Building a Global ERP Company from Estonia: Katana CEO Kristjan Vilosius (Part 1)

ERP is an entrenched category full of incumbents. Katana is a wonderful story of excellent positioning and strategy work to find market foothold.

Sramana Mitra: All right, Kristjan, let’s start with your personal background. Where are you from, where were you born, raised, what kind of circumstances?

Kristjan Vilosius: Firstly, thank you for having me here today. I’m the CEO and one of the three co-founders at Katana. And my personal story starts in the early eighties when I was born in Estonia, which was part of the Soviet Union back then. I don’t remember much of it since I was very young, but I spent part of my childhood in the Soviet Union.

In the early nineties when Estonia became independent, a world of opportunities opened up for my family and for myself as well. I was born in a small town on the west coast of Estonia. Estonia is a small country with a population of only 1.5 million. I went to university in Estonia and studied finance.

So, my background is in finance and accounting. I started my career in finance, specifically in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) advisory. Back then, I was working for a Swedish based M&A advisory firm that was expanding in the Baltics. That period gave me the opportunity to work with various businesses and business models as I was engaged in helping owners to sell their businesses and advising various private equity funds and venture capital firms in acquiring targets in the region and strategic players as well. It allowed me to take a glimpse into all the various business models you could think of and give me a good understanding of how different business models are run.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking of?

Kristjan Vilosius: This was in my early twenties and mid-twenties. I believe that was from 2005 until 2011-12.

Sramana Mitra: So, you’re doing this work based in Estonia, working all around the Baltics.

Kristjan Vilosius: The Baltics and a bit of the Nordic area as well.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. So, Skype has already happened in Estonia at this point.

Kristjan Vilosius: It was kind of starting to scale. The tech industry was starting to take shape. All the success of Estonia is the spillover effect of Skype.  

Sramana Mitra: You know, in regional economies, there comes a moment when things start to break open, and Skype was that moment for Estonia for sure.

Kristjan Vilosius: Skype was definitely that moment for Estonia. Today, Estonia has the highest number of unicorns per capita. We can trace back all of them pretty much to Skype, either former employees of Skype or some key talent from Skype that has moved or joined the new firm and that firm has flourished into a unicorn. So that was definitely the pivotal moment for the local tech scene. It’s the same for Katana. Our roots also lie there. One of my co-founders, our CTO, is a former Skyper.

Sramana Mitra: Okay.

Kristjan Vilosius: I think in the early days, 10%-20% of our team members were ex-Skypers.

Sramana Mitra: Did you start Katana right after your M&A advisory work?

Kristjan Vilosius: I wish I had, but there was another stage in my journey before I got to founding Katana. So, I left M&A and started my corporate career in my late twenties. This lasted another six years. I joined as a group CFO of a regional distributor and retailer of pharmaceuticals in the region. It’s for a big company in Estonia with more than a thousand employees and several hundred million in turnover.

Then about a year later, when I was thirty, I was promoted to the group CEO position. So, at a very young age, I was at the helm of a company that had more than one thousand employees.

It was a very pivotal moment for me in my career. I’d made a lot of mistakes, but I also had some very valuable learnings. During the years when I was leading that business, I think it also helped me to build confidence in jumping into the entrepreneurial journey that followed a few years thereafter.

So, it was it wasn’t until my mid-thirties when I decided that I’d enough of the corporate life. My entrepreneurial spirit in me didn’t allow me to stay there much longer. I realized that I have to make the jump now or I will never do it.

That was 2017 when we first started kind of thinking about Katana and started building the prototype. We launched it in the spring of 2018. By that time, I had fully exited my corporate career and dived head into the entrepreneurial journey.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Global ERP Company from Estonia: Katana CEO Kristjan Vilosius
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