Back in 2012, Jaime Jorge did something few of his Portuguese compatriots ever did: He turned down a job at Google in London.
Jorge, then a 24-year-old software developer, chose to start his own enterprise instead. Five years later, Codacy, the company he co-founded with Joao Caxaria, uses algorithms to automatically correct mistakes in software code for scores of businesses worldwide, including PayPal and Adobe.
They’ve never looked back. “Instead of working 18 hours a day for someone else, we did this cool project for ourselves,” Jorge says at a cafe in Baixa, Lisbon’s historic district. “We had an alternative.”
That’s something new in a small nation long beset with a stagnant economy and a stressed banking industry. For years, Portugal’s best and brightest bolted for plum jobs at global consulting firms such as Accenture or tech giants like Google. Those brave enough to start their own tech companies almost always decamped for London, where a mix of British creativity, government support, and venture capital had fostered a bustling startup scene. Half the investments in European fintech startups from 2011 to 2016 went to British companies, according to CB Insights, a New York research firm.
Now a confluence of forces is leading entrepreneurs to build their companies at home. Thanks to cloud computing and open source software, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to assemble digital platforms anywhere. And universities such as the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon are teaching students the art of entrepreneurship rather than just grooming them for careers in multinational corporations. Besides, London is one of the most expensive cities in the world in which to run a business; a rank-and-file software developer there earns three times what a coder makes in Portugal, according to a report by Balderton Capital in London.
This story is from the February/March 2017 edition of Bloomberg Markets.
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This story is from the February/March 2017 edition of Bloomberg Markets.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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