Climate change, migration... they transcend national borders and require an international response.
I get a kick out of helping the next generation of founders.
'Big' problems are overwhelming, but when we distil them down to their simplest forms, then the solutions become simple, too.
You start a business being hungry, foolish, and a little bit naive. But more often than not, you end up being disrupted yourself. It happened to Skype.
Securing and attracting the best talent is an obsession in the tech industry for good reason. It's your main asset; it's your edge.
Historically, people have flocked to Silicon Valley because of the belief that that's where the latest innovation is happening. It's a snowball effect.
Talent is a complex subject: from the education our kids get in kindergarten and beyond to the re-skilling of some parts of the workforce; from the opportunities available for research to how we attract the best people to work in our companies.
The attitude to failure is one of the characteristics that's often called out as the difference between the U.S. and Europe. And we do need to be less risk-averse, more embracing of failure. Having failed makes you look bad in Europe. But in the U.S., it makes you look experienced.
Scaling a business at speed can feel like an out of control roller-coaster.
I was in my early 20s when Estonia joined the E.U. For a kid who'd grown up in the Soviet Union, it seemed like my country had come of age. For a country that had been isolated and cut off from the rest of the world, it seemed like we were becoming part of the global community. It opened a whole new world of possibility.
For Estonia, joining Europe meant our potential as a country increased - not decreased - because of that connectedness.
The world is getting smaller thanks to technology.
Being a 'global citizen' is not something reserved for the global elite anymore. Thanks to the democratising power of technology, it's not a trend determined by privilege or even age but by attitude.
At TransferWise, we started out as - and continue as - idealists. We start with what we can do to make things better and how we can solve problems, focusing on what people need. It turns out you can focus on building the best service and be successful as business.
Sometimes, companies are better placed than politicians and governments to make change happen. That doesn't mean that they should not be held to account and follow international rules. But with the right motivation, they can be the force for change.
To be a global business, you need access to the best talent from around the world - fix this, everything else falls into place. Whether it's homegrown or imported, we don't mind where it comes from - we just want the best.
People need the financial sector to be safe; people also need the financial sector to go through a massive phase of innovation. That means delivering on the positive rhetoric, like around settlement accounts, not allowing Open Banking to be diluted, and leading the way on AML.
While in two very different sectors, both Skype and TransferWise were born out of frustration.
In 2011, when we launched TransferWise, it was our frustration with banks not giving us what we wanted or needed as customers. The motivation was a strong desire to solve a problem and not just fix something that was broken but create a better alternative and a new system for doing things.
A seed depends on a whole host of factors to grow - from the fertility of the soil to the right mix of rain and sun to not being eaten by a passing bird. The same goes for an idea. For an idea to really take hold, other factors come into play, from timing to the emerging technology that makes it possible.
