Beiträge

This is the way: Luxembourg gives Innovation easy access to Money

One thing I never quite managed to wrap my head around is the way financing for start-ups works. Well, yeah – I understand how it works and why it works like that. But fact is: A start-up and it´s visionary leaders, taking personal risks to move it forward, should focus on their business entirely and push it towards success. Instead they struggle to get to the next finance round and pay for the essentials.

Markets which make it easy to access funds to grow a business, from my point of view, got it right. It should be easy for small businesses to finance innovation and growth and when a local government is supporting that in a relevant way, thats even better.

In that sense: great initiative in Luxembourg these days, with a deal between the European Funds for Strategic Investments (EFSI) and BNP Paribas in Luxembourg for lending cheap money to innovative SMBs in the marketplace. EFSI pretty much is a tool of the EU Commission to boost innovation and jobs. So say something that the EU is a bad thing. It is not. You can read how good it really is on the EU Commissions website.

Full details on the Luxembourg deal can be found here.

 

Soros is pushing Ukraine towards a better future

Ukraine has been in the news for so long with mostly negative topics related to the Russian invasion in the eastern parts of the country and the annexation of Crimea by the Russian army before. These reports overshadowed the fact that the people of Ukraine decided to rid a corrupt and cleptocratic Regime, that was leading the country back to tyranny. The people of Ukraine chose freedom and and a free economy, and with it an open society following the western model. Its really been that – the choice between cleptocrates stealing the assets of the country or a free society. It had only little to do with any east / west conflict in my view, at least internally in Ukraine. The Ukrainians simply did not care for what Russia thought about their strive for freedom. Obviously, looking at the bigger picture, the Russian regime feared something like this could happen at home and they feared NATO coming closer and, probably most importantly, they feared losing influence. And everyone knows what happened next.

During these rough times, the young and educated in Ukraine did not stand still to move the country forward. I reported earlier about the efforts of the Brain Basket Foundation to educate more IT engineers and Software Developers, with the goal of strengthening this big and important industry. 

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5 Countries leading the way in Fintech Investment (Computer Business Review)

Computer-Business-Review-logo_620x350The Computer Business Review CBR released today an overview of the five regions investing most in FinTech. Who would have guessed? 🙂 Interesting nevertheless.

5 countries leading the way in fintech investment