6 min read

Programs startups go

Programs startups go
Lithuania Tech Weekly #144
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work in progress

We are not in favour of excessive funding for a specific industry, because this investment does not necessarily pay off for the state, especially if it distorts the developers’ goals when they develop for the mere sake of justifying funding rather than to create a game that millions of people want to play. The game development industry in Lithuania would benefit most from investment in education, children’s creativity and artistic potential
Repeat Founders - the list
Why serial entrepreneurship is so important? Interestingly, in many ways, it becomes harder to start again. Just like NVIDIA’s CEO just said - “no, I would not start again if I knew what it would take”. For repeat founders, naivete is gone - they all know how hard it is
  • Diversity. Invest Europe report highlights that LT has many female startup founders (second after Bratislava!) - and features Dalia Lasaite, CEO and co-founder of CGTrader.

rounds and capital


founder's guide


What Cloud Solution Is Best for Your Startup? A guide comparing different cloud solutions – AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

introduced by Cloudvisor

further insights

Are there general rules for finding situations with superlinear returns? The most obvious one is to seek work that compounds.

There are two ways work can compound. It can compound directly, in the sense that doing well in one cycle causes you to do better in the next. That happens for example when you're building infrastructure, or growing an audience or brand. Or work can compound by teaching you, since learning compounds. This second case is an interesting one because you may feel you're doing badly as it's happening. You may be failing to achieve your immediate goal. But if you're learning a lot, then you're getting exponential growth nonetheless.

ecosystem

  • France wants to follow UK lead in incentivizing angel investment - will provide up to EUR 50k tax break if you invest in a startup.
  • There is something very special about economic performance in Scandinavia. For example, Nordics have delivered +4.0% Total Return to Shareholders vs. Europe over the past 20 years (and +2.2% vs Global average). What is the key driver behind this? Strong company performance is fully explained by a higher degree of differentiation in local and global niche markets, leading to higher margins and economic profit. So that's an interesting insight from McKinsey.
  • Less spot-on is when they dive into startups and scale-ups, where things are a bit more dynamic and data is much less clean to work with. With this report, they tried to make a point about which countries are better in scaling their startups. This created a lot of debates online (why Netherlands so much behind Sweden?) but in reality this graph suffers from poor selection of metrics. The scaling is narrowly defined as "firms founded between 2010-2015 that have moved from pre-series D to series D+ or IPO". This clearly leaves a ton of companies out that had other paths (such as profitable growth without external financing or successful acquisition). Combining the startup success with general business creation (most of these are just SMEs for the local economy) is also not helpful.
chart, bubble chart

roleplay

Poklet - Co-Founders with expertise - Tech/Product Ownership, Growth/Marketing, and Business Development
Spike Technologies - Senior AI-tech Sales Executive
Cloudvisor - Partnerships Manager
BaltCap - ESG Manager
#walk15 - Sales Manager Germany
Syntropy - Product Designer

One way to get interviews - make a slide deck

Pick a startup - find a job
Inspired by the reader’s comment below, a practical framework for how to think, research and find the best jobs in the tech market. A draft -help improve this by sending your suggestions. The early options that matter have already matured and there are just not enough high-growth early stage startu…

other messengers

three questions, previously