We Need to 10x the Entrepreneurs

Celebrating the ones who venture into uncharted territories

Aug 30, 2024

Friends, we’re kicking off Season 5 of Startup Pirate with thoughts on getting more entrepreneurs in the arena. The past month was one the highest ever in investment activity, so right below, you can find a full list of funding rounds, plus jobs, resources, and events. Here’s what we covered in past issues:

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We Need to 10x the Entrepreneurs

There’s a popular framework for technology revolutions and capital markets called the “Perez Technological Surge Cycle.” Carlota Perez studied past technological revolutions and found that every major revolution has two phases: installation and deployment. Installation is when technology comes to market and the infrastructure is built (rails for the railroads, server & network infrastructure for the internet). This is followed by deployment when technology is broadly adopted (the development of the western part of the US in the railroad era, iPhone, Facebook, and ridesharing in the internet era). A financial crash and recovery almost always mark the turning point between the two. As Fred Wilson says, “Nothing important has ever been built without irrational exuberance”.

We live in exciting times

It’s hard to know whether we’re in the installation phase of another revolution with artificial intelligence or still in the deployment phase of ICT with many smaller, internal revolutions (PC, internet, mobile, AI) extending the duration and impact of the core revolution.

ICT revolution meets S-curves slightly tinkered

We’re in a rare moment in history where the new rails are built: billion (or soon trillion?)-dollar GPU clusters, LLMs, diffusion models, reinforcement learning, etc., while entrepreneurial activity moves up the stack, requiring deeper cultural changes: self-driving cars, mobile manipulators, AI-powered drugs, brain-computer interfaces, you name it. Nowadays, people dream of life extension, universal basic income, colonising Mars, etc. How do we reach the next golden age?

Waymo, Optimus, A-Lab at Berkeley, Neuralink patient

We need to 10x the number of entrepreneurs

I firmly believe that teaching entrepreneurship is counterintuitive as it equals teaching rebellion, creativity, and taking bold risks—everything that disrupts the order supposed to reign in archaic education systems and most corporations.

I often think of the following quote by Antonis Malaxianakis, founder of Harbor Lab, during our past conversation: “As a kid, we used to read the stories of Onasis and Niarchos with my mum instead of children's classics. I always found shipping fascinating and dreamed of becoming a shipowner. Greece has a long tradition, with 20-25% of the global fleet owned by Greek shipowners. That's remarkable for a country of 10 million.” He went on to build one of today’s most high-growth maritime startups in Europe.

Rebellion and risk-taking are culturally ingrained. It’s watching your peers venture and succeed or fail. It’s why 8 of the top 100 shipowners globally originate from Chios, a Greek island with a total area of 850 sq km and 54,000 inhabitants. There, life at sea has been rooted in the local culture kind of forever. A large part of the population is still employed in shipping and every village has stories of seafarers lost at sea, whom they deeply honor.

Naval tradition was also developed on the nearby cluster of islands of Oinousses in the 1830s, where the whole population famously diverted “from sheep to ships” (as per a British reporter). In the 1960s, Oinousses had 150 vessels. We need more of this running in the DNA of Greek families.

The statue of Unknown Sailor in the coastal town of Vrontados, Chios dedicated to those lost at sea

Playing different games

Complex hardware is making a comeback. Unlike the innovation categories of the recent past that mostly moved bits, the new technological revolution brought forward by AI is deeply integrated into the physical world, requiring profound societal changes. Every region should be figuring out what domains are (or could be) of strategic interest and get down to building. In a piece titled “What It Will Take to Create the Next Great Silicon Valleys, Plural”, Marc Andreessen argues:

“Imagine a Bitcoin Valley where some country fully legalises cryptocurrencies for all financial functions. Or a Drone Valley, where a particular region removes all legal barriers to flying unmanned aerial vehicles locally. A Driverless Car Valley in a city that allows experimentation with different autonomous car designs, redesigned roadways, and safety laws. A Stem Cell Valley. And so on.”

