Investor Partner @ Practica Capital. Co-author of the annual Baltic Funding Report. Baltic tech - patterns, mistakes, the parts nobody says out loud.
Tallinn, Estonia
Joined September 2015
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Tim Vaino retweeted
Don't (Start) Work in Venture Capital
Almost every day I get a note from a student saying they want to get into venture investing. got a nice one yesterday from a rising senior at Harvard (comp sci major), here was my response:
my strong, strong recommendation: don't start in venture capital or even investing! this is the greatest time in the world to *build* something. investors are parasites. they (we) need a host. as an investor, your destiny is basically whether you can find somebody to hitch your wagon to.
but if you're technical and determined, you can now create anything!
that having been said, when you are 21 you aren't exposed to a broad array of problems in the world. most college students i meet just know homework, dating, and food -- and consequently start companies/build products around those areas.
so my recommendation (even if you want to end up as an investor): join a very exciting company now. there are only two jobs at real companies: making the thing, or selling the thing. choose which path you want. and as you get more experience there, and are exposed to more problems in the world, and more people in a work environment, maybe you'll start something.
and THEN, you'll have a powerful network, an understanding of how products work vs don't work, deep insights that you can coach people with, etc. and you'll probably already have done a few little investments here and there. and THEN you will be interesting for a venture firm. i didn't reach out to any vcs to get a job, they all pursued me, which is not meant to sound arrogant -- rather it's how most firms operate.
most venture firms don't hire mbas anymore. we want people who enhance our ability to find, pick, and win deals, and overwhelmingly this means people who worked at a startup. there are exceptions, but they're rare. it's the inverse of the world 30 years ago.
good luck!
Tim Vaino retweeted
Before you even think about quitting your job, these 5 systems need to run automatically:
Tim Vaino retweeted
Bot-detection startup Spur nabs $200M from Insight techcrunch.com/2026/07/28/bo…
Tim Vaino retweeted
Several improvements on Affiliates dropped this week
You can now shape commissions around your economics: one time or recurring, capped to a set duration or lifetime, and set per product 🍦
Your affiliates get credited no matter how: a link, a discount code, or your own funnel
Tim Vaino retweeted
DoorDash is building its own delivery drones and has received FAA approval to operate them commercially. The company still expects humans will handle “a vast majority” of deliveries bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Tim Vaino retweeted
He created jQuery UI which powers 19M website (6% of the internet).
Now he’s solo teaching agents how to design (160k installs and counting).
Solo Founders Podcast ep 21 is live with @pbakaus of Impeccable.
03:01 The era of the 40-year-old founder
16:19 He started a company at 11
21:55 Why go solo now
26:31 Chief of staff before engineers
32:49 Killing AI slop
1:05:54 Steve Jobs, the greatest editor
1:21:59 The case for solo founding
Tim Vaino retweeted
Google brings its age-assurance technology to Android developers worldwide techcrunch.com/2026/07/29/go…
Tim Vaino retweeted
Replit Design reimagines the UX for AI design with Ambient Intelligence.
You don’t need to prompt. You don’t need design language.
At every step the agent suggests next best actions that you can take with one click, taking you from idea to amazing outputs fast.
Tim Vaino retweeted
I compared 1,127 startups:
B2B B2C Difference
Revenue $2,851 $884 3.2×
MRR $750 $264 2.8×
ARPU $31 $11 2.7×
Rev. growth +0.2% −5.6%
0 → $1K 90 days 101 days
All B2B economics are stronger.
What they're selling:
🔌 APIs
📊 Analytics
📈 Sales tools
🤖 AI automation
💻 Developer tools
Start a boring business.
Numbers are median.
Data from @trust_mrr.
Tim Vaino retweeted
"That logo you’re chasing is costing you your market."
"Every AI founder believes they’re inventing the future. And they are! But your buyer doesn’t purchase the future; they purchase either proof or math."
"If they need proof, go win the logo that gives it to them. If they need math, get on a plane and show it to them before your competitor or the incumbent does."
"The founders who get this wrong won’t fail because they built the wrong product or picked the wrong strategy off a menu."
"They’ll fail because they never asked which game they were in, and in a market moving this fast, you only get to ask it once."
a16z's Joe Schmidt and Julian Marx on the two GTM playbooks for AI companies selling into the enterprise: a16z.news/p/lighthouse-or-la…
Tim Vaino retweeted
Your customers will tell you exactly what to build next.
