Secrets of the Untracked Path Bolt's journey from Estonia to the World | Panathēnea 2026

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Great question. I think fundamentally every entrepreneur should bet their company on a secret or some advantage that others haven't observed yet. Otherwise you're just going to be competing with no real advantage. For us it was mainly two things. First, it was network effects where I fundamentally understood much earlier than everybody else in the industry how exactly the dynamics work in the field of ride-sharing. Looking back, it was quite obvious why that happened because I liked to study math and go to computer science olympiads as a kid. I was already solving these kinds of problems before. Second, I was always quite comfortable being contrarian. In school when I had arguments with my teachers, my classmates would usually back down. I was very fine challenging authority if I saw that something didn't make sense. So when I was 19 and everybody was saying that this ride-sharing world would be impossible to compete in because the network effects are so strong that Uber would be very dominant, I thought this doesn't intuitively make sense to me. When I started plotting out the map of how many drivers you need to build a well-functioning service for customers, I realized that everybody else was undervaluing or overvaluing this effect a lot. Therefore I thought, actually I think this is absolutely possible for us to compete in. If you take that insight, you design the company very differently than if you think there's a monopolistic network effect. That was the first core insight. The second thing was that all the investors in the world were very focused on the traditional Western European markets. They thought that if you raise money and want to build a big business, you have to go to Western Europe or the US. I think that was an out-of-date view because the world had grown so much larger. Everybody had smartphones. When you ran the math, you realized you could build a 10 billion dollar business without going to those places. You could build it by focusing on emerging markets like Africa, Central and Eastern Europe. So it was very obvious to me that if I combine these two insights, you can build a massive business and then later go and challenge the incumbents in Western Europe as well.

We had a bit of a unique story there because it really happened in very different sequences depending on the stakeholder. We were already credible in six months in our home market of Estonia. We were able to build such a fantastic product that thousands of customers and drivers very quickly realized this is obviously a great product and we very quickly became the household name there. That continued being the case as we progressively launched more markets. In a couple of years we were operating in 15 countries and we were really spiking in popularity, revenue growth was like 600% year-over-year. So very clearly customers and drivers resonated with what we were doing. But that was very different from investors. Despite us having this phenomenal growth of revenue, which was quite unprecedented for any European tech company, it was still very hard for us to raise money because most investors were so bought into this herd mentality that there's going to be one winner, no room for anybody else. It took us a lot of time to convince them otherwise. That's actually the reason we first raised money from strategics like Mercedes because the traditional VCs just didn't believe in the model until we had got to like 100 million revenue and then we were becoming too big for them to ignore. So it was a pretty unusual story.

I'd say that fundamentally at first we thought we just didn't have any other choice because we started in Estonia, so it was natural for us to hire there. We were so capital constrained the first couple of years that we couldn't afford to hire people in London or the US. That was the first constraint we started with, but over the years we genuinely understood it was a massive advantage for a couple of reasons. First, when we look at the work ethic we've observed in people in Eastern Europe, it's been fantastic. Most of these countries were under Russian occupation 30 years ago, so entrepreneurialism was completely banned. There were no economic opportunities for people to grow up. When they finally had this chance to join a world-changing tech company, people were so passionate about it. They put in so much effort, they really cared deeply about the product. It was very hard to do that if you were just another startup in the Valley, but in our markets we were the company to join and work for. We were able to get the very best talent and they were very committed. Related to that is retention. When we look at the turnover in Silicon Valley companies, on average it's really poor. Most engineers join and often quit within two years, so it's not like you're willing to take a very long-term bet of investing massively into those people. But in our case, we've had engineers who've now been with the company for a decade. It completely changes your mentality of how much you're willing to invest in people, develop them, how you build teams. We've really been able to turn this constraint into a huge benefit for us.

Great question, something every company is battling with as they get larger. First, as a general principle, my view is that the world is changing so quickly, especially now with AI, and we're literally inventing new business units and business lines that have never existed. For example, when we launched ride-sharing or scooters, you couldn't hire somebody who had five or ten years of experience in that industry because we were inventing that industry. It didn't exist before. So obviously you had to find people who were generalists, able to adapt and solve new problems as they went along. That's where that saying comes from. At the same time, there are some domains where you require very deep expertise, like accounting or building a very well-scaling large database. For that you can find talent who has done that particular thing before and benefit from deep talent, but that's a small fraction of the workforce. The vast majority is a very different type, especially in our kind of business. Regarding retaining the culture, there are a couple of basic things we've done. First, you have to interview for this ability of people to be entrepreneurial, take ownership, move quickly, not be overly bureaucratic and only thinking about their own swim lane. You can try to assess that at first. But the other thing is that it often boils down to compensation. If people only join you because you're the highest bidder, you attract mercenaries who want to join for the money. But if you're paying them sometimes even less on the cash side but make it up in equity, you filter out people who don't genuinely believe in the mission because they're otherwise taking a pay cut that won't pay off. We found that to be very effective.