Chasing Unicorns (Ükssarvik): An Estonian Movie About Entrepreneurship
“Skype has a great engineering team, which I like to describe as ‘all of Estonia.’” — Marc Andreessen
“Chasing Unicorns” (“Ükssarvik” in Estonian) is a movie about Õie and Tõnu, two entrepreneurs from Estonia, who try to make their tech company a unicorn.
They have met at a hackathon and come up with an idea of a bike helmet.
And their journey of becoming a unicorn has just started!
This is a funny movie which is expressing the process of entrepreneurs on their way to becoming unicorns and we really recommend you to watch it if you are interested in entrepreneurship.
We had a chance to watch the movie with our Estonian colleagues — thanks to the InnoEnergy CEE team — when we were at a quarterly meeting of the Hubs of InnoEnergy CEE.
In this blog post, we will go through fun & backstage details about the movie which will show us how the movie reflects the Estonian entrepreneurship ecosystem.
*“No spoiler” alert! Feel free to read this blog post before watching the movie.
Here are some backstage details about the movie:
1. The director of the movie, Rain Rannu, is an Estonian entrepreneur, too.
He founded a successful mobile payment company: Fortumo
Rain Rannu wears a “Palo Alto t-shirt” in real life just like Tõnu wears it in the movie and apparently, he loves to wear it just like Tõnu does.
Movie was financed through several rounds of investment by Estonian entrepreneurs.
2. The movie is based on the real experiences of more than 30 Estonian entrepreneurs…
whose real-life stories overlap with Õie & Tõnu’s fictional journey.
For example, in a catchy scene of the movie, Õie and Tõnu are pitching Bikedrive to an investor in a sauna. This scene is based on an experience of Pipedrive when they pitched to their potential investors in an Estonian sauna.
* If you think this is just a coincidence, here are some examples to show you how serious Estonians about their saunas:
While I was searching for the movie, I saw that they even had a “Chasing Unicorns screening and sauna” event.
3. In the movie, some people play themselves, like Taavi Rõivas — former prime minister of Estonia.
Taavi Rõivas, who oversaw much of the development of Estonia as a startup hub, makes an amusing appearance in the movie.
4. Tõnu, who is the hopeless entrepreneur in the movie, has circumstances that are similar to Ragnar Sass.
Ragnar Sass was known in Estonian press for his startup failure before going on to found one of Estonia’s most successful startups, Pipedrive — a cloud-based sales software company with offices in Tallinn and Tartu, Estonia; New York City, New York; Lisbon, Portugal, London, United Kingdom and Prague, Czech Republic.
5. The dog in the movie, Chief of Happiness Office, really works as Chief of Happiness in real life at Pipedrive.
Sass’s dog, Riki, also features in the movie playing the same startup role he performs in real life at Pipedrive, which is “Chief Happiness Officer”.
* If you want to know how Riki’s one day as a Chief of Happiness at Pipedrive, here is a video to learn more about Riki:
The movie tells the story from the perspective of Õie. It is starting from how she met Tõnu and how they came up with an idea of a bike helmet, because of the little accident they had before.
Because we are seeing everything from Oie’s perspective, we even witness the occupational sexism.
Also, here you can watch the trailer of the movie:
The movie shows all the stages a startup can/may go through. Because it focuses on all these stages, the movie is somehow educational and guiding.
And this is what producers wanted to achieve from the beginning. The movie hopes to help and inspire more people to pursue their business ideas and become an entrepreneur.
That’s why 5,000 digital copies will be donated to high school students in Estonia and elsewhere around the world. The producers have also pledged to make the movie free to any school, teacher or student that wants to use it as a learning aid.
Let’s hope that this hilarious movie will encourage who out there wants to become an entrepreneur!
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