Skype's Sten Tamkivi Weighs in on Russia-Estonia

[Skype's Sten Tamkivi, October, 2006. Photo by Shel]

I had requested Sten Tamkivi, Skype's general manager for eCommerce and Estonia, answer a few questions for my recent post about the Russian-Estonian frictions. His comments came in this morning.  He takes a different view than the one I presented.

Following is the full text of the email he sent me:

" The Russian cyber attacks that made the news recently are obviously a serious matter for law enforcement, but I don't think their immediate impact is that significant. I am very saddened by the political context leading to these conflicts and hoping for a resolution along with the vast majority of peace-minded Estonians and Russians. Naturally there are different views on history, but our future needs to be common.

Skype has never had any issues with the ethnicity of talent -- whether a programmer is Estonian, Russian or Chinese. There is bureaucratic red tape around EU's internal free movement of labour rules, which makes it harder to hire if the country of origin for talent is outside EU.

That said, we have several Russian citizens working for Skype in Tallinn today, and a significant percentage of our Tallinn-based employees are ethnic Russians who work side by side with people from some 30 nationalities. Skype helps people reach out to one other -- both as a piece of software and as a company.

Sten has also posted some observations on his personal blog.