Greece's tech entrepreneurs hope hitting rock bottom will end red tape
Athens' thriving web startups believe an 'anti-capitalist hangover' is lifting and Greeks are thinking differently about business
Greek geek central is a light, bright, very white space off Athens' main shopping street, furnished with cheap desks and chairs from Ikea and an expensive ? and well used ? coffee machine. They don't do despondent here. At coLab you can get a desk, free broadband and as much coffee as you can drink for ?10 a day or ?140 a month Or you can rent a small office for not much more.
Some of the dozen small startups that do are world leaders in their field. BugSense, for instance, though barely a year old, is used by more than 4,500 mobile developers around the world to track and analyse crash reports from their apps. It recently turned down a �1m takeover bid. Others have already outgrown coLab, as this space is called.
TaxiBeat, a mobile app that allows taxi drivers to advertise where they are and passengers to hail them, is doubling its business every two months and has expanded into Latin America and Scandinavia.
These are Greek ideas, launched by young Greek entrepreneurs; most of them with a PhD or master's in what is poetically termed the internet-mobile-software triangle.
"It is quite a new phenomenon," says Andreas Constantinou of VisionMobile, which analyses the mobile telecoms industry. "Greece has always had bright minds, but for generations a public sector job was the only goal. Decent pay, job for life, early retirement. That's no longer the case. And new technology ? apps ? mean people can concretise their ideas."
The economic crisis "has shrunk the expectations people had of becoming civil servants somewhat," observes Gieorgios Kasselakis, drily. He's a partner in the Open Fund, which channels private investors' money ? up to ?50,000, enough for two to four people to get a product to market ? into outfits possessing the "potential to go global and disrupt the market".
The fact that public sector salaries have been cut by around 40%, and that civil service pensions are anything but secure, has acted as a "powerful disincentive" to a state sector career, says Kasselakis.
But there remain many obstacles to a sudden and generalised flowering of Greek entrepreneurship. Several mention a generalised "anti-capitalist climate", a hangover from the post-dictatorship years of the 1970s when business was a dirty word.
Some say the consequence of corporate failure in Greece ? generally jail ? has turned Greeks into reluctant risk-takers; unlike in the US, failure here is not considered a necessary step on the road to success.
All complain of the bureaucracy. Dimitris Michalakos of RuleMotion, which from a coLab office in Athens runs ? rather astonishingly ? the digital LCD screens on the latest generation of hi-tech London recycling bins, shows me his thick invoice book, every page and its multiple carbon copies carefully perforated with his company's unique tax number. "When it's finished, I have to go to the tax office and get a new one made, just for me," he says. "The receipts are Greek, so make no sense to my clients. Almost every country in the world manages a halfway efficient tax system, but not us.
"I'm afraid of an inspection, not because my books aren't in order but because I know no inspector can leave without handing out a penalty."
For reasons not unrelated to bureaucracy, several of the coLab start-ups are officially registered as US or UK, not Greek, companies. Almost all do the majority of their business outside Greece.
"The environment in Greece," concedes Stavros Messinis, who co-founded coLab just over two years ago and is now opening new spaces in Crete and Thessaloniki, "is not very conducive to doing business. But things are starting to change. Greeks are beginning to think differently."
The Open Fund has just advised the Greek government on a new law making it quicker, easier and a lot less scary to start up and register a company, says Kasselakis. "The minimum compliance requirements are far less complex. Now people just have to be convinced that's really the case."
Messinis is offering free advice sessions, hackathons, "lunch-and-learns" and lectures from successful 'startuppers' (no coLab startup has yet failed) to encourage the process; mutual support and collaboration is key.
Clearly, if Greece is ever to rebuild its shattered economy, innovative and optimistic young entrepreneurs who choose to stay here, as opposed to the 76% of young people one recent survey suggested would rather try their chance abroad, will have a big part to play in it.
"We're doing our bit," says George Voulgaris, who runs a business accelerator programme ? culminating in a three-week visit to Silicon Valley ? for coLab hopefuls. "We're driving change from the bottom up. But it can't be just one way; we need top-down change too."
Irene Daskalakis holds a Canadian passport as well as a Greek one, and could have set up her business ? a sustainability research and consultancy firm called Close the Loop ? across the Atlantic.
"Greece," she says, "has reached rock bottom now," she says. "The clientelist system, all those companies that relied on political sponsorship, are having to fend for themselves ? there's no more money. It's survival of the fittest, and quality will out. It's actually not a bad time to start a business."
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