Let’s start from the beginning. How did your path into entrepreneurship start, long before Kriptomat?

I never liked the idea of working for somebody else. That was something I was kind of programmed with by my dad. I was always trying to build something and do something, even when I was a kid. I remember that together with my friends we prepared a small stand and were selling used toy cars in front of our building.

 In my teenage years, I was really into music and the entertainment business. I got a job as a barman in one of the top clubs in Slovenia, and shortly after, I became the bar manager and later the club manager. It was a huge club, with a capacity of around 3,500. I was very young and didn’t finish my school at that time because I was just working and having the time of my life running that club.

After that, I went deeper into entertainment. I was organizing festivals and running a talent booking agency. This also became cross-border, working in Croatia, Italy, Austria and elsewhere. I also moved into PR and corporate events, doing events for big brands like Peugeot and other large companies.

During that period, I met my wife, we had our first child, then our second child, we got married, bought a house, and so on. At the same time, I made a couple of really bad business decisions that resulted in a huge loss and brought me to the edge of bankruptcy.

After that, I started founding tech companies. I failed twice. I was already on the edge of bankruptcy, and then I failed again. But I learned from that. One of the biggest lessons was understanding that I cannot do things on my own. It’s much easier if you have a good co-founder and a team around you.

That’s how I ended up with my current business partner, Serge. Together, we continued building tech companies and eventually got into fintech. In 2018, we became familiar with blockchain and crypto. We realised this was one of those rare moments where you are still very early in a technology that is shaping itself.

We understood that crypto would change the world of finance and how we treat money. That’s when we decided to try building something in that space. We came to Estonia after friends in the Baltics suggested it as a strong entrepreneurial environment and a crypto-friendly country.

You co-founded Kriptomat with a long-time friend. How did that relationship influence the way you built the company together or do business?

At the end of the day, it’s a relationship. And I believe that in any relationship, you need to be open and honest. If you can openly talk, openly discuss, argue, cry, and laugh together, then the business partnership will last as well. It works if you can be 100% honest, especially in hard times. Because in good times it’s easy.

Of course, business is business and friendship is friendship, but it’s still a relationship. With Serge, we knew each other, and I knew his earlier work. He had done an amazing job before, and his wish was to go international. When we started talking about collaboration, we realised that we have similar objectives and values.

In Kriptomat, one of our core values is directness, which means that everyone in the company can speak openly with anyone about anything and be brutally honest. That’s the only way you can solve things. So I strongly believe in transparency, open communication, and the power of honest relationships.

Looking back, what was the moment when you realised this was no longer just an experiment but a real company you wanted to commit your life to?

It depends on what stage of life you are in and how much risk you are willing to take. When you’re younger and don’t have a family, you’re willing to take much more risk than later on.

With Kriptomat, we ran a couple of businesses in parallel at the beginning to understand whether this was going to be a real business. In our second year, we noticed growth and from that point on, it was full focus on Kriptomat.

That was also the time when we started setting bigger goals, because we understood that there was a market and that people actually saw value in what we were offering. Suddenly, you see people from Germany, Spain, Poland, all over Europe using your service. And you think, wow, this is actually happening. They’re not just using the service, they see real value in it. That’s when you realise that you’ve built something meaningful.

How would you compare Slovenia's startup ecosystem with Estonia's?

Slovenian people are smart, very clever, and very capable. But the startup ecosystem itself lacks certain elements that make it easy to build a scalable company. One of the main things for me is access to capital. In Slovenia, it feels like investors are much more conservative and risk-averse, and the amounts of capital available are smaller than in Estonia.

Estonia, on the other hand, is very entrepreneur-friendly. Regulations are straightforward, taxes are relatively predictable, and the government has a strong focus on digital infrastructure and startup support. Estonia was already building e-residency and e-government tools before most other countries even started thinking about it. That creates a sense that the system is working for founders rather than against them.

In terms of regulation, Estonia makes it easier to start a business and experiment legally without too many barriers. In Slovenia, the regulatory requirements felt more rigid, and the process of getting things done sometimes took longer or required more bureaucratic steps.

When it comes to community, Estonia has a strong and open startup community. People collaborate, meet often, share knowledge, and support each other. In Slovenia, there are smart people and good events, but the overall critical mass and infrastructure for founders are smaller. That means you often end up reinventing the wheel or trying to find resources yourself.