Emerging tech hubs, in particular, need to zig when others zag: Attract the entrepreneurs innovating in the vanguard of particular domains—the domains each region mostly cares about—by loosening regulations preventing them from deploying innovative business models, attracting capital to invest in them, and detoxifying the business environment in the process. Throwing non-dilutive grants and beautiful technology parks into the problem is orthogonal as “They cost founders their indeterminate curiosity”, as Alex Danco says. Entrepreneurship ≠ R&D.

These should be ten-year action plans (think Made in China 2025) that rally talent, capital, and resources to solve problems of strategic interest, create entropy in the system, and cultivate risk-taking. The biggest advantage of this is potentially accelerating innovation everywhere by allowing multiple innovation categories to advance in parallel without being bottlenecked by time or place. 10x the number of entrepreneurs globally.

Case Study: Greece

Greece recently established a Centre for Defense Innovation to support the R&D of dual use technologies, the procurement of innovative products for the Armed Forces, and modernise higher military education. Basically, it’s an attempt to create the ecosystem that will supply the Armed Forces with software and hardware in the future.

Although it’s early days and there are still concerns to figure out (eg around IP of technology created), it’s a step towards “This is a strategic industry for us. It’s time to build”. Greece ranks high among European countries by military expenditure, there are adversaries in the vicinity, dual use can expand into critical civil protection such as wildfires, and many local companies already develop world-class technology.

We're at a rare moment in history where a new technological revolution is upon us that will change the history of humankind. It's rebellion and risk-taking that will get us there. Celebrating the ones who venture into uncharted territories. We need to 10x the entrepreneurs.

to the unknown sailors

Jobs

Check out job openings here from startups hiring in Greece.

News

Plum (fintech) raised a £13.4m Series B.

Rillet (accounting tech) secured $13.5m.

Piramidal (AI for EEG) raised $6m Seed.

Mintify (NFT infra) secured $3.4m.

Moveo (conversational AI) raised $2.6m

Axle Automation (AI compliance) raised $2.5m.

illuminem (sustainability data) raised €2m.

Petchef (D2C pet food) raised over €1m.

Theramir (biotech) raised €525k.

Lucid Labs (crypto) raised $500k.

Swaplanet (retail tech) raised €430k.

Caroo (car sharing) raised €300k.

LanzaJet (sustainable fuels) announced new funding.

Zenus (ethical facial analysis) secured funding.

6-week founder program Day One by Genesis Ventures with a ticket of €150k accepting applications until Sep 27.

Corallia Ventures launched with a size of €22.5m to invest in Greek startups.

Resources

Visualising wildfires in Greece by Christos Porios, co-founder of Touvlo.

An overview of classifier-free guidance for diffusion models by Nikolas Adaloglou, PhD Candidate at the University of Düsseldorf.

Machine learning and Brain-Computer Interfaces with Konstantinos Barmpas, ML Engineer at Cogitat.

On the history of Artificial Intelligence with Maria Terzi, co-founder & CEO of Malloc.

Bootstrapped SaaS launch kit by Kostas Livieratos, Senior SRE at Embark Studios.

How companies lose efficiency as they scale by Elektra Bilali Simou, Principal Software Engineer at Orfium.

The operating system of REBORRN with resources on team structure, hiring, onboarding clients, and more.

Durable Objects (DO) — Unlimited single-threaded servers spread across the world by Lambros Petrou, Principal Engineer at Cloudflare.

Agile: embrace the philosophy, not rigid framework rules by Panayiotis Kritiotis, Senior Engineering Manager at Linearity.

Events

“GenAI Summit” by AWS User Group Athens on Sep 5

“AI & Ethics” by Hellenic Tech Network on Sep 19

“Data Science & Business Intelligence Bootcamp” by WE LEAD

That’s all for this week. Tap the heart ❤️ below if you liked this piece—it helps me understand which themes you like best and what I should do more.

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Thank you so much for reading,

Alex