0:00:00 - Alex Shevelenko
Welcome to Experience-focused Leaders! I'm your host, Alex Shevelenko, and I'm delighted to introduce you to Kristjan Vilosius, co-founder and CEO of Katana. Katana is taking on manufacturing ERP software, effectively taking on what SAP has been doing for a few decades. Additionally, Kristjan has a history as an investor in his native Estonia. So it's a fascinating story to hear of both an investor and entrepreneur taking on a huge and very important industry for us. Kristjan, welcome to the pod!
0:00:37 - Kristjan Vilosius
Hi Alex! Thank you for having me on the show!
0:00:40 - Alex Shevelenko
Amazing! Well, let's start with the beginnings. As I mentioned, I come from the former USSR and some of my best friends were Estonians. I could have felt the mentality. I probably understand why there's a phenomenal rate of really entrepreneurial and innovative folks coming out of Estonia. But I don't think it's a well-understood phenomenon outside of European markets. People think of Israel, they get like, “Okay, startup nation”. But Estonia is smaller, it has so many foundational startups and you're building the next one. So tell us from your position as one of the largest investors in Estonia in general, historically, what's going on? What are you guys eating over there?
0:01:44 - Kristjan Vilosius
I'm happy to share my view on this. I’m similar to you. I was also born in the USSR in the early 80s, but Estonia got independent when I was, let me do math quickly, nine years old or somewhere around that. So I don't remember much of that time, to be honest. Since then, I have been living and working in Estonia. Of course, the country has gone through a massive transformation compared to where we were at the beginning of the 90s and where we are today. And it's a very small country. It's only, let's say, 1,5 million people living here, but we have the highest number of unicorns per capita in the world. I've heard some people say that Estonia wins everything per capita.
I think there are two main elements to the success story. One of them is that Estonia basically has no internal market. If you think of startups that are born in, let's say, Germany or the US, you have a large home market that you can service. So very often, these companies spend many years trying to establish the product’s market fit and trying to establish themselves in the market where they started. When it comes to Estonia, you have to be global from day one. There is no local demand, typically, for any of your products or services, and that forces founders to go global very early, which was the case with Katana as well. From day one, we thought of Katana as a global company and we built up our go-to market globally. Today we have customers in 80 different countries, so this small home region forces founders and entrepreneurs to go global and to start exporting very early.
The second element here, also very important when you think of Estonia's success, is the founding story of Skype. Although globally it's well known that the founders of Skype came from Nordics, the tech team and the core of that product were developed in Estonia and the technical co-founders were Estonians. Skype turned into a big global success and that laid the foundation for many years to come because it attracted talent, schooled and developed the local talent to a level where, in many areas, we have people that are world-class. Then the spillover effect started, because those early employees of Skype started founding companies, which later turned unicorns on their own. And if we think of all the unicorns that we have in Estonia, then we can basically track back from all of them to the origins of Skype, either being employees at Skype or having key team members in their team who were former employees of Skype. So that was the catalytic event that set it all in motion.
0:05:13 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah, that feels right to an outsider. So a product that I use on a regular basis is Wise. One of them used to be called TransferWise and was obviously founded by one of the early Skype folks. Then to connect the dots for some of our listeners, if you are having trouble getting Uber in any one of the major European capitals, there's this wonderful company called Bolt that will get you there cheaper and faster. I think what I admire — maybe back to your founding story as well — is that this is going global and not being afraid to take on giants like Uber. Frankly, quite a lot of other ambitious teams and founders have struggled to take on Uber. We know the story. Many countries have had their Uber and went away because they just weren't able to compete.
What do you think? Is this the global ambition? Is it the part that Skype went on to be at the time defining a company for the era? Not just doing a small startup but going up and against very aggressive and well-established competitors?
