Creative Destruction Lab


work in progress
- Starting New. ForgetBill is creating a cashless payment solution for restaurants. Pawns.app pays you for sharing your unused internet bandwidth. Bob in Klaipeda is launching Majiky - an all-in-one parenting tool. Tracehat is B2B SaaS platform providing brand insights and effective advertising in streaming media. Jonas started StatusArea to save us from "death by powerpoint". Some great ideas, yet some will get refined - please go after big ones, make it scary - even for yourself (EF podcast)
- Fintech. Big year for SME Finance - growing into new markets, closing at EUR 23m revenue. Interview with TransferGo founder and CEO, Daumantas Dvilinskas (in LT), takes through the background story of why and how. Uldis is quite a rockstar - his startup Nextpay is licenced by the Bank of Lithuania (with a local team, too), and he is also a host of the podcast you should be listening to.
- eBay - Exporter of the Year award winner! You guessed it right - POPPRI Fashion Auctions. POPPRI store sells collection leftovers of world-famous fashion brands by auction. It was created in the small town of Siesikai (300 inhabitants). Three years later, the store moved to Ukmerge, and by 2021 the team had grown from 30 to 120 employees. Video of this impressive story, small-town entrepreneurs, please take note.
- Deeptech. OCC's Pixevia and Perfection42 have signed breakthrough contracts, with the latter one also raising new funds (!). VCs are bullish on deeptech in the current market (paywall) - keep an eye also on Droplet Genomics, Biomatter Designs, Psylink and others. "Tech Founders, Don’t Be Afraid of Bio" - new NfX essay explains.
AWS announced Cloudvisor as the winner of the Rising Star Partner of the Year - EMEA award. Chosen among thousands of AWS partners in the EMEA region proves Cloudvisor is one of the leading AWS partners empowering startups to scale. Book a free consultation today. AWS + Startups = Cloudvisor 🖤
rounds and capital
- Kaunas-based medtech startup Vilimed has secured EUR 300,000 in funding from the Lithuanian fund CoInvest Capital and the LitBAN angels. The startup develops a unique therapeutic device that reduces hand tremors for people with related diseases.
- Avallone (70V portfolio) has raised EUR 2.1 million in a seed round from new and existing investors.
Does the Lithuanian startup community require a new FB group? The current one seems to be innovating a lot lately. Vote here
☑️ I find these posts entertaining, it's fine
☑️ We need a new FB group with proper admin/filter
☑️ Yes, but a Slack channel
☑️ Nevermind - META is goodbye for me
roleplay
Kilo Health - Health Category CEO
ArcaPay - Senior Regulatory Compliance & Risk Manager
Oxygen - Sales and Marketing talent
Startup Lithuania - Project Manager
ArcaPay - Senior Regulatory Compliance & Risk Manager
Oxygen - Sales and Marketing talent
Startup Lithuania - Project Manager
things planetary
- How did European climate tech develop in 2022, a crisis year for startups and VCs? (Okey)
- Alex (Katalista Ventures) talking to Kjell Clarysse, Founder and CEO of Forestbase.
founder guide
- An underrated way to attract great engineers to your company (if you ask a successful newsletter writer...)
- How to create an investor CRM? Fundraising is mostly about process. Ventury.app can help, too.
- What ESP to use for a newsletter? We use Ghost, but this guide is comprehensive.
ecosystem
- We should not stand still just observing the tech ecosystem grow on its own - there is too much opportunity to ignore. But what creative interventions would accelerate further? How shall we encourage new founders to launch? If you believe the best founders are self-starters, we have bad news - "forced" entrepreneurs are better performing, not worse, compared to "natural" entrepreneurs.
Our results therefore provide the best evidence to date that even the best entrepreneurs are not destined to select into entrepreneurship, and thus many wage workers today have high entrepreneurial potential.
- For immediate effect, it is tempting to look into late-stage solutions - universities and mid-career training. For example, Antler and EF are trying to locate misplaced talent (people that should be founders instead of employees). As mentioned by Sten Tamkimvi in this podcast, Creative Destruction Lab and Digital Society Stream - training/mentorship programs in universities - are other avenues to explore. Keeping it super simple and aiming for impact, YC Startup School - accelerator and content- is a great example. It definitely encouraged (and educated) thousands of startup entrepreneurs worldwide.
- But where is the highest leverage? Nobel laureate economist James Heckman shows how smart investments in early childhood development improve social, economic and health outcomes. But that's not only about future earnings or overall productivity.
Through entrepreneurship education pupils typically acquire non-cognitive skills, which has a positive effect on their continued school education. Non-cognitive skills, or character skills, such as persistence and creativity are self-reinforcing and make it easier for pupils to acquire and utilise other skills.
It seems that this is the massive unlock (and largest ROI), is within the family, kindergarten, and school! There might be no hacks in this system...

insights
- Disruptive science is declining (just looking at 45 million papers). Matt Clancy dives deeper into the relationship between researcher age and disruptiveness. There is a certain benefit to being new in a domain.

three questions, previously
- Magnus Hambleton, Investor, byFounders
- Povilas Poderskis, Development Director, Darnu Group, ex-COO Nord Security
- Gytenis Galkis, Venture Partner, Superhero Capital
- Daniel Kratkovski and Dominykas Milašius, co-founders, Delta Biosciences
- Kasparas Aleknavicius - Co-Founder and CPO, Loctax
- Andrius Milinavičius, General Partner, Baltic Sandbox Ventures
- Laura Korsakova, Founder and CEO, Psylink
- Paulius Uziela, Investment Manager, Coinvest Capital
Member discussion