Sten Tamkivi

Sten Tamkivi is Skype's Chief Evangelist, building relationships with engineering communities, media, governments and academia around the world. Based in Tallinn, he also looks after Skype Estonia, our largest office globally as local General Manager.

Sten joined Skype in 2005 and has held various executive positions as the Head of Operations, overseeing our sites and servers, internal IT, security, and productivity tools; as manager of the engineering for Skype Devices; General Manager of Skype's eCommerce activities, responsible for developing next-generation commerce around Skype's core communication offering; and more recently as GM of Desktop clients, focussing on the development of landmark Skype 4.0 for Windows release.

Prior to Skype, Sten was business development director at Helmes, a Tallinn-based software development and IT-consulting company. His client roster included major regional financial institutions, telecoms and utilities.

Having begun his career as a programmer and web designer, Sten co-founded and managed Halo Interactive DDB Estonia, the country's first full service digital media agency. It was at Halo, while working on a web portal project, that he first met the future founders and core engineers of Skype.

Sten has studied Public Relations and Communication at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He lives in Tallinn where he cooks gourmet meals for his wife, son and daughter.