0:06:38 - Kristjan Vilosius
I guess it's the mentality that with the right people, funding and vision it is possible to achieve big things. This kind of entrepreneurial thinking or spirit is very much ingrained in Estonians and it's a good question to ask why is it so? I think this feeling of liberation and that the world is your oyster, an approach that developed into people's minds after the USSR collapsed, I guess it helped them to think big and to really dream big. But the other element that you touched upon here was how come, for example, Bolt has been able to compete against Uber while many others have failed globally? It's also the mindset of being super efficient. Bolt’s CEO Markus Villig has commented many times that they are trying to run very efficient operations and that efficiency and that kind of scrappiness that is built into the company's culture has allowed them to take on those giants, and many founders from the region think alike.
0:07:50 - Alex Shevelenko
I agree. This may be a Soviet-era thing or maybe just a general lack of resources where there is not a ton of venture capital money dropped on you on day one. You are probably an exception to this rule. We'll come back to that. But I think there's the DNA of survival, working in a constrained resource environment, which is if you have a centrally planned economy, you almost never have anything that you need at the right time. So you have to figure stuff out. And it does seem like it's a secret sauce if you transplant that DNA into other environments where it may be required. For some competitors, it may be that they're too rich and that's also the source of their demise or at least kind of economic inefficiencies.
But on your end, back to Katana, I worked at my company that I was part of from the early team days, at SuccessFactors that got acquired by SAP. It was obviously an anchor company. I even remember before we got acquired, writing an ebook while working. People weren't going directly against SAP. We were competing, but we found a layer where we're better and then we're trying to play coy, so to speak. And obviously, we're competing. That's why we got acquired and it was a good thing for them at the time. Maybe you're not going head-on into the main area of strength. But you're taking on an industry that historically is perceived as complicated, cumbersome, limited to technical specialists who need to get trained for months in terms of how to use various components of the ERP. Guide me a little bit what drove you to do that and how are you going about disrupting the status quo in this space?
0:10:06 - Kristjan Vilosius
Let me start by very briefly introducing Katana to provide the context for the listeners here. Katana is a cloud inventory software for small and medium-sized businesses globally. What we do in Katana is we're going to make sure that companies can efficiently and effortlessly store, order, use, make and sell physical goods, everything related to physical goods. And so the software combines purchasing, manufacturing, order fulfillment, warehouse management, inventory management, and is very interesting across a variety of industries: from cosmetics, food and beverage, apparel, furniture and so on and so forth. The journey for me personally is my background in investment banking. I started my career in my 20s in investment banking, then continued in my 30s into what I call my corporate career period, and ended up working as the CEO of one of the largest investment firms, the family offices here in Estonia. But the story of Katana begins from another path that I've taken in life, which is angel investing.
So for the past decade, I've been an active angel investor in tech here in Estonia and the Baltics but also investing in more mature businesses. It was about eight years ago when I helped to co-found a direct-to-consumer manufacturing company and we were trying to find an ERP solution for such a modern manufacturer. Then look through the product offerings of the names that you mentioned before and its competitors. So these traditional big, complex, expensive business suites dominate the ERP market, especially when we talk about mid-market and enterprise.
I was just puzzled: how is it possible that one of the largest software verticals in the world, ERP, is considered by some 50 billion US dollars annually, globally? How come the market leaders are so clunky, so expensive, so hard to implement? You have these horror stories on the market of companies spending millions and years trying to implement those complex ERP products. So I felt that it must be possible to build something that is easy to use or at least significantly easier to use. Not just easy to use in terms of product features but easy to onboard, implement, consume, communicate within all its aspects.
0:12:53 - Alex Shevelenko
Right, yeah, we have. We have a saying that we like it all kind of, because I love your alliteration here.
We have, like easy to understand, easy to try, easy to buy, easy to deploy, and you know like so something like that right like so something that you want people to understand that you know, do it, talk about it to their friends after you've been successful, right, and not some sort of forced case study in a conference where you know it's sort of contrived as it gets. You know it's like, yeah well, we worked for two years with our brilliant partners and we went live.
