This interview was conducted by Rene Rumberg, a member of the sTARTUp Day communications & marketing team.

You were raised in a farming family. When you were younger, did you think about doing something else when you grew up, or was your future set already from the beginning?

My father is an organic farmer, my grandfather was a conventional farmer, my great-grandfather was a farmer, and so on. So I've been involved in farming since the early days of my life.

When I was younger, my main goal was to become a professional football player, and I worked hard to achieve that goal. My dream was to play for Manchester United one day. I even attended their training camp once.

That was my main goal in the early days of my life. But then, in 2012, while attending school, I had to decide whether to do a practical research project or start a student company as part of the curriculum.

Together with some friends, we decided to start the company.

We were wondering what to do and then came up with the idea that kindergarten children really look forward to attending school. However, if you ask the 3rd grader the same question, they usually say 'No,' as the excitement for some reason disappears. We decided to create a science class for birthday parties, a company called Three Little Pigs. The company's primary goal was to get children excited about learning. We succeeded with this, as many children still attend those science classes today.

Three Little Pigs was picked as the best student company in Europe, and for me, that showed that building a business is one of the best ways to change the world in a way that you want to change it. If you see a problem, then building a business is an excellent way to solve it.

Fast-forward to 2016. When my father needed a tool to manage the family farm, I saw the problem. We ended up building something for him, and that's how eAgronom was born.

eAgronom was established in 2016 when you were only 20. When you compare yourself today to the earlier version of yourself as a leader back in the early days of eAgronom, and if you could travel back in time, what kind of management/leadership recommendations would you recommend for 20-year-old Robin to follow?

That is a very good question!

The first thing I knew was that I needed to have more experienced people around me compared to the first company I founded—people who are better at something than you are. That was already there initially, but having the right people is even more important today.

Number two - something that we could have done better in the beginning - is focus. We succeeded in Estonia in the first year - maybe we were a bit too successful. We thought that everything would be as easy as it was in Estonia. But it wasn't because of different languages, cultures, geographical distances, etc. After success in Estonia, we expanded to six other countries simultaneously. Now, looking back, I see that there were way too many countries for such an early stage. We spent a lot of money, research time, and people's nerves trying to figure each market out, and eventually, we decided to focus on Poland and Latvia.

Today, we are active in those countries again, but in the early stages, we should have focused on fewer countries.

 

If you had to explain regenerative farming to a five-year-old, how would you do it?

Soil is a living organism, like your dog or cat. Conventional farming means leaving your dog without food or gentle touches. Regenerative farming means taking good care of your pet—feeding them and showing them love. For soil to flourish, you really need to take care of it.

What advice would you give to young entrepreneurs looking to start a business in an industry like agriculture, where tradition and innovation must often coexist?

It's a tough market, certainly.

We just had a field event, and I met with one farmer who told me he believes he has 11 harvests left. He was around 50-ish. This means that, during his entire career, he can try 11 more times. That makes farmers super conservative when it comes to change.

My advice to someone young starting in this field is that before you start scaling to other markets, try to get a field trial with a farmer to prove to them that whatever you're doing is working, and then invite other farmers there so they could see it as well. eAgronom started similarly. We first experimented on my father's farm, and other farmers saw that it was actually working, so they wanted to start using it. If we had gone to other farmers immediately, the product would not have been so good because we made many changes after learning about those things on our farm. Secondly, they would have taken us less seriously because they wanted to see how it works in their region.

As a young CEO, what have been some of the toughest decisions you've had to make, and how did you handle the pressure of making the right call for your company and your team?

We make tough decisions quite often. For example, we don't know the correct answer and cannot reach 100% accurate information, but we still need to make decisions.

Before I come back to the toughest decisions, the good thing is that I can make those decisions with other people in eAgronom, which significantly helps. We have Kristjan Luha, who has a lot of experience from his career in Nike (former VP of Global Sales & Marketplace in Nike Inc), Indrek Kaldoja (former CFO of Skeleton Technologies), Tarmo Osman (former COO of Xolo), Tatiana Boussange and other good people in the team, so making those tough decisions are actually not that tough.

What was tough was letting a lot of people go when COVID-19 hit. It was clear we had to make it, but it was tough because we had built the company together with those people, and you hoped you could hire more and they could rise in the ranks, but instead, you must zoom down a bit and become a slightly smaller company. We came through all of this, and looking back at things, it played out very well for both parties, eAgronom, and those people who have great careers today. Many decisions might be tough at a particular moment, but when you look back years later, they do not seem so tough anymore.

How do you maintain your personal values and vision while managing the fast-paced growth and external pressures of leading a startup aiming to change an entire industry?

I do two things.
First, I do sports daily.

Second, I go to the field from time to time, at least once a month and even more often during the summertime. I drive around during the weekends, go and see my father and his fields, and try to see the bigger picture by talking to him about what we're doing, how we improve the soil, etc.

Traveling is a big part of my job, but I do not only travel in the cities; I also visit the countryside to meet with farmers and my partners. This helps me put things into perspective and connect with our customers, which is cool because, as a tourist, you wouldn't reach those destinations—eating a cake with a farmer in a small village in Spain that was made by his wife in Poland, meeting with a farmer in Ukraine, and so on.

When it comes to making a lasting impact or changing the world, how do you measure success beyond financial metrics, and what kind of legacy do you hope to leave through your leadership?

In a simplified way - to solve the climate crisis. Energy production is responsible for 75% of the problem because we're using fossil energy and the number of CO2 emissions caused by that industry.

The construction industry, such as cement production, is responsible for 5% of the problem, and agriculture and food production cause the remaining 20%.

We don't have a solution for energy production, and we hope other people are finding a way to tackle that problem. However, eAgronomy's goal in food production is to find a clear path to net zero food production and create an environment where this can happen.

By the environment, I mean three things:

1. Data collection capabilities are crucial in emission reduction because you can't influence something you cannot measure.
2. The agronomy side and the advice, such as field trials that we organize in the countries where we operate.
3. Infrastructure to bring incentives for farmers to accelerate, such as our carbon program, where we work with companies that want to offset their emissions, food companies that want to reduce emissions in their value chain, sustainable loan programs where banks are giving better interest rates, sustainable land programs with landlords, and so on.

So eAgronom's main KPI is to reduce emissions in food production while continuing to feed the growing population, which is a real challenge. We could just plant trees across the land, which would help to reduce a lot of emissions, but who would feed the world then? Our job is challenging because we have to reduce emissions and store more carbon in the soil while continuing to feed the population.

How do you balance the need for quick decision-making in a fast-paced startup environment with the long-term vision of creating lasting change in the world?

You have to become quite good at ignoring things. I'm often not looking at Slack or emails because I'm working on something that I know is really important for the company in the long term. Nothing would happen if I didn't work on it today, this week, or this month, but in the long run, if I work on it, it has a significant impact. It's the same with workouts - even though workouts give you a good feeling even on the same day. You just have to ignore noise sometimes. Things may happen, but in most cases, you come back and focus half a day on something essential. The other half of the day, you can handle all the noise around you.

Last but not least, maybe a small sneak peek at your sTARTUp Day keynote speech—what will you be talking about?

It's connected to one of the previous questions. eAgronom started eight years ago, and we've scaled to 15 different countries. During that time, as I mentioned, we've scaled too fast and scaled down again. I'll be talking about lessons learned from scaling too fast too soon. For anyone who wants to scale in the EU and Africa, there are some valuable lessons in that story, no matter your industry.

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Robin Saluoks is a speaker at sTARTUp Day 2025 in January.