Fintech Leader Promotes Green Investing For Self-Reliance

  TALLINN, Estonia – When Triin Hertmann tells me straight away at our first meeting she doesn’t have her “A” game because she only had three hours sleep, I’m thinking:

  “This is going to be interesting.”

  We were sitting in the conference room of the company she co-founded, Grünfin, which helps corporate employees build retirement income through green and sustainable investments.   Triin explained the reason for her fatigue: She hosted a party for business colleagues the night before that ended at 4 a.m. Yet she hadn’t cancelled our early morning interview.

  As one of Estonia’s most successful leaders in Estonia’s financial technology [fintech] industry, Triin was high on my list of must meets during my recent visit there. At 44, she already has made a king’s ransom from her early involvement in two successful start-ups – Skype and Wise – and as an investor in more than a dozen companies.

  From my research, I knew Triin had a young family, so I wanted to know why someone financially secure would want to take on the commitment and accompanying stress of directing a startup.

  Her answer was simple and, as I would later learn, obvious.

  “I was too young to sit under a palm tree and drink cocktails the rest of my life.”

Startup Leader

  Triin began our discussion with a surprising fact: Estonia is the startup capital of Europe, an amazing achievement considering its population of 1.3 million, about the same as San Diego.

  She then delivered another doozy: Estonia is home to 10 startups valued at $1 billion or more, another first in Europe and an eye-opening number on any continent. [Such companies are called unicorns.]

  “It’s absolutely unique in the whole world,” Triin said.

  Only 34 years earlier, the country, as part of the USSR, was known as the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. So I wondered how Estonia turned things around so quickly when other former Soviet satellite nations have struggled.

  Triin, of course, had the answer.

  When Estonia became independent in 1991, the average age of its parliament members was around 40. The mindset of these young, nimble leaders was to move away from the past as fast as possible.

  “The question before them was ‘What would you do if you could start a country from scratch?’” Triin said. “So, they were totally focused on building the country up a new way.”

  Unencumbered by tradition or stringent rules, Estonia aligned itself with Europe and began to focus on digitization as a way to prosper.

  The country also benefited from having an inspirational leader, Lennart Meri, as its first post-Soviet era president.

  “He was a visionary with an international viewpoint. And he had a clear idea of how Estonia should move forward. This gave us very strong goals and direction,” Triin said.

From Poverty to Prosperity

  When Estonia broke from the Soviet Union, Triin was 11. Her mother was a pharmacist, her father a worker. She had one sibling, a younger brother. Triin remembers growing up in a typical socialist environment where if you weren’t a Communist party official, you struggled with food shortages and a lack of many basic necessities.

  The other bane of Soviet rule, where there was no incentive to achieve, became evident in her home: “My parents were not ambitious whatsoever.”

  Triin had other ideas.

  “The one thing on my mind when I was growing up was I wanted to do something that would allow me to be totally independent. The only thing I could think of to achieve that was to study as much as I can. And to take every chance I can.”

  As she spoke, I couldn’t help but notice the confidence and intelligence radiating from her blue-gray eyes. Triin had the classic Nordic/Baltic look: Hair so blonde it almost appeared white. Fair skin. Understated makeup. Wholesome. Healthy. She also had a great, natural laugh – always a good sign when you’re the person at the top.

  True to her childhood ambition, Triin studied. Long and hard. By the time she graduated from college with a double major in accounting and international business, Estonia was well on its way to worldwide economic relevance in the world arena.

  Her timing could not have been better. Triin initially worked at a private equity firm and auditing company. Her entry into the fintech world came at 22 when she joined Skype, a pioneer in voice calls and videoconferencing.

  The significance of Skype in the future of the Estonia-connected startups cannot be overstated, according to Triin.

  “Skype was something like the grandmother in a family tree. Many Skype employees created their own startups. And the employees of these companies created a third generation of startups. As of now there are over 900 startups all over the world that began with Skype.”

  Triin’s ascent in fintech began in 2011 when Taavet Hinrikus, Skype’s first employee, co-founded Wise, which created a platform that streamlined global money transfers. She was Wise’s second hire, adding her acumen in finance to a company that eventually was valued at $11 billion when it went public in 2021.

  “It was very inconvenient; I was pregnant with my first child,” Triin said, adding humor to a career-defining moment.

  At Wise she began to better understand the world of business ownership.

  “When you’re involved in a startup, you organize your own area. You build your team. It’s like you’re an entrepreneur inside a bigger organization. You get all the training and accumulate the knowledge without the risk.”

