Career Cafe with director of Playtech Estonia Kaari Simson. Image credit: TÄFF.
Kaari Simson is a natural born leader — she recalls organising her peers already in kindergarten when she was four. At the age of fifteen, Kaari, a promising sports talent, moved to train in Sweden. That year she realised that professional sports were not her cup of tea, but more importantly, after being enrolled in a Swedish school with zero language skills and becoming proficient in Swedish in just two months, she knew that the sky was her limit.
Kaari’s career path is far from anything typical or obvious. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science (2002) and master’s in conference interpretation (2005), both from the University of Tartu. Her master’s project was an English-Estonian-English Explanatory Glossary of Yoga Philosophy Terms with Sanskrit Equivalents. Six years later, Kaari Simson became the Director of Playtech Estonia, the world’s largest supplier of online gaming software.
Big fans of the investing game Cashflow, Kaari and her husband have been putting aside a substantial part of their income, investing and reinvesting it for years. By now, they have achieved financial freedom and, technically speaking, don’t have to work for money to sustain themselves and their two kids any longer.
What motivates Kaari to work when she does not necessarily need more money? How can you learn to be a leader? Can introverts make good leaders? What are the challenges of being a female leader?
Watch the University of Tartu Career Cafe with Kaari Simson:
