Jaan Tallinn

Tallinn participates in the effective altruism movement and donated $604,500 to the effective altruism associated Machine Intelligence Research Institute since 2015. In addition, his initial donation, in 2012, when co-founding the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk was around $200,000.

In 2014, he invested in the reversible debugging software for app development Undo Software. He also made an early investment in DeepMind which was purchased by Google in 2014 for $600 million. Other investments include Faculty, a British AI startup focused on tracking terrorists, and Pactum, an "autonomous negotiation" startup based in California and Estonia.

Jaan Tallinn graduated from the University of Tartu in 1996 with a BSc in Theoretical Physics with a thesis that considered travelling interstellar distances using warps in space-time.

Tallinn founded Bluemoon in Estonia alongside schoolmates Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu. Bluemoon's Kosmonaut became, in 1989 (SkyRoads is the 1993 remake), the first Estonian game to be sold abroad, and earned the company 5,000 USD. By 1999, Bluemoon faced bankruptcy; its founders decided to acquire remote jobs for the Swedish Tele2 at a salary of 330 USD each per day. The Tele2 project, "Everyday.com", was a commercial flop. Subsequently, while working as a stay-at-home dad, Tallinn developed FastTrack and Kazaa for Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (formerly of Tele2). Kazaa's P2P technology was later repurposed to drive Skype around 2003. Tallinn sold his shares in Skype in 2005, when it was purchased by eBay.

Jaan Tallinn (born 14 February 1972) is an Estonian programmer, investor and trained physicist known for his participation in the development of Skype in 2002 and FastTrack/Kazaa, a file-sharing application, in 2000.