0:13:34 - Kristjan Vilosius
Yeah, precisely, and internally here we kind of joked about it that, like you know, that let's take this easy to use and put it on steroids.
0:13:43 - Alex Shevelenko
Yeah.
0:13:44 - Kristjan Vilosius
And then use that concept in the vertical. That is everything but easy to use. This is precisely what the ERP software vertical is right. So some of the big questions these were some of the big questions that we asked and during this mapping exercise, when trying to find a solution like that to this modern direct-to-consumer manufacturer, it became a very then for me that there is a market opportunity. It's going to be a tough journey because it's difficult to enter the ERP market. It's probably one of the most expensive products to build because it's so feature-rich. But if you start small, with a clear focus, and start moving up the market step by step, then eventually we should reach a spot where we can start up the market step by step. Then eventually we should reach a spot where we can start competing with the big ones SAPs and Oracle NetSuite of this world. And this is precisely the journey that we've been on for the past seven years now with Katana and yeah, so you could say that Katana was born out of personal frustration.
0:14:46 - Alex Shevelenko
So what's interesting in that founding story is also that you were an investor-turned-founder right, and the last big challenge to the ERP hegemony, so to speak, was Dave Duffield. You know HR centric ERP back in the days. And then he just went and went down the cloud route and there were some user improvements probably not like as massive, you know, because they ultimately went after the enterprises. You give you personally the nudge that, yeah, I can, I can go and you know, take on, take on the giants here without having you know that depth of direct experience and building something that complex yourself yeah, I mean, firstly, to be fully transparent.
0:15:42 - Kristjan Vilosius
Here there is if I would have known everything that I know today, would I have taken on the journey? And I think this is a question that many, many, many founders ask themselves. In every entrepreneur, there has to be a certain level of naivety. You have to be to some extent naive, because if you knew all the struggles and all the obstacles, you would shy away, right? So? But then again, what kind of gave me that confidence?
Is that, firstly, my founding team, my co-founders, having you know, my technical co-founder having experience from the days of Skype and Playtech and unicorns here we have in the region, so very strong kind of technical expertise that he was able to import.
And my other co-founder, very strong in having worked with companies that are implementing ERPs and their data solutions and so on and so forth. And the fact that we went after the SMB market and we are still a SMB product, we haven't moved into enterprise. So we understood that if we go step by step and if we move up market step by step, starting with the smallest customer that is most underserviced and then moving upward from there, we should be able to show traction along the way and attract enough capital that, over the course of several years, we reach a point where we break this barrier of entry that these traditional ERP players have built over the decades and we'll be able to amass enough capital to build enough product to start to get access to some of the larger businesses step by step, and this is exactly what we have done. So it is a huge elephant but, as the saying goes, “Chop it into smaller pieces and eat it piece by piece.” That has been very much the motto and the way that we have approached this journey.
0:17:30 - Alex Shevelenko
And so it sounds like by picking on direct-to-consumer manufacturer, which was at the time probably one of the hotter categories, you kind of identified yes, great, new growing market. By definition they are smaller, or if they were being bought, maybe by somebody, but they maybe remained independent, and so on. So that sounds great. Now the market is a little bit not as in vogue, at least from investor enthusiasm. What does that mean for you as somebody serving that market? Are you seeing implications of that? A lot of people here are like well, you have the SaaS recession you kind of may have. Was there a D2C recession and how did you handle that after you've already taken off on your? Was your product?
0:18:21 - Kristjan Vilosius
Great question and you're absolutely correct that in the early days when we launched I think we went live with our prototype back in 2008, spring, 2008. And in the early days we were focused on direct-to-consumer manufacturers and the kind of the lower end of the market, the smaller one, the smaller guys you know, larger workshops, smaller factories, maybe only you know 10 to 15 member teams and during that time you know this was a booming industry. And then COVID hit and there was another layer of boost from that for direct-to-consumer. But at the same time as we moved up markets, we were building out the product for a direct-to-consumer manufacturer. Then we realized that it's one of the most kind of complex business models to have because it entails direct--to-consumer manufacturers, entails traditional manufacturing, e-commerce, retail and as those businesses scale, they typically also started selling B2B, so it's also the element of distribution and resale right.