For me, Estonia gave us the ability to scale faster, meet investors more easily, and integrate into a European ecosystem that understood technology and change. It just felt like a place where founders can breathe, experiment, and grow without so many artificial limits.

What were some of the hardest operational or regulatory moments that tested you to stay on that path?

When you’re running a business, you like to have things under control and to plan. When you run a regulated business, it’s tough to plan because there is one part of the business you cannot really influence, and that is regulation.

We chose Estonia because, in 2018, it was a crypto-friendly country. At that time, more than 45% of all regulated crypto businesses worldwide were operating in Estonia. There were more than 2,000 companies with a license. Of course, the licensing regime back then was not as strict as it is today.

Then the country realised it was in trouble and needed to clean up what had happened. They started tightening the rules and increasing the requirements to keep a license. During the first re-licensing, we managed to keep our license. During the second change of law, we managed to keep it again, but that was the hardest period.

We were initially invited to Estonia on the idea that you can start your company anywhere and run it anywhere. Suddenly, government officials started looking very closely at our connection to Estonia and whether we were truly invested locally.

That was difficult, because I did not want to relocate permanently. I have my life in Slovenia, but I still wanted to build the business in Estonia. It took us a lot of time to adapt. Many companies at that time were preparing bankruptcy plans or establishing companies in Lithuania or other jurisdictions.

That was when we made a very clear decision. We said we are betting only on Estonia. There is no plan B. We are terminating everything else and sticking with Estonia only. We also communicated this very clearly to the regulator, saying: here we are, we are not doing anything wrong, and we will do whatever it takes. Just tell us what you need from us.

It was hard because we were trying to stand out and set standards in an industry where many things were unclear, and there were many bad players. But we managed.

Today, Kriptomat is one of 38 crypto companies still operating in Estonia. We have applied for the new European-wide license under the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation. We are now transitioning to supervision by the Estonian Financial Supervisory Authority, alongside banks and other major financial institutions.
Because of this, I also had to change personally. I went from being a resident to having a residence permit in Estonia. I have an apartment in Tallinn, I walk the streets without Google Maps, and I have friends there. I was forced to do it, but I like it.

You often speak about trust as a competitive advantage. How do you actually build trust inside a company, not just in marketing messages?

Trust is hard to gain and very easy to lose. And trust is long-term. In our industry, there were many opportunities to make money really, really fast, but we never did.
Together with my co-founder, we don’t believe in shortcuts. We believe in doing things the correct way, especially if you look at the long term. That’s why Kriptomat is one of the longest-running crypto companies in Estonia and why we are still here. People are trusting us with their assets, with their hard-earned money. That’s something you need to respect. You need to be cautious about it and almost worship that responsibility.

At the same time, I want to be able to sleep well at night. I don’t want to worry about whether something is okay. I’m a father of three kids, and I want to be able to explain to them what we do and how we do it, and to be an example for them. We never believed in get-rich-fast schemes, crypto cowboy culture, Lambos, or yachts. We built a normal company that does things the right way.

And I think that’s what built trust. People see that we’ve been here since 2018, that we are consistent, we have customers, that they trust us, and that we’ve never been fined or involved in scandals. That was the original problem we wanted to solve: how to build a crypto company people can actually trust.

What is a good life?

I mentioned earlier that I want to sleep well. That’s absolutely one thing. Running your own company and building a business comes with the burden of hard work, but it also comes with the benefit that you can switch off when you want to. And you need to be able to switch off.

For me, I’m 46 years old, I’m not 28 anymore. I understand what I like, and I like to reward myself with those things. That means being able to spend time with my family over the weekend. I don’t work weekends at all.

I do a lot of cycling. Cycling is my yoga. I go for a 5-6-hour bike ride.

At the same time, I can also stay longer in the office if I want. When I’m in Tallinn, I usually go to the office at 8 in the morning and come back to my apartment after midnight, because I like it there. I like working with people.

For me, a good life is having the ability to do what you want and to stop when you feel you need to. You only have one life and one body, and you need to treat it well.
Some people talk about competition and pushing harder, as if in some economies people work 6 days a week from 6 in the morning to 9 in the evening. But it depends on what you want from life. I know what I want, and I’m pursuing that in a very realistic way. In our company, we don’t have burnout problems. We don’t push people unrealistically and we set realistic goals.