e-⁠residency builds entrepreneurs

E-⁠resident Luke Seelenbinder's founder story as told at Tech Open Air in Berlin, Germany in July

This post was adapted from a speech made by e-⁠Residency Envoy Luke Seelenbinder at TechOpenAir in Berlin in July 2023. Luke has been an e-⁠resident since 2015 and is co-founder of Funktional OÜ and Stadia Maps.

Hi, I’m Luke! I’m excited to share my entrepreneurial journey with you today, and the pivotal role Estonia and e-⁠Residency have played in it.

As you might have guessed from my name, I was born and raised in the US, in South Carolina. My entrepreneurial journey started there, when I discovered that creating software opened a door to making money on the internet. Before finishing my computer science degree at university, I had already participated in multiple startups, including an Amazon dropshipping firm which peaked with millions in revenue.

I discovered Europe during University. After studying German in high school, I traveled across Europe most Summers, visiting 10+ European countries and driving tens of thousands of kilometers along Germany Autobahnen, Polish country roads, and everything in between. Just like with my entrepreneurial adventures, I was hooked on Europe and wanted to see if it was right for me. That dream was made simple for me when I met my now-wife—and 5 years ago I immigrated to Switzerland. Today, I’m based in St. Gallen, Switzerland.

E-⁠Residency of Estonia: ask not why, but why not?

As with most good things in life, I discovered e-⁠Residency quite by accident. After seeing a post on Hacker News, despite having no reason to use it at the time, I applied and became an e-⁠resident in late 2015. I was captivated by the idea of a government innovating for their own citizens. And it was only 50€, so why not? This attitude, I’ve since learned, is quite Estonian: ask not why, but why not?

Since I relocated to Switzerland in 2018, I’ve been part of three e-⁠resident companies. One of them has been paying my salary and social taxes. As a Swiss resident, it’s really easy to use an EU company to pay salaries, since they already have the legal framework in place. It's much trickier with a US company.

I chose e-Residency over a Swiss GmbH or US LLC because, I knew I was going to be traveling and wanted a stable legal entity for customers. An OÜ (the Estonian equivalent of a C Corp or GmbH) comes with the advantages of ease of management, low paperwork overhead, and no requirement for share capital. All of these factors (and more) made the choice a no-brainer.

Along the way, I’ve participated in the first known three-way e-Residency company merger, have visited Estonia a dozen time since 2016, and—because I love it so much—biked 500km around eastern Estonia for 5 days last year.

Stadia Maps is optimising user experience

Right now, I'm CEO of Stadia Maps—a bootstrapped, B2B SaaS creating the alternative location platform for developers. For too long, developers building location experiences have had to wrestle with compromised user privacy, high cost, and poor support. We believe for many apps, maps are an optimal user experience, and for too long companies have avoided them.

To solve this, we created Location APIs for humans. A maps platform designed to be used as much as possible. By offering affordable, private-by-default APIs, we enable developers to build apps that effectively use maps, place search, and other location-based functionality.

Our current focus is building out all of the tools and APIs required to serve the vast majority of the market. Just this year, we've added a world-class satellite imagery basemap, launched place search, and greatly expanded our documentation to make it easier for any developer to get started with maps.

On top of those product launches, we also just inked an exciting partnership with Stamen Design.

Stamen is a world-class cartography design shop, renowned for their work with AWS, Meta, Airbnb, and many others. Almost every major digital map in the last 20 years has been directly built or impacted by Stamen's work and design aesthetic.

The first phase, will bring Stamen's own map tiles to our service—one style of which is part of the Smithsonian's permanent collection, as the first live website to be features in their collection. For years, this level of cartography was limited to those with deep pockets—i.e., Big Tech. Starting this month, our exclusive joint project will make this level of cartography available to everyone.

To recap, I'm Swiss-based and a US entrepreneur with a US company, Stadia Maps. My co-founder is another US entrepreneur based in South Korea. So you might be wondering how I benefit from Estonian e-⁠Residency.

First, e-⁠Residency has provided a stable base from which to manage my personal income. By using my Estonian company (Funktional OÜ), I don’t have to worry about ensuring tax compliance, salary payments, and the litany of other paperwork. Funktional OÜ, by being a stable entity and employer of record simplifies the many twist and turns of my entrepreneurial adventure.

Second, e-Residency has introduced me to the broader Estonian ecosystem of startups. One of the biggest challenges a company faces when scaling is finding the right talent. Just this year, I’ve been able to build relationships and begin engaging with key code schools in Estonia—a key source of talent as Stadia grows. Hiring is never simple, but Estonia’s tax and social laws makes employing Estonian residents easy and straightforward—something I can’t say about hiring in the US.

Third, e-Residency has afforded dozens of opportunities to grow as an entrepreneur—from speaking opportunities at conferences, to key introductions within a network of like-minded individuals looking to build companies just a little bit different. This year, e-Residency appointed me its first official Envoy, which both solidifies all of the above opportunities and puts a title to my passion for the program.

Some of my best friends are a direct result of my choice to deeply engage with the Estonian ecosystem. Some are e-⁠residents, some are former e-⁠residents-turned-residents, and some are Estonians by birth. What they all have in common is the goal to challenge the status quo of how governments serve people and the impossible complexity of regulation.

I can confidently say that Estonia is the only country I can imagine a government minister remembering my name and enthusiastically greeting me—after we met once at an event in Munich. While this is just an anecdote, I believe it typifies what I’ve come to experience in Estonia. It's a modern, forward-thinking society and culture working every day to become better humans, from which they become a better nation.