So while we were building a product for direct-to-consumer manufacture, we noticed that we are becoming a better fit for pure traditional manufacturers or B2B businesses or pure retailers or pure distributors, and the customer segment started widening and the differentiation started to increase. So today a big part of Katana's customers are still manufacturers and a big part of Katana's customers have a direct-to-consumer element, but most of Katana businesses today are what we call kind of hybrid business models. The lines between manufacturing and retail, e-commerce and retail are getting blurry. Many of our customers don't identify themselves anymore as direct-to-consumer manufacturers or distributors. They rather say, “We are a cosmetics brand”, “We are a furniture brand” or “We make electric bikes”, etc. So over the years the business models that we service have widened. We moved beyond manufacturing, but we still are operating very much in the space of physical goods.
0:20:22 - Alex Shevelenko
Got it. When you deal with somebody who is more consumer-centric, they really have a perception of themselves. First and foremost, we're a brand and then we're something else. We found that that's kind of a very interesting area where experiences and communications, like to those companies the expectations are higher than some other more conventional B2B areas which are not historically as brand centric. And part of it could be that the leaders in that business come from brand background and are like big brand believers and they've been trained and they have higher expectations. So to sell to them, you need to be more like them and part of it is just there's just more trained eye, right, like, there's just a trained eye for, like you know hey, I'm paying attention to this I noticed that, you know, in running my own startup, like I think I'm a lot more dangerous it was my expectations now than when I was starting out, kind of like wanting to be dangerous, but I wasn't as much.
So, what are you seeing? Right, because you have this broad range from probably pretty traditional manufacturers that are kind of much more focused on the manufacturing and, you know, six Sigma, excellence, and then there is like the brand opposite of that, and sometimes it's one and the same, but what are you seeing and how is that influencing how you go to market?
0:21:50 - Kristjan Vilosius
You're absolutely correct. But I would even say that very often today it's kind of one and the same. We are servicing brands who have those high expectations and of course many of them also have in-house manufacturing operations, at least to some extent. Some of course, outsource, but there is an element of in-house manufacturing or at least some form of final assembly. And, yes, they identify as brands, which means that there is a certain level of expectations towards us as well. As they are customer-centric, then the value that in the end, our customers want and need to deliver is that they ship right products at the right time in right quantities to the right customer, now and when those companies are customer centric. That means that you know there is very little room for error for us to make sure that they can deliver on the promise. We are the system of records, we are the system of records and we are their main business software and they rely on us to deliver on that promise.
I mean you could argue that maybe more traditional manufacturing businesses or traditional resellers or distributors that there was more has been or maybe to date is a bit more legroom for mistakes.
Definitely with those modern brands, the expectations are high, which has pushed us as a company to really deliver beyond what was traditionally expected from an ERP.
You could even say that traditionally, customers expect ERPs to be a bit clunky or difficult to use, but we are working today with brands that don't have that expectation and we need to respond to that, which means we have to not just be able to deliver on that promise in the product, but everything beyond that as well the way we communicate with the customers. We have turned our customer support into a competitive advantage and our customer success into a competitive advantage for us. We're over-invested in that. You could even say Make sure that we are there for them, because initial ERPs are notoriously bad when it comes to support and success and customer communications. So this is just one example. The other one I could say is that we put a lot of effort into making sure that we have proper product design included in whatever we build. So we wouldn't end up with a spreadsheet in the browser with 1,000 buttons while the user needs 10.
