Chief Design Officer / Design Lead

I grew up surrounded by electronics and computers. My dad graduated as an Electronics and Computer Engineer from the Tallinn University of Technology and worked there. I remember being mesmerized by all the equipment at the university: large mainframe systems, early Apple and IBM personal computers. When I was 6, we built a Sinclair home computer from scratch. I used it to play games and write my first lines of code.

My dad became a software engineer and bought an IBM 286 PC with a 12MHz turbo processor and a color VGA monitor. That was a huge step for us. I spent hours on Prince of Persia, Wolfenstein 3D, The Incredible Machine, SimCity, Civilization, and dozens of others.

Eventually I got bored of games and wanted to make things. My dad needed some basic UI work done for a US construction industry client, so I drew bitmap typefaces and icons. That was my first design work.

My mom was a technical drawing teacher who also worked at Tallinnfilm, the oldest film studio in Estonia, drawing for animated films. I spent a lot of time at the animation studio with her. She later became an arts and crafts teacher. Between my parents, technology and creativity were baked into my life from the start.

Then I discovered music production software and got obsessed. By the mid-90s my tracks were getting radio play from local alternative music DJs. Record releases followed, then live performances and DJing.

Music and the internet arrived in my life at the same time. I started with a 9.6k modem and BBSes to trade and promote computer music, until the WWW and Netscape took over. I built my first Geocities website in 1995 to promote my music. By 1997 I was deep into Macromedia Flash and teaching myself HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Freelance design and web work started from there.

By 1998 I had built an animated Flash website with an integrated music player for my music projects. By the time I finished high school in June 2000, I had a job waiting at one of the top local advertising agencies, as a designer/developer for web and multimedia projects.

During high school I also worked after-school and summers, setting up UNIX server systems to specification, at the leading local IT company, where my dad was by then the Lead Engineer and eventually CTO.

Through the 2000s I worked mainly for advertising and design agencies, sharpening my skills in Macromedia and Adobe software, HTML/CSS/JavaScript and ActionScript, and picking up MySQL, PHP, and Apache server configuration along the way.

Working in studios alongside senior designers, I became well-versed in brand and visual identity design. I learned print design at my first agency job. After hours, I designed hundreds of flyers, posters, and record sleeves for music events as personal side projects.

Freelance kept me busy too. I built one of the first Flash websites for a UK electronic music label (Rui Da Silva's Kismet Records), with an integrated music player and MP3 shop, at a time when there were no sites like Beatport yet.

I was also deep into animation, motion graphics, and video editing, from micro-animations for web projects to full TV-show packages. Some of the ads I made for large music and fashion events ran on regional MTV and FTV.

Throughout these years I kept producing music and performing as a DJ. I started a weekly radio show called TechTribe Essentials, which ran for about 5 years: first on a local dance music station, then on national Radio 2's Friday late-night peak-time slot, syndicated to top-tier web radio stations globally.

In 2002 I entered the Estonian Business School to study IT Management. I got through two years before dropping out. Life was too full of projects and work to sit in lectures.

In 2012 I made some big changes. By the end of the year I had quit traditional office work for good and moved to Thailand. I paused music production and DJing. Instead, I took up ultra marathon running and shifted my focus to health and wellness.

From Thailand I worked remotely as a Brand Identity and Design Consultant. Clients were mostly tech startups, with some hospitality, sports, and wellness projects mixed in, from the US, Asia, and Europe.

By 2016 my client base was shifting toward fintech and crypto. My business partner and I started a boutique fintech consultancy. By 2017 I was fully in crypto and blockchain, and I haven't looked back.

In early 2020 I got an offer to join Soramitsu as Design Lead. The company was doing something genuinely different, working on central bank digital currencies and decentralized finance, and I could see immediately that my background was a good fit. It felt like everything I'd done had been preparation for this.

I started by organizing the company's brand and visual identity. Soramitsu grew from 40 people to over 100 in a year. I was promoted to Chief Design Officer. My department grew from 2–3 designers to over 10, split into a Product Design team and a Brand Experience team.

As an executive, I filled gaps wherever they appeared. 80-hour weeks, late nights, weekends. It was intense, but in many ways the most rewarding period of my career.

I also grew a lot as a developer during these years, picking up a modern web tech stack. Soramitsu's mission is creating a better world through decentralized technologies. That's something I care about deeply.

I want to work on something that can change things for the better.

I was born in a country under Soviet occupation. It was a nightmare. But I got to see, in my early life, how fast things can change. The Berlin Wall fell. Estonia became independent. The whole world opened up, and my country rapidly became one of the leading IT nations in Europe.

That experience shaped me. I value freedom above everything. I believe the future needs to be decentralized, with real democracy and real opportunity for everyone.

I'm also drawn to the possibilities around human longevity, health, and the future of our planet. I want to be a meaningful part of building a better world, not just watching it happen.