Croatia could be Europe's hidden tech haven in 2024
fastcompany.com
Croatia could be Europe's hidden tech haven in 2024
1–10 of 59 posts
Re: Croatia could be Europe's hidden tech haven in 2024
#2It is a nice country but unlikely due to the small tech scene and lack of venture funding.
Re: Croatia could be Europe's hidden tech haven in 2024
#3It's like California but with Roman emperor's palaces and Habsburg vacation homes strewn around the shoreline. Happy to see this trend and hope it continues.
Re: Croatia could be Europe's hidden tech haven in 2024
#4Kudos to Croatia's tourism board or whoever ordered this article. It is nice place for digital nomads for sure.
Belgrade is much bigger hub for example (Serbia) and more of Ukrainians and Russians moved there to work, but overall this creates positive climate for Balkans as a whole... Not sure what is happening in Bosnia for example.
Re: Croatia could be Europe's hidden tech haven in 2024
#5Europe is going to have a long hibernation in the global scene. Whatever existed was killed by bureaucracy and taxation.
Whatever doesn't exist, it will simply not happen, the ship has sailed
Re: Croatia could be Europe's hidden tech haven in 2024
#6Kudos to Croatia's tourism board or whoever ordered this article. It is nice place for digital nomads for sure. Belgrade is much bigger hub for example (Serbia) and more of Ukrainians and Russians moved there to work, but overall this creates positive climate for Balkans as a whole... Not sure what is happening in Bosnia for example.
Nothing much in Bosnia, it's all either Serbia or Montenegro.
Croatia is Schengen, so it's much more difficult to get there, and once you're in, there are better destinations.
Re: Croatia could be Europe's hidden tech haven in 2024
#7As someone who has built and sold an original software startup in Serbia, and has followed the evolution of the local tech scene in the Balkans over the last decade pretty closely, the one thing the region absolutely needs more of is this kind of positive press.
While there's been a fair bit written about the growth of the "IT Sector"[0] there, for the longest time that sector was mostly made up of outsourcers and body shops (as opposed to product-centric, funded original startups). As that outsourcing workforce has matured, I've started to notice an increasing number of individuals at the top end of the talent spectrum that have become too experienced/expensive to be considered 'profitable resources' for those outsourcing companies (i.e. their salaries have grown to be too high compared to the daily rate they're sold at while demand for them has fallen away as companies seeking staff augmentation already tend to depend on their own senior technical leadership).
What this means is that we're going to see more experienced, highly skilled technical experts in reasonably well-off financial positions start to ask themselves what they could do next, and what I'm hoping happens is that the more original success stories we evangelise - the more we publicise the Infobips and the Rimacs - the more likely it is that those experts will choose to develop their original idea and seek funding.
TL;DR The talent is absolutely there and growing, they just need encouragement.
https://www.ft.com/content/03f995f0-9c12-11ea-871b-edeb99a20...
Re: Croatia could be Europe's hidden tech haven in 2024
#8Croatia has been having a brain drain to the north. In 30 years it has lost about a fifth of the people. They leave for Austria or Germany because they can earn 3+ times more even for not-IT jobs.
Re: Croatia could be Europe's hidden tech haven in 2024
#9The article doesn't touch upon some major pain points. While the sea side is nice, it heavily relies on tourism and short term rentals. A long term rental is difficult to find during the summer time and it's not well regulated.
The capital (Zagreb) is overcrowded and its infrastructure is getting worse every year. I spent many years there. Now, I can't imagine living there again (judging by my occasional 1-2 day long visits of it).
And, I'm not sure how much the tech sector plays the role for the digital nomads. Some companies did grow a lot, but I don't find today's tech sector (mostly in Zagreb) much different from the one 1-2 decades ago.
You are mostly left to the local market, which has a significant outflow to the rest of the Europe for the past few decades.
Re: Croatia could be Europe's hidden tech haven in 2024
#10Europe is going to have a long hibernation in the global scene. Whatever existed was killed by bureaucracy and taxation. Whatever doesn't exist, it will simply not happen, the ship has sailed
What do you base this opinion on?
Northern European countries consistently rank at the top of the world in ease of doing business
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_doing_business_index
Some of them have more entrepreneurs per capita than USA.
What you don’t have is the ability to attract a crazy amount of international capital to mega corporations like in California/Texas or some places in China. So it’s hard to build the very largest tech corporations there.
I think European companies tend to be less consumer oriented, not as visible, and focusing on more “behind the scenes” technology. So you get the impression there’s fewer of them than there actually are.
Like, in my industry, there’s nothing like Nvidia or AMD. But there’s ASML and Zeiss for instance, without which Nvidia couldn’t make their chips. There’s nothing like the mega super high performance foundries like TSMC and Samsung but there’s a whole bunch of smaller specialised foundries focusing on very high power, very low power and optics and MEMS stuff.