If you're not hearing it, you're not asking.
Tim Vaino retweeted
The biggest misconception around vibe coding is that AI replaces software engineering.
It doesn't.
AI makes building dramatically faster, but it also makes it easier to ship insecure code at scale. Security, rate limiting, authentication, legal compliance, and observability don't disappear just because an LLM wrote the code.
The future isn't just about building fast it's about building responsibly.
Vibe coders are getting sued.
People are shipping apps with real users and skipping the boring stuff that kills them.
A 20+ year dev shared the pre-launch checklist every AI builder needs.
I added what I learned after shipping 60+ apps at the agency.
Don't skip this:
1. Protect yourself, not just your app. The moment you collect user data you're in legal territory (GDPR, CCPA). Have a privacy policy. Know where user data lives.
2. Row Level Security. Without RLS, anyone can open DevTools and read your entire database. Supabase → Auth → Policies. Zero policies means your app is naked. 5 min to fix.
3. Test the failure path, not just the happy path. Wrong password 5x. Reset for an email that doesn't exist. Verification link clicked twice. Signup with an existing email. Catches 80% of auth bugs.
4. Security baseline in 2 min. Prompt your AI: "Review my app as a security specialist and make sure I have strong security headers and a solid baseline security posture."
5. OWASP. Prompt: "Review my app against OWASP standards and highlight vulnerabilities." This is where SQL injection, XSS and auth bugs actually get caught.
6. Client-side validation is UX, not security. Attackers disable JS and hit your API directly. Validate again on the server. Every time.
7. AI code leaks data in 3 spots: .env values in the frontend, API responses returning too much, secrets in logs. Prompt: "Check my app for credential or sensitive data leaks in frontend or API routes."
8. API keys in the frontend means game over. If it's in the browser, assume it's already taken. Move it server-side or proxy it.
9. Rate limits before someone burns your API bill. Cap every endpoint hitting a paid API. I've watched a Supabase bill jump from $20 to $200 in a day.
10. CAPTCHA on public forms (Cloudflare Turnstile is free) plus CORS locked to your domain. 10 min, kills bot floods.
11. Error messages that don't leak. "User not found", not "SELECT * FROM users failed". Log full errors server-side, show users generic messages.
Build fast. Just don't ship naked.
(full breakdown in my article below)
Tim Vaino retweeted
At 28, I sold my first SaaS for 7 figures.
I started it with just $500.
Here's the exact playbook I'd follow if I had to do it again:
↓
1. Don't reinvent the wheel
Our biggest mistake : we spent 6 months trying to copy a YC startup that didn't even have product-market fit.
Huge waste of time.
Instead, find a SaaS that's already profitable.
If customers are paying and the company is growing, the demand already exists.
Your job isn't to invent a market.
It's to build a better product for a specific audience.
2. Go vertical
Horizontal SaaS is hard.
We focused only on Shopify e-commerce stores.
Instead of building 100 mediocre features, we built 10 features our niche couldn't live without.
Your messaging becomes obvious.
Your sales become easier.
Your product gets better faster.
3. Get to $50k MRR
This is where things become interesting.
A SaaS doing ~$50k MRR can often sell for 2-3x ARR depending on growth, retention and profitability.
If your product costs $100/month...
You only need ~500 customers.
Here's how we got them:
• Cold email
• LinkedIn outreach
• B2B influencers
• Organic content on X & LinkedIn
• Affiliate program
• Podcasts your buyers already listen to
One rule:
Don't create content about your product.
Create content that solves your customers' problems.
4. Sell it
Most founders go to Acquire (dot) com
That's a great option.
We didn't.
I searched LinkedIn for people actively buying SaaS businesses.
Messaged around 10 buyers.
Got on calls.
One acquired the company.
The entire process took less than 2 months after due diligence started.
Why did we sell?
The team wanted to build something much bigger.
That became GojiberryAI.
Remember : building a SaaS isn't easy.
You'll spend hundreds of hours solving problems no one else sees.
But the formula is simple:
• Build something people already want.
• Focus on one niche.
• Get customers.
• Keep improving.
Do that consistently...
And selling your SaaS becomes an option, not a dream.
Tim Vaino retweeted
GPS spoofing and other countermeasures meant to knock drones from the skies over battlefields are giving rise to novel navigation systems that will work even in the face of intense jamming bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
