German tax office. And don't get me started about registering a new company. It takes weeks and you need to visit a notary. (Coincidentally last week I created a UK Ltd to hold some intellectual property. It took 20 minutes and I paid the fee via PayPal. And the next day everything was ready to go.) There are really different school of thoughts when it comes to administration. And you can't just slap an electronic form ontop of an over-regulated dinosaur and automagically become a modern & agile institution.

EugeneOZ 11y ago

Didn't read because of huge popup window.

igravious 11y ago

Note to editors: this is from 2013!

trymas 11y ago

One little critique I have, is about Estonia's e-voting. That's a total black box technology. Basically what they did is said "ok, let's vote using internet, and we'll believe results are true". They do not know is someone hacked them, etc. Voting data from the servers was transferred using personal computer and flash drive of some random sysadmin. It's horrible. In my opinion, they do e-voting for the sake of doing it and being 'first'. Though big thumbs up for e-citizenship. IMHO, Baltic states are in the forefront of IT technologies. 3G works almost anywhere, 4G in cities. Internet is cheap and super fast (if you do not have 100Mbps connection - you have slow internet connection). You do your taxes, get your doctor appointments using internet and so on, for a very long time (since 2010 at least). All Baltic states have prominent startups, though Estonians where first to sell startup for big bucks (Skype).

Kymps 11y ago
I agree, the e-voting technology should be a lot more secure, but as long as they keep improving it, I don't see it as too big of a problem, but if they used the same technology in the states for example, I would be pretty worried. The influence Estonia has in the world is negligible compared the US, so if something was to go wrong, sure, it would be pretty bad, but compared to the same happening in a more influencial country, it would be pretty minor.
tn13 11y ago
In many countries and places this strategy of "ok, let's vote using internet, and we'll believe results are true" would work well. USA, India are not one of those places. All the mainstream media reports on such topics and especially technology should be taken with a boatload of salt.
devdoomari 11y ago
what about verifiable mix-net voting? wouldn't mix-net voting prevent from such things in the first place? if not, why/how? (*I'm learning about these stuff, and I want to know your opinions on them...)
- pgeorgi 11y ago

jkot 11y ago

Estonia is basically one big city, no country side. It is easy to score high in broadband speed etc, if no rural areas are decreasing average speed.

dullgiulio 11y ago
Wrong. https://www.google.ee/maps/@58.6,25,7z https://www.google.ee/maps/@58.6,25,7z
belZaah 11y ago
Yup, one big city: http://blog.moment.ee/2015/06/pruunkaru-brown-bear-ursus-arctos-9.html http://blog.moment.ee/2015/06/pruunkaru-brown-bear-ursus-arc... http://www.zacekfoto.ee/?pid=3339 http://www.zacekfoto.ee/?pid=3339

DyslexicAtheist 11y ago

first time Estonia was on my radar was in 1998 on a Linux Conference in Singapore. The number of companies present from a small country like Estonia was astonishing. They have come a long way since and really know how to foster entrepreneurship and the local tech community. A lot of governments (sigh France) could learn from their hands-off approach.

flatfilefan 11y ago

Leader in technology, but laggard in population dynamics? (depopulated to the 1970s level recently) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eesti_rahvaarv_1970-2009.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eesti_rahvaarv_1970-2009....

ommunist 11y ago

@trymas/ "IMHO, Baltic states are in the forefront of IT technologies." <- I can only agree that they are in the forefront of using IT, not producing anything noticeable, with rare exceptions like Skype messenger, MikroTik routers and FlyZip algorhythm.

return0 11y ago

(2013). Also, how has Estonia as a country benefited from this so far? The GDP/person seems to be stalling , although generally growing fast since the 00s. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD/countries/EE?display=graph http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD/countries...

coolgirl43 11y ago

It's because they have willingly changed their culture to open up technology. I learn russian online skype at http://preply.com/en/russian-by-skype http://preply.com/en/russian-by-skype and my teacher said success starts with the mind.