So, these examples are from the product, but also beyond the way you consume, where you onboard what is the experience there? Kind of beyond the way you consume, where you onboard, what is the experience there. So we try to think kind of beyond the traditional of you know, we just build EAPI software, but rather we build a company that needs to be able to deliver the software that delivers the promise to our customers, but also everything around it services, the way we communicate, everything beyond that needs to also deliver that promise. So we don't see Katana merely as a software company. We see that we build a lot of software that makes these business processes effortless, but in the end we want to enable growth for those entrepreneurs and so we also teach them and guide them.
0:25:08 - Alex Shevelenko
So this is fascinating. So this feels great when I know you right and I work with you and maybe I hear a customer that's already worked with you. But for most people they discover you somehow Either it's through outbound you know you reaching out, especially when before you had the brand team and kind of bigger credibility in the market. So how do you get that across? Like what's been your? You know, is it founder-led sales at the beginning? That was kind of driving this. Do you have a large team? How do you design this team right? Because we talked about originally the software maybe is in Estonia, like the sales, are you also centralizing that? You know it'd be very curious to see how do you bring to market a new category, at least for SME, new category defining brand yeah, I'll take a quick deep dive into the go-to-market motion.
0:26:03 - Kristjan Vilosius
So, as we started, when we started, we obviously were very much inbound marketing driven, demand capture mainly, and of course, at some point during the revolution, demand generation layer was added on top of it. But where we have our big bet today is in tech partnerships and channel partnerships. And why is that? It's because, compared to traditional business suites, like you know, or a client suite or SAP, they are checks of all, trade, master of none, in that sense that they build all the modules that the customer requires themselves and so they have their own CRM they have their own accounting, they have their own shipping, while we at Katana are focused on inventory management and deliver our software in that field.
But when it comes to accounting, we integrate with QuickBooks Online and Xero, the best SMB accounting platforms out there. Right when it comes to e-commerce storefront, there's Shopify. When it comes to CRMs, when it comes to shipping, we integrate with Best in Class. As a result, the tech stack that the customer has is best of breed and best tool for the job right Now. As a result, we are very active in the tech and channel partnership ecosystems of our key partners. So we collaborate a lot with QuickBooks Online, we collaborate with Shopify and to make sure that, as they also move up market, that we can deliver that experience to those customers who have those advanced inventory needs and who look to build a tech stack of best of breed products instead of going down the business suite route, which kind of has this major vendor lock for them for years to come. So, to sum up, it's inbound marketing and, on top of that, tech and channel partnership play with the likes of QuickBooks Online and Shopify.
0:27:47 - Alex Shevelenko
So let's dive in. So let's start with the inbound. So what does that mean? You know when you're you're going against, kind of. It sounds like demand capture. You know heavily so. So it sounds like it's a mature category. But I, you know, I'm curious how many people look up inventory management type of like, a very like is this? Is this sort of just feeding you, like the like, because it's a pretty deliberate thing that people are looking for? Or or are you going around and seeing adjacent areas for opportunities to capture that demand?
0:28:19 - Kristjan Vilosius
The honest answer here is it's both. I mean, in the early days it was very much demand capture and SEO work that we did at Katana and we invested quite a lot in it to capture exactly the people that are out there looking for manufacturing, erp or inventory management software or Shopify manufacturing or QuickBooks, inventory and elements like that. But then, of course, over time, more of the content, play and demand generation, e-books and all sorts of materials to attract the audience that might not necessarily be purchasing at this point in time, but then to try to turn them into leads over a longer period of time. So it's both and that's how we have developed over the years. But I guess it's very similar to many other SaaS products that are selling to the SMB space in that sense.
0:29:11 - Alex Shevelenko
And are you finding that you're starting to replace other solutions at this point? Or are you still capturing new unmet demand where, where you know you're, you're probably not competing with something best in class, you know like a bunch of spreadsheets or whatever? Whatever is the basic, the basic rudimentary workarounds for what you're building?