  After 15 years of non-stop working, Triin had had enough. At 37, she cashed in a sizeable Wise buyout – the co-founders had become Estonia’s first billionaires - and joined the unemployed.

  “I had a bad burnout at Wise,” she said. “It took me two years to regroup.”

Back in the Game

  At home, Triin spent more time with her family – she had a second child in 2015 – and considered her next challenge.   Financially independent, she began investing in Estonian startups, not just fintech companies but those involved in education, business software and defense, an emerging sector.

  In particular, she was interested in backing female founders, as she called them. Her reasoning: At the time, only 1% of venture capital investments in Europe involved women.

  Her return to work seemed preordained when a friend from her early years in finance, Karin Nemec, contacted her with a fintech startup idea, which became Grünfin. Once again, the timing was impeccable.

  “By then I decided I wanted to do something bigger than work with my own closed circle of family and friends. Something in which more people would benefit from my actions,” Triin said.

  Grünfin opened in 2022. With 12 employees, it’s a lean company with a large ambition focused on a basic concept: Teaching employees how to self-invest. The opportunity was clearly defined. Unlike in the U.S., Estonian companies do not offer retirement plans such as 401ks, so employees are on their own.

  “Our message to employees is ‘This is one of the last chances you have to make a decision using your savings that can impact your lifestyle,’” said Triin.

  For employers, Grünfin stressed that companies benefit when their workers are financially secure. A measure of Grünfin’s success is that a number of their corporate clients began matching their employee investments with the stipulation they had to stay a minimum of three years or pay back the company’s investment. It became an easy sell, according to Triin.

  “Most companies here would rather match employee investments than offer stock options.”

  Grünfin’s business product, as Triin calls it, works beautifully in her country because of the integration of digitization into every aspect of Estonian life. Most Americans would find it hard to believe that check writing here has been obsolete for years. And voting only with mobile phones is on the horizon. For Estonians, advanced technology is second nature, making it easy for Grünfin to implement its digitized-investment program.

  Grünfin’s secondary but equally important mission: All the companies in its investment portfolio feature green or sustainable technologies.

  “It’s the companies pushing for Net Zero [carbon emissions] that we’re interested in,” Triin said. “[For instance], Microsoft is one of the biggest leaders of sustainability in the world and most people don’t know this.”

  Early returns are encouraging. Grünfin is listed in the top ten of Nordic companies with the most potential. And in 2023, Triin was named Investor of the Year at the annual Estonia Startup Awards banquet. That event provided her with a platform to call for more investments in female startups. To punctuate her pitch, she and 12 other successful women running startup companies wore T-shirts with “F--king One Percenters” printed on the front.

  “It certainly created attention,” Triin said, laughing at the recollection.

  On a more serious note, she said there has been little progress since her group’s unofficial campaign began.

  “[Yet], if we study the results of female startups, we usually bring two times the return to our investors than male startups. Why? We are very determined because we’ve had to prove something all our lives.”

What’s Next?

  At the party she hosted the previous evening, Triin said the hot topic among the startup executives present was the stressful, never-ending effort to succeed.

  “It’s much harder than I expected,” she admitted. “It takes such a toll. I won’t do it again. Ever.”

  She does believe that Grünfin could be at the beginning of a more altruistic mission. Maybe involvement in lobbying the government for more tax-friendly savings plans, or working with companies to help them help their employees become more financially savvy.

  For now, her focus is on today’s Grünfin and her family.  She mentioned her husband of 15 years, Kristjan Hertmann, who works in finance.

  “Balancing work and family are a challenge. I have a very good husband who takes on big loads. Without him it would be so much different.”

  Triin’s children, a girl 14 and a 9-year-old boy, live in a world unimaginable to her at their age. She makes sure their activities are varied and balanced.

  “They are very happy,” she said.

  I asked how her widowed mother feels about her achievements, and those of her brother, who founded a successful watch company.

  “She looks at it and doesn’t believe her eyes. But she accepts that we are thinking so much bigger than she ever thought was possible.”

  Sometimes the most surprising news during an interview comes last, without warning. I casually mentioned that I liked the look of her office.

  “I designed it,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  Triin then revealed that architecture was her initial choice when she started college. She quickly changed her mind.

  “I wanted to earn money - fast.”

  As I left Grünfin and reflected on my enlightening visit with a supposedly exhausted Triin Hermann, a final thought hit me:

  “That was her “B” game?”

Editor’s note: Second in a series from a reporting trip to Estonia August 7-10, 2024

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Reported and written by: George J. Tanber

Edited by: Michael Gordon

Photo editor: David Kozy