It's 60% owned by Schibsted, one of the largest media conglomerates hailing from the Nordics. They recently spun out their non-Nordic classifieds into a subsidiary and listed it onto the Oslo Stock Exchange.
It's easy to replicate design and technology. It's extremely difficult to achieve such a high equilibrium of sellers & buyers on the platform. These businesses benefit extremely well of network effects, creating high barriers of entry.
It's still fairly homogeneous society compared to many other European countries. The language is also very different to other European languages, so it helps to pick up a little bit of Lithuanian to understand more here.
I believe it's slowly changing and you can see some non-Europeans coming for study exchange and to work for international companies, but it's far from what it's like in e.g. Sweden, Netherlands or Germany.
However, Lithuania is quite diverse in the sense that it's a crossroad between Central Europe, Northern Europe and Eastern Europe. Having many influences from Nordics, Russia, Poland and Germany. Many people in Vilnius speak several of the following: Lithuanian, English, Russian and Polish.
All young (below 45) people speak English, older generation (45+) might speak Russian instead of English as second language.
I moved to Vilnius from Sweden four months ago and enjoying it a lot so far. A lot of the things from the website are true - low costs (I pay 500e for 2-rooms in city center), very safe city, lots of green. Can get anywhere within 30 min and I walk to work every day. Working in here might be a pay cut but the low costs make up for it. Tech is much more well-compensated here than other industries.
My perception is that Lithuania (and Baltics in general) is suffering a lot more for its reputation than it should. Society has developed very quickly the past 10 years and the reputation doesn't reflect today's reality here.
Most of the DTC stories I hear seem to be very US-centric, including most of the companies mentioned in this article. What are successful DTC companies coming from outside of US?
# apply to jobs and internships despite not meeting requirements. it's just a numbers game in the end. eventually you get in somewhere.
# improve social game - go to parties, go dating, travel, get drunk.
# build products, ship and post on producthunt. there are many teens getting exposure there.
# find likeminded people in your own age to share thoughts. join a young maker collective.
Worked on a similar concept during a hackathon. You could potentially connect plant watering to a system like Nest/Toon and get data from all your plants - track temperature, soil moisture, water and energy spending.
https://schibsted.com/about/who-we-are/adevinta-a-schibsted-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schibsted