0:29:33 - Kristjan Vilosius
Great question, it's funny. I mean as an investor and someone who has co-founded businesses that sell physical products, many companies I mean. They initially started building some form of a spreadsheets-based structure to run the early days of the operations. To run the early days of the operations, and I've been just amazed at how big of a business people have built on spreadsheets. And then, of course, how big of a mess they can get themselves into, trying to continue scaling it.
I thought in the early days that you know very quickly we would be into replacing only, and you know spreadsheets has its limits. But still to date I find leads in our funnel that are crying out for help because they've been delaying that purchasing decision of a proper inventory management or a proper ERP tech stack and I've scaled to tens of millions in revenue and they still have a big part of the business running on spreadsheets and those are out of sync and everybody has their own version of it and there's not a single point of truth in the business. Everyone has their own understanding what's the inventory level of this and that and, of course, doing that transformation too late, it becomes a challenge for the company. So the earlier the better. Of course you set yourself up for success if you invest in that early days.
0:30:57 - Alex Shevelenko
So you mentioned, you kind of brought back your investor hat, so let's kind of come back to that a little bit Sure. So you know, you've raised, I think, like 36.
0:31:07 - Kristjan Vilosius
We've raised in total 50, but the latest round CSP was 36 years 36, right, total of 50.
0:31:14 - Alex Shevelenko
Great investors, kind of the same folks that backed Spotify and the Atomica folks kind of were the ones behind Skype, originally as well known. But the interesting thing is you were here, a former investor, raising from those folks. What did you bring into those investor conversations that you think other founders would benefit from that have not worn the investor shoes and founder shoes before, because you really had a pretty unfair advantage, I would say, at least in that component of building a business.
0:31:52 - Kristjan Vilosius
Well, it's a great question because to some ways you could say that it's an advantage, To some ways you could say it's a disadvantage, and I'll explain. Obviously, there is an advantage when it comes to fundraising. You have, when you are, you know, have worked in investment banking in the past. You know how to build your presentations, you know how to build your financial models right. You know how to build your presentations, you know how to build your financial models right and, having been an investor, you understand the psychology game of the parties on both sides of the table.
But it was also for me personally. I mean, I also had to prove that I'm an entrepreneur at heart and I want to solve this customer problem and I'm not an investment banker or former investment banker or a former angel investor that knows how to build a model or do a nice pitch deck. So in the early days, I think it was both an advantage and a disadvantage. I guess I came in well-prepared but also had to show that I had this personal relation and passion for the problem at hand and I really want to put myself into the customer's shoes, understand their perspective, and then build a product and service around it that solves that core problem. So yeah, I think it was both.
0:33:09 - Alex Shevelenko
Okay, what would you do differently if you had to raise again or if you had to build a business again? You're starting from scratch. You've had a few lessons New market environment.
0:33:25 - Kristjan Vilosius
AI is around. Ai is around, obviously, and that also plays a big role when it comes to our roadmap in Katana for the coming years, as it, I guess, does for everyone right what I would do differently. Of course there has been decisions along the way. In hindsight you would say that some of the decisions should have been taken earlier and I should have been more decisive here and there, but I would take on that journey again 100%. I mean the pleasure that I get from working with those customers. We are in the SMB space. Very often we talk to the founders and CEOs directly.
That are building these super cool businesses, super cool products. So when people come to me and ask for advice for starting entrepreneurs, I often tell them, “Look, there are many ways in this world how to make money and you may stumble on opportunities from time to time that look very lucrative from a financial perspective: if I do this, there's the likelihood I will succeed financially.” But you have to ask yourself — are you passionate about it? Do you really want to solve this problem? Because the entrepreneurial journey, it gets tough along the way, right At some point you have to have that resilience and grit to continue. And if you can't relate to the customer, to the problem personally, you don't have the passion for it, you're doing it for the wrong reasons, for financial gain only. Then it's very difficult to maintain that required level of resilience, in my opinion.
