Merry Opportunities and Happy New Startups!

At the end of the year I, like most of us, am looking back at the year to find solid evidences of being worthy and mighty.

And often I find something small, yet extremely relevant that wraps up the year.

This year my wishes are: World peace! Prosperity, abundance, happy, healthy and educated youth creating better future beyond current understanding!

 

And since we are not there yet, I ask you to take action –
join us in funding selected 4 startups (links are below)!
We have small tickets left in promising 4 pre-seed startups – let’s have the impact!

 

Balance. Considering the craziness that has been around us during last few years, a war starting out at Estonian Independence Day, one crisis following the other, the key goal has been the “balance” for me. Since my last exit in 2019 summer I’ve been operating rather at very slow pace, except the 2022. I consider myself a hard working person, yet perhaps sometimes I am over-optimising the effort in order to achieve my goals, in the end, changing my goals on the go. The ultimate goal would be doing stuff I value at my own pace, maybe 3-4hours per day. But getting there requires smart and continuous work of hundreds if not thousands of hours. Sooner we get there, better it is, as we all have got limited hours under the sun. A lesson, that I learnt the hard way sending my father away this autumn. Scarcity puts values into different perspective, makes us impatient, nervous, unwilling to risk with high stakes. Irony is that my father used to exhort me to be more calm and patient about achieving my goals. Yet scarcity also creates opportunities for many entrepreneurs, it requires us to learn and evolve faster. You might not know why I switched into an angel syndicate Fstage.vc investing in pre-seed startups, but at one point it was inevitable. Sure, I can blame genes of my mother, a long-time teacher. Yet again, saving others from mistakes we’ve done is worth passing on, and honouring my father’s beliefs, if to do then to do it properly, everything has to have a greater good and best possible impact in it. That sort of defined the only possible way for me. As an entrepreneur I found a way to engage people in this, binding founders’ problems to raise money, if they are not so known yet, allowing mentors to monetise the immense value they bring to startups, letting small ticket investors have their impact in making the world a better place. It’s a win-win-win or nothing. Technically, it’s just another marketplace where every player may switch its role dependent on the time or scope or goal. For Fstage.vc was 2022 like the pre-seed stage, or even F-stage, when we learnt by doing, discovering and evolving on the go. In 2023 we continue what we did great and keep on learning. I’ve always loved tough times as it pushes towards innovation.

In 2022 Fstage.vc had its first cohort. We started formalising the idea at Techcill (life changing conference for me, every year something major happens), we validated the concept at Latitude59, following legal side over the summer and we came public at Startupday.

Fstage.vc first public announcement was at Engaged Investments conference in Prague (humble thanks to Michal Ciffra, Jan Krahulik and Petr Sima from Depo Ventures for inviting me and Andreas Munk Holm from EU.VC for moderating the panel discussion).

On December 19-th we gathered at Yanu robot-bar to have our investors’ first ever physical get-together to assess our lead-mentors’ work with 13 pre-seed startups over past 2 months. Finally we picked our TOP4 pre-seed startups ForkNAV, RunProperty, Bulrby Bike, Unsinkable Robotics to continue working with. And after full DD and funding we continue supporting with paid custom mentorship up to 18 months.

 

Up to this point every Fstage.vc onboarding, OKR, brain-picking, evaluation or discussion meeting was held online, engaging investors and mentors all over the globe. Fstage.vc was designed as a global VC from the day one. We focus on Baltic/Nordic startups to take them to EU, UK, US, mainly. Exceptions are allowed to learn. We are sector agnostic, as our mentors/investors determine startups we are able to help. We try to avoid slow moving and capital intensive sectors.