Greek Tech Entrepreneurship Prospects

During the last fifty years a huge investment in education has taken place in Greece both from the public and the private sector, even on the family and the individual level. Just note that the last thirty years the Greek families invest annually more than €2 billion in the assistive education of their children.

The result of this gigantic investment is that Greece is equipped with a human capital much greater than one would expect from a country of its size, both in terms of quality and quantity.

Unfortunately, however, an introverted business model dominated the local entrepreneurship ecosystem over the same time period. Everyone was trying to do business with the public sector, as they were attracted by the more than €500 billion which came into the country in the form of EU grants and sovereign debt. This business model led to the infamous Greek economic collapse of 2010.

That very disaster however worked as a wake-up call for the country’s human capital. Much as more than 5% of the population, perhaps more than one third of the readily available highly skilled workforce, was forced to emigrate, an unprecedented mobilisation of the country’s creative forces also took place.

And this is how and when the huge investment in education actually saved the country.

We started with a few early successes, like BugSense, AbZorba Games and TaxiBeat, and now we can count dozens of successful startups and scale-ups — including, but not limited to, Viva Wallet, Epignosis, Workable, Blueground, Yodeck, LearnWorlds, Skroutz, Hack the Box and several others.

I am confident that these significant successes indicate only the first rays of light breaking into the dark skies of the Greek economy. We are only witnessing the beginning of the dawn of the country’s. Tech Entrepreneurship Ecosystem!

One can indeed be certain that during the next two decades the success of the ecosystem will be immense. We shall overcome the exit obsession and we shall start building global tech champions from our small country.

It also is very likely that significant synergies will be developed between the Greek ecosystem and its natural allies, namely the tech communities in countries like Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Albania, even Ukraine and Russia when the geopolitical developments allow for it.

The time will come for companies launched in Greece and more broadly in SE Europe when they will not have to look for an exit; they will simply be scaling up and, when there’s a fit to their strategy, they’ll be acquiring other companies launched in Western Europe, North America or Asia.

Does this sound like science fiction? Perhaps it does, for now. It is nothing else however than the objective of our own tech entrepreneurship ecosystem and I am confident that we shall witness such developments within 15 or 20 years from now.