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" When a new hire is afraid to roll up their sleeves and get things done, it's a clear sign it's not going to work out. "

Taavet Hinrikus

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" Without immigration, nations would stagnate. It is key for innovation and for economic growth. "

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" Scaling a business at speed can feel like an out of control roller-coaster. "

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" If the U.K. leaves the E.U., we'll have to consider whether it makes business sense to stay headquartered here. "

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" The fact that Skype was founded in Estonia, the fact that Skype had a successful exit, which meant that Estonia benefited in a major way, meant that entrepreneurship became legitimate. There were more than a thousand people who either worked or had worked at Skype who had seen what it takes to build a global business. "

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" I think that's the beauty of being a private company: you get to choose when you disclose something. You can play it in a strategic way or in a tactical way. "

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" I spent my workdays at Skype creating a more connected world. We were shrinking the distances between people, making it easier to connect across countries. Then I'd go to my bank to transfer my euros to pounds, and it was like going back in time 50 years: expensive, inconvenient, and painfully slow. It was a nightmare. "

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" Bitcoin, I think we can say, is dead. "

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" Bitcoin and the whole discussion around it shows how big a need there is for innovation about what money is and how it is stored. "

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" In 2011, when we launched TransferWise, it was our frustration with banks not giving us what we wanted or needed as customers. The motivation was a strong desire to solve a problem and not just fix something that was broken but create a better alternative and a new system for doing things. "

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" Traditional consumer finance has been unfair for decades. Banks have had a monopoly on financial services and have been able to overcharge and underserve consumers. "

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" The world is becoming more global. More than ever, people are proactively deciding where to live, where to study, where to work. Sometimes it's out of necessity, sometimes it's out of choice. "

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" The banks never sent me one chequebook. I'm very happy not to have ever touched one. "

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" People need the financial sector to be safe; people also need the financial sector to go through a massive phase of innovation. That means delivering on the positive rhetoric, like around settlement accounts, not allowing Open Banking to be diluted, and leading the way on AML. "

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" There's most definitely a Davos bubble. You're in a small Alpine town that, for just four days in January, sees its population tripled with world leaders, CEOs, media, police, the army... and a whole bunch of people who aren't invited but just come to hang out. "

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" Creating a new country from scratch has given Estonia the license to imagine what a country could be. "

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" Celebrity-spotting is pretty standard at Davos. It's one of the things that makes it easy to criticise. "

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" While in two very different sectors, both Skype and TransferWise were born out of frustration. "

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" International money transfer is a massive consumer rip-off. Banks and companies like Western Union have gotten away with it for too long. "

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" Building a business is a marathon, not a sprint. I don't believe it when people tell me they've been working 80-hour weeks for five years in a row. I just don't think that's possible. "

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" If we think about how long Google spent searching - I think they came around in '98? And, OK, Gmail came in 2004, but it was literally built by one engineer as a 20%-time project. It was probably 10 years before Google started diversifying. "

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" 'Big' problems are overwhelming, but when we distil them down to their simplest forms, then the solutions become simple, too. "

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" Talent is a complex subject: from the education our kids get in kindergarten and beyond to the re-skilling of some parts of the workforce; from the opportunities available for research to how we attract the best people to work in our companies. "

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" Costs should always be presented up front so that consumers can make informed choices and get a fairer deal. "

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" Doing something that empowers people makes you realise how boring it would be to work for a place where the goal is just to make more money. It's much easier to get out of bed and look forward to 12 hours of work if you're making the world a better place. "

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" Banks are really bad when it comes to building consumer-centred products. "

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" Sometimes, companies are better placed than politicians and governments to make change happen. That doesn't mean that they should not be held to account and follow international rules. But with the right motivation, they can be the force for change. "

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" There's one thing a CEO should always keep at the front of their mind, and that's customer needs. "

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" To be a global business, you need access to the best talent from around the world - fix this, everything else falls into place. Whether it's homegrown or imported, we don't mind where it comes from - we just want the best. "

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" Hiring new people, opening up in new markets, all of that takes money. "

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" The attitude to failure is one of the characteristics that's often called out as the difference between the U.S. and Europe. And we do need to be less risk-averse, more embracing of failure. Having failed makes you look bad in Europe. But in the U.S., it makes you look experienced. "

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