Tag: Ecosystem

Webit.Festival - a place for minds to meet. Marius Ghenea, the Investment Director of 3TS Capital gave a keynote at last year’s edition about seizing opportunities and avoiding pitfalls in the fast-growing Central & Eastern Europe risk-capital ecosystem. 3TS Capital has been investing in countries in the CEE region for quite some time and Marius, as a serial entrepreneur and angel investor himself has gained deep insight on the specifics of this market. Though being quite underestimated in the years back in time, CEE is slowly but surely getting its footprint in business, tech and innovations. The region has drawn attention not only with unicorns such as Skype, Avast, Transferwise and AeroMobil but also with the emergence of multiple, active and growing startup ecosystems across and around.

CEE sure has its historical, economical and national challenges to overcome

The diversity of this region consists of countries in the EU, countries yet to join the EU, countries with an “on the way” developed startup ecosystem and ones that have yet to work towards the achievement of it. This calls for quite a turbulent, hard to define business environment with ounces of political, ethical and cultural differences ranging for each country. Despite the tiny late development, things are starting to look more and more promising. The IT sector has been rapidly growing, adding to a growing GDP for some of the countries. In the last years, we have seen business association networks popping up in the region. One of the things happening more often now is that a growing number of these national and regional associations have been connecting with large organizations and business angel associations on a European and worldwide level. Webit.Festival gathers exactly the people, entrepreneurs and investors involved in this ecosystem mixed with players in the worldwide scene to create a colorful mix. Check our website for more details of the 2018 upcoming edition.

At Endeavour's Dare to Scale Rosen Plevneliev - the president of Bulgaria 2012-2017, Fernando Fabre - president of Enveavor Global, Vassil Terziev - Co-founder of Telerik Acacdemy had a panel discussion about the value about Entrepreneurial Ecosystem, moderated by Plamen Russev - Chairman of WEBIT Foundation.

Strengths to focus on and weaknesses to work on

The discussion went through 3 stages - Bulgaria, Region and Global. Vassil Terziev took over the first stage going through the last 10 years of developing an entrepreneurial spirit in Bulgaria and bringing all the components of a working Ecosystem together. They include people, events which gather several thousand people together talking about the future. New and new formats are coming to Bulgaria every year. "The growth is a function not only of time, but also of communication and aligning the economic interests. In order something to be sustainable it has to make sense for everybody involved. And this is what is still missing."  - mr. Terziev said, but staying still optimistic about what the Technology Ecosystem that's being built can do for the other sectors in Bulgaria.

It's a kind of magic

"I believe in magic big time. We need the magic of giving back."  mr. Plamen Russev We already have the Ecosystem startups and they are growing but do we need to focus on scale ups more? "They will make Bulgaria a better place, Through WEBIT, through Enveavor and other formats we will build those scale ups who will give back to the community." We need an ecosystem where every single person grows within the idea that he or she has to give back to the community – like the Israerli ecosystem. “You can’t say “I’ve done enough, now it’s time to give back” – no, you give back all the time. ”

The Local Heroes

Mr. Rosen Plevneliev talked about the ambition of Bulgaria and how he shared his thoughts with several entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley. “You are as big as your dreams are, not as big as your territory is. And to be globally strong, we need to be locally strong. This is what you, the local heroes are doing right now.”

A map of ecosystems

Mr. Fernando Fabre took the audience on a world tour of the Ecosystems – from Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Silicon Valley, New York to Tel Aviv, Beirut and so on. He shared his opinion that it all goes down to inspiration. Big entrepreneurs inspire others – they grow and do the same – thus multiplying the mindset. “You call it giving back, Local heroes, I call it multiplying effect these are three terms that are exactly the same.” Webit Foundation commits its annual funds to foster the development of the startup and innovation ecosystems in the regions our global events take place. Founders Games is the startup competition in the program of Webit.Festival Europe. During the event we not only provide free grant for startups to get a free expo table, free festival tickets and opportunity to meet unparalleled selection top enterprise leaders from all around the world + investors, but also an opportunity to WIN €200 000 seed investment! Find out more about the Founder games here.

Amid the political turmoil in Europe, caused by the unprecedented influx of refugees from the MENA region and the election victory of Donald Trump in the United States, the issue of immigration quickly established itself as a major in today’s political life. And although most people in the developed world have their reasons to be worried about the migration and its effect on their country’s social system, on the political scene we see a clear conflict between the stated policies of governments and the interests of the industry, and especially the tech sector. Last week we saw that the tech companies in USA continued to rally against the new president’s immigration ban for the citizens of 7 countries with Muslim majority population. More than 100 firms in the sector voiced their opposition to Trump’s executive order, and among them were Apple, Facebook, Tesla, SpaceX, Airbnb, Twitter and Microsoft. Meanwhile Starbucks even announced that it will hire 10 000 refugees in 75 countries over the next 5 years. But what caused the strange connection between large technology corporations and the issue of migration? Quite simply, it’s the fact that vast majority of the directors of successful businesses in the US and around the world are either immigrants or descendants of those and feel committed to this issue. Among them we can mention the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk, who grew up in South Africa and studied in Canada, the Co-Founder of Google Sergey Brin, who was born in Moscow, the Аrmenian refugee descendant and founder of Reddit Alexis Ohanian, the Cuban immigrant descendant and Founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos and many others. In fact, the connection between being an immigrant and becoming an entrepreneur is well studied, even by Harvard. Last year the famous university published a report on the extensive cross-cultural experiences of top level business leaders and how it helps them take over the industry with out of the box decisions. According to the Harvard’s experts immigrants in USA are almost twice as likely to become entrepreneurs as native-born citizens of the country. Right now they represent 27.5% of the US entrepreneurs, but only around 13% of the population. This pattern extends beyond the United States. The data from 2012 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor showed that the vast majority of the 69 countries surveyed reported higher entrepreneurial activity among immigrants, than among natives, especially in growth-oriented ventures. This year Webit continues its mission of hosting top level policy discussion about dealing with Europe’s most pressing issues and forming the digital future of the continent. The Digital Economy Leadership Summit of this years Webit.Festival will again become a platform for presenting the best ideas for the future development of European industry. The event will gather some of the most influential policy makers and top level experts, that shape the global agenda of the World Economic Forum, like the Global Leadership Fellow at WEF Thomas Philibeck, the Head of Europe and Eurasia at WEF Martina Larkin,the President & Global Brand Director of Havas Worldwide Jason Jerinovic and the Director General of Digital Europe John Higgins.