Present in 200 cities, Startup Grind is a Google powered million-strong community of entrepreneurs. It got there by organizing intimate, local events with a hundred attendees, one speaker, and a single host. Each event is an hour-long conversation. One that offers hands-on insight, personal stories, and a chance to ask questions from folks who have failed, and made it.

On the 21st of February at 6 pm at LIFT99co, Startup Grind Tallinn will host Märt Lume, former employee #1 at Tiny Speck, the maker of the massively multiplayer game Glitch, to talk about its famous pivot to Slack.

Such radical pivots are rarely met with such success, yet this team has done it twice: their first success Flickr was a pivot from Game Neverending, a desperate attempt to make something in 5 months out of the tech of the “failed game”, which was image sharing. During the 4 years of Glitch development, the team beefed up the classic IRC-client with “integrations”, “notifications”, “file previews”, “file uploads”, “mobile view” etc, which turned out to be a pretty good idea for a product as well.

Märt will share his story of being inside the pivot and outside (like most of Tiny Speck’s 55 employees, he moved on to another company as Slack’s product development began), what was it like to see your 4 years of passionate work and relationships come to a tragic end, and what were some of the key product development principles of the team which has executed the unimaginable pivot twice.

Agenda:

06:00 PM - Networking and drinks with the greatest community members

07:00 PM - Fireside Chat with Märt Lume

08:00 PM - Networking

Startup Grind is the largest independent startup community, actively educating, inspiring, and connecting 1,000,000 entrepreneurs in over 200 cities. We nurture startup ecosystems in 98 countries through events, media, and partnerships with organizations like Google for Entrepreneurs. The cornerstone of Startup Grind global community are monthly events featuring successful local founders, innovators, educators and investors who share lessons learned on the road to building great companies. Founded in Silicon Valley, Startup Grind has now hosted 5,000 fireside chats since its founding in 2010. To date, Startup Grind has helped millions of entrepreneurs find mentorship, connect to partners and hires, pursue funding, and reach new users.

The event is supported by SendGrid and their Startup Accelerate Program