Italia Startup Visa

Wouldn't this be a great way for non-EU citizens to get a residence-permit within the EU? Then, one could move and work in more lucrative places, like Switzerland. (Full disclosure: I am interested in tech-recruiting in Switzerland - see https://medium.com/@techrecruiting.ch/eight-reasons-why-i-mo...)

As an Italian, I have to say that Italy isn't the first place where I would open a startup, but many comments here are really exaggerated. Corruption and crime, in the center and north of Italy (the most economically active part), is nowhere as prevalent as they say. Unfortunately, because of the crisis that really hit hard here, there is a very gloomy sentiment in lots of Italians.

But as a consequence of the crisis, there is a lot of talent that can be get pretty cheap for European standards, especially now that taxation for newly hired workers has been greatly reduced.

Could you elaborate on that? Switzerland is not part of the EU, so how would that help?

# Sorry LONG comment and need to go to work, little to no time to read again and fix errors. Be kind.

I'm yet another italian (expat to London) and let me state a few things which are not listed on that landing page but that you should consider before applying:

I've worked for a few months in a "startup" inside a major italian incubator (Working Capital). I was developer #1 of the company, and here are a few things I want to tell you about incubators in Italy: 1) The level of mentorship provided is close to zero. Their main role is "office" surveillance. They will contribute with ZERO competence to your startup as they have no valuable experience. 2) There are two kind of companies inside incubators: those "with connections" and those without. Companies without connections were accepted just so that the incubator has some numbers to show off. Those with connections (which is most likely due to the parents of the founders being friend with some excutive in the incubator partners) will receive enough support, will behave without a code of conduct, will make it through the whole process without a flaw while If your company will be on the "no connections" side expect (and I will state this again) to be simply abandoned. 3) Investors, pitches and demo days: they mostly are a bunch of executives from partnering companies who have close to zero experience in investing and who gives zero shit about startups. Again, they will just hangout events because of political connections with incubators and as soon as pitches are over they will leave the presentation flying. Execting any kind of feedback nor real investment is just nonsense. I never saw ANY company in an incubator getting anything from official investors. This is still true if you are a random startup without connection. If you are one with connections, you won't attend demo-day, you won't be doing spitches and you'll be funded anyway. 4) In general the startups level is mediocre to say the best. As the selection process is quite random (remember: you are there so that they can say they are an incubator and get money from the public administration) most of the ideas are just completely random and founder have ZERO technical background. In the incubator I used to work, I was the only developer (and we are talking about 40+ people in the room). Believe it or not. 5) Getting investments won't be easy. Which doesn't mean that if you work hard enough you can still achieve results. It means that nobody wants to invest, there's no investments culture on the investor side and no support from so-called incubators. I saw probably 1-2 companies getting any sort of funding and they took years of "working for free" to get a 250k investment.

So, this is pretty much what you should expect when bootstrapping a company in Italy inside an incubator. Of course this is bureaucratic and tax-related problems aside (which are quite difficult to sort: you should expect to throw tens of thousands of euros to get your company officially started and keep your books in order. These costs will probably exceed any funding you'll get).

A few more things to consider: 1) The italian culture is business-adverse. Average People aim in life is to find a stable job in a big-size company/public administration until pension. As a startupper you'll be mostly seen as a young unemployed wasting his time. 2) If you are REALLY talented and lucky, you build up the "right connections", get yourself funded and open a profitable company you will likely have to deal with mafia (as someone already mentioned). First hand experience: my uncle bootstrapped a profitable fish-import company. Mafia knocked, asked them to acquire the business paying close-to-zero. At the beginning my uncle refused: His car and house catched fire. Of course institutions did nothing about this. He sold the company and left the country. No jokes here.

So, I could probably go on but I hope you got the point :) Should you apply? It depends I guess from where you are right now. If you want to launch a business in Europe and don't know where to start: then maybe you could apply to be accepted in Italy BUT then you need to have a plan to move either to London or to Berlin. If you think to move to Italy and find a healthy business-oriented environment: you are SO wrong.

Good luck!

Ehh, I thought I was negative about Italy, but seeing what everyone else is saying, I'm probably the most positive person here.

The pros:

- There are some absolutely excellent open source developers who can be hired much more cheaply than the US.

- Life is excellent. Italy is a really beautiful country.

- Lots of incredibly low hanging fruits. Italy has a lot of great companies that makes excellent products the entire world wants, but have absolutely pathetic IT departments. This is also true in the public sector - several regions of Italy have amazing touristic attractions with pathetic marketing/web presence. This is probably the best reason.

The cons:

- As a corollary to the last pro (about low hanging fruits). Public sector contracts are given to people who are completely incompetent but well connected, who then sub contract it out. The technocratic/political class, especially at the local level, is almost always old, and has gotten their positions because of connections.

- Moreso than outright corruption (unless you live in the South), red tape can be a massive issue.

- This does not affect start ups, but once you grow to more than 15 employees, staff hired full time is basically impossible to fire. This is very slowly getting changed.

I don't think it makes sense to move to Italy if you want to work on the next chat/social media application, but if you have a great idea on how to use web to improve tourism/market high end goods, or you have excellent SaaS software for medium-large sized companies, you could probably do very well, and live very well too.

Basically, this is sort of an interesting (but old) summary of an interesting case study: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121969807244970447 - there were lots of resources, lots of low hanging fruits, and yet due to political squabbling, total ignorance of technology and nepotism the project was a huge waste. Given how low the bar is, it's very possible to do much better.

Small edit: There is a huge generational gap between the 50+ year olds that run the country, and the kids graduating now from University, in terms of attitude towards technology, meritocracy, and entrepreneurship.