Mentoring @A Hack

The weekend was started with two parties in Tartu: two startups – Fortumo and Fraktal – both celebrated their 6th birthday and threw a party at their respective offices. Since these are only a couple of hundred meters away from each other there was quite a lot of traffic between the offices.

The parties were nice, I met a lot of people that I hadn’t seen for a while and so it happened that I got back home around half past 2 and got to sleep 3 hours before I started going towards Helsinki, to mentor in A Hack.

Mentoring @ Startup Highway

Office venue in Startup Highway

This week I was mentoring Startup Highway teams in Vilnius. Startup Highway was the first startup accelerator in the Baltic States and it is run by charismatic guy named Rokas Tamošiunas and his team. I know Rokas through Toivo Annus (one of the co-founders of Skype), who is my customer in Advisio and Rokas’s investor in Startup Highway. Nevertheless, this was the first time I got to meet him. Rokas is a true fan of startups and their mentality and the leader of the local startup community in Vilnius. They guy beams energy and as far as I’ve seen, is working crazy hours to make startup community in Lithuania blossom. Startup Highway is in the middle of their second batch already with 6 teams who will graduate in a month.

Rokas had been inviting me to mentor for a while already, but I had been just way too busy with preparation of the first round of GameFounders. Now I took the two days and flew to Vilnius to meet the teams and help them with my knowledge and expertise.