The Prime Minister of Estonia Visits Twilio HQ to Roll Out E-Residency Program

The Prime Minister of Estonia Visits Twilio HQ to Roll Out E-Residency Program

Today, the Prime Minister of Estonia, Taavi Rõivas, made the 5,500 mile trek from Estonia to visit Twilio HQ. While Estonia might seem like a world away, Prime Minister Rõivas is eliminating the geographic barriers that prevent entrepreneurs in the US from establishing companies abroad. At Twilio, Rõivas discussed Estonia’s E-Residency card program that gives anyone the ability to securely maintain a digital identity for non-residents and allows digital authentication and the digital signing of documents.

Along with 60 state officials and Estonian entrepreneurs, Prime Minister Rõivas met with Ott Kaukver, who is Vice President of Engineering at Twilio.

Ott talked with the group of state officials and Estonian entrepreneurs about the parallels of shipping new features and gathering customer feedback at Twilio, and managing the E-Residency program. “For them, it’s about how we work. What’s the philosophy? What do we do well with our small teams?” says Ott. Twilio R&D is built around small, empowered and self contained teams that are responsible for delivering great experiences to customers, and gathering feedback to iterate on their work. This structure isn’t common in large companies, but it’s essential to the way Twilio operates.

Prime Minister Rõivas and his team are working to scale and iterate the E-Residency program to unlock new opportunities for entrepreneurs all over the world. Deputy Secretary General for communication and state information systems, Taavi Kotka, told Zdnet “Ten million e-residents is a bold goal which shows our ambition. We want to create an infrastructure with our services that would permit companies, and not only Estonian companies, to use that infrastructure and make Estonia bigger. We have 80,000 companies in Estonia right now, if we could double that number with e-residency, it really would be something big.”

Ott talked with Rõivas’ about how he manages Twilio’s development teams to keep the company moving and constantly shipping new features. “After my presentation someone said ‘I’ve learned more in two days here, than I had in a quarter’,” said Ott.

After Rõivas presented his talk, and Ott answered questions from the audience, Ott couldn’t help but feel as sense of homecoming.

“I feel great the Prime Minister is here. I’m really proud I could give something back to the country. I saw people leaving really inspired,” said Ott. “It’s kind of an intrinsic motive as a citizen to give back to your country. If I can help it, give a one hour presentation and showing how things are done here [at Twilio] and inspire people, that’s the least I can do.”

The first recipients of the E-Residency identification card are:

1. Edward Lucas (British Journalist and Columnist)
2. Stephen Albert Jurvetson (Managing Director of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson)
3. Timothy Cook Draper (Founder and Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson)
4. Benjamin Abraham Horowitz (Co-Founder and General Partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz)

“There’s a huge interest from people who want to start companies in the European Union. They’ll have the opportunity to control their money, there are no obtrusive tariffs involved. They have a EU residency, and the key to unlock everything in the private and public sector in the country. That’s the main benefit,” said Kokta.

Learn more about the program here