Martynas Gudonavicius, CEO & Co-Founder at TRAFI, suggests he is very rarely approached by early stage startup founders and employees, and yet both himself and the whole ecosystem would be more than happy to share experience with the interested ones.

At Startup Lithuania’s Wrap Up Of The Year Martynas said 2016 was the year of significant learnings, quoting Vinted’s partial move to Berlin and YPlan’s sale as major examples.

“… We all learned that it’s very very hard to build a sustainable and a significant business no matter how much money you’ve raised or how rockstar investors you have behind you. In YPlan’s case, the biggest learning, at least for me, was that you need to create a lot of intellectual property in order to extract the value. And in Vinted’s case, we all saw how talent is important, (…) so we need to invest more into people (…) in Lithuania,” Martynas said.

However, he admitted he doesn’t see much enthusiasm from startup founders to extract the experience from more mature members of the ecosystem even though they would be very happy to help.

“When I was an early stage founder 3,5 years ago, I was trying to approach every single one who raised more money and had more experience in Lithuania. (People such as) Mantas and Justas from Vinted, Rytis from Yplan, Ilja Laurs. We currently have 316 startups in Lithuania, right? I was probably approached by 3 people in the past years.

So just drop us a line, be more of hustlers, write an email, ask for something. Myself, guys from Deeper, Vinted, Oberlo and the likes. They will definitely reply and share their experience. But nobody is approaching [us] from 300+ startups. That’s the problem. Nobody is doing it.”, Martynas spoke at the panel discussion.

And Donatas Malinauskas, CTO at Deeper, added that our startup ecosystem is a close-knit community, where it’s super easy to find anyone on LinkedIn and approach someone in one way or another.

“Everyone here will answer and help any [other] company in all situations. Just go and do it,” Donatas said.

Startup Lithuania is also here to help you to get a piece of advice or an introduction – simply get in touch with our team.