I had lunch on Friday with Ross Mayfield , one of the people who most influenced me 
to get involved in social media. We ate at PJ Chang's, where we had met almost four years to the date before.
We talked a while about the industry and the jockeying triumvirate of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and how rapidly perceptions have changed.
But mostly Ross spent the time educating me about Estonia, the European Community's newest and smallest member and with a population of 1.5 million, one of the world's smallest countries overall. Ross went to Estonia for a non-profit in 1995, when the newly formed democracy was still in a formative state. Tech companies were fast-emerging and Ross became one of a great many people to start an Estonian ISP. He followed that with a Web design company that was successful enough to have Ross design one for the president, whom he eventually served as an adviser. His connections with the country remain current in part because he married a beautiful and charming Estonian. They now live with their two children in Palo Alto. Ross is also the founder and CEO of Socialtext, a leading social media tools provider to the enterprise.
Ross took me back to the beginnings of the Estonian tech community. When the Soviet Empire broke up, the software from the not-yet-complete Soviet supercomputer project software landed in Estonia, along with its developers. It is generally viewed as an IT oasis surrounded by a wasteland of Baltic Countries still in the shadows of the Information Age.
From the seeds of the supercomputer software came a core competency in data encryption, which partly explains why tiny Estonia is third in the world in Internet banking. It might also contribute to the company's leadership in e-gambling technology. Playtech, an online casino that recently went public is valued at $1 billion in an industry whose total value is estimated at $12 billion.
The other Estonian startup that hit outer space is of course Skype. As Ross pointed out, legal anomalies made a situation where VOIP was the only real way a startup could push in the telecom category. This made it a logical direction for the founders of Kazaa following their devastating rebuke in courtrooms. Perhaps another factor that came in, was Estonia's proximity to Scandinavia, where the influences of Western freedom lovers was felt, as was the influence of Nokia.
Ross described Estonia to me as a socially liberal country, that tolerates all night gambling casinos, which have earned it the reputation of being "Europe's Vegas." It's people are well-educated and, like Ireland, another tiny EU country is enjoying a prolonged prosperity that is pushing its population out of its recent light manufacturing past and into an increasingly skilled, internet-expert labor force.
Ross discussed several people for us to meet and about the promise of a new generation now coming to age, who have no memory of living under the heavy hand of the former Soviet Union.
Ross will make introductions for us, if Rick can fit Estonia into our schedule. There seems to be a surplus of interesting people to meet.