Yeah, I'll give a side comment from my personal life. I really love surfing. I'm not really good at it, but I love it. I think of it exactly as a sport that suits very well a founder or an Estonian. You have to spend 59 minutes of an hour in the water, paddling and fighting the waves for the potential to get 60 seconds of riding the wave. There's a lot of grit and hard work that needs to be done to get the reward. And I think it helps to build that mental resilience that is required.
0:35:56 - Alex Shevelenko
This actually leads me to my last question about how you're approaching building your team. I think we did a little check on LinkedIn. You're attracting people from some of those unicorns, great companies that have been successful to you know a. Attract you know great folks to join you right in a market where I think it matters, right. If you're in Estonia and so you know relatively limited population, you know that's, that's valuable. And then what are you doing to build a culture you know that will set you up to take on you know other. You know SAP, whatever you say about it, has its culture. It's very, you know you driven, yeah, and a strong one, and it has been a source of strength. You know Salesforce. You know great culture more and more around the customers, right? So a lot of these sort of venerable ERP, you know, and enterprise software solutions have had a very strong culture. I would love to hear how you're thinking about it in the long term and who you're attracting right now.
0:36:54 - Kristjan Vilosius
Yeah, I'm happy to comment on this Now. Firstly, yes, you're correct. I mean, we started the company in Estonia and the product development is still here and there's a lot of good engineering talent available here in the region thanks to Skype and the spillover effect that followed. But by now, most of our customers are in North America. We're very much US, and now, considering that most of our customers are in North America, we're very much US and Canada-focused. Then most of our customer-facing teams are also based there, so it's very global, and in addition to that, we also sell to Australia and New Zealand and UK, so, due to that, it's a very global talent pool.
Now, in terms of culture, what we have built to attract the talent, I think most importantly, we have tried to build a company that is very transparent internally as well as externally, and what advantage that we have here, compared to the big ones that we're competing with, is that we've been able to create, thanks to the startup structure and logic, this feeling of ownership. And obviously, all the Katana team members are our shareholders in Katana, and we are very transparent about the good things and the bad things, so all the team members know what are the targets and what is the challenge that we're up against for the next 12, 18 months, 19 months, milestones that we need to reach. We talk very openly about the things that are going well, but we also talk very openly about the things that are going well, but we also talk very openly about the things that are not going well, because that's the only way for us to improve right. So there's very little sugarcoating, very little, quite a direct culture, but directness together with empathy, meaning that we we I mean Estonians in general don't really do a lot of small talk. We get straight to the point, and I think this is this. This is part that's become part of our culture as well.
We attack those problems together and we don't try to brush things under the carpet that are perhaps not moving as well as they should. So I try to give my team a lot of ownership, together with responsibility, over those areas. So I've tried to employ a team that takes full ownership over their respective domains and I've given them this freedom to operate, but then, of course, try to hold them accountable when it comes to the targets we need to reach and the milestones, and not to compromise on the values that we've defined for Katana along that way. So this environment of transparency and ability to execute and freedom to operate has allowed us to attract talent globally. But, of course, for a company coming from Estonia, it's a constant challenge to get that talent from the international markets and that's something we need to continue investing into.
0:39:28 - Alex Shevelenko
Well, we are rooting for you, Kristjan. Super inspired by your story, Katana's story, Estonia's story. Where can people that want to follow up and learn more about what you guys are up to, can find you and the company?
0:39:43 - Kristjan Vilosius
Yeah, thanks for all the listeners here and thank you, Alex, for having me. If you want to learn more about Katana, open your Google and type in Katana Inventory Management and you'll find it straight away. Follow me on LinkedIn and I'm looking forward to seeing you exploring the product and the service offering that we have, and I have to say, it was a real pleasure being on the show, Alex, and talking with you here today.
0:40:06 - Alex Shevelenko
Perfect, thank you!