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Urmas Purde is the cofounder of Pipedrive, a sales pipeline management software.They have over 10,000 paying customers in 100+ countries worldwide such as HubSpot, Samsung, Discovery Channel and many more. He talks about life and death experiences.

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What will you learn in this interview?

  • What attracted Urmas to do training on firewalking?
  • What are Urmas proudest moments personally and professionally?
  • What were some of the life and death experiences that shaped Urmas?
  • What inspired him to start Pipedrive?

In addition to cofounding Pipedrive, Urmas has Trained more than 10K sales people in thousands of companies over 10 years. His customers included PriceWatehouse, Toyota Coca-Cola .

FUN FACT:

Certified firewalking instructor

Business Mentors, Tools, Books mentioned:

Background:

Urmas Purde was not really a popular guy in school and he didn’t even have good grades but the collapse of Soviet Union made him enter the world of Capitalism where he took risks to make and sell items to the market. During this period, Urmas kept looking up to Bill Gates.

Urmas Purde is a Certified Firewalking Instructor who is also the co-founder of Pipedrive. Pipedrive CRM is a customer relationship and sales management software solution that was built to make the sales process less painful by making the pipeline visible and easy to use. By focusing on perfecting the features sales reps and their managers use on a daily basis, Pipedrive has made a commitment to building a more focused tool that reps actually like using.
Urmas has Trained more than 10K sales people in thousands of companies over 10 years, his customers included PriceWatehouse, Toyota Coca-Cola.

He started to learn firewalking as he found it very interesting and he never really thought it would help shape him into the person he is now today. Firewalking taught him the attitude of staying focused no matter what.

He got married in July 2011 but before the wedding Urmas had to undergo a surgery to remove the tumor from his brain. It was one of the hardest things that happened to him but he managed to survive.

Half of his face was paralyzed but that never stopped him.

Some of the questions that Urmas answered in the video interview include:

What did you do to overcome low points?

First – never stopped moving – I realized that I have to have to have a plan. I have had severe depression many years before – I remebered my lesson from that, that no vacation is going heal you. You have to just keep going. So, for example we made no changes to our plans with Pipedrive. I told Gus that best you can do to help me is, let’s just stick to our plans. July was one of the busiest and hardest months I ever had – I had surgey, I got married, Pipedrive Inc incoporated in U.S.

Babysteps are fine – you just need steps. I also needed some kind of steps with my health condition. Before the operation I had a plan with many layers – I wanted so bad to fix myself with some alternative methods but I was running out of time. One day before the operation I got some proof that one of my things I tried worked as MRI showed that. But as the situation was really critical – I had no time to wait – doctors said that if you wait you might wake up and realize that you are close to death. Without a family I would have been waiting even more. I’ll never know if I would have survived without them. I just decided to be alive no matter what. Thank god I had that choice. Kristel told me: You are tough guy – just look at you.” And I tried to convince her who had severe brain tumor with 6 operations. That I’m not tough. That moment right there was one of the most important moments – I realized the damage I do to myself when not believing in myself.

During my recovery period Pipedrive got accepted to Angelpad – startup accelerator in San Francisco. So I moved to SF for two months with some other co-founders. I went to investor meetings with shades and one eye was covered with black glass and other one with clear one. I looked like a pirate. When I was wearing those glasses no-one ever asked anything about my condition. Then I remember Thomas Korte and my brother telling me that you should stop doing that – wear normal shades all the time if you need to.

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