Last week Lisbon hosted three great events for Portuguese talent and entrepreneurs: Silicon Valley Comes to Lisbon Conference, Sapo Codebits, and Startup Weekend. So I thought this could be a great opportunity to promote our most recent campaign and try to expand our team, but most importantly to keep great talent in Portugal.
Too many people are leaving the country
According to the 21st of November issue of VISÃO magazine, more than 600 thousand people have left the country since the beginning of the crisis. And we now have over 100 thousand people that have a degree but can’t find a job. Also, roughly 30% of Lisbon MBA students leave Portugal to go to Startups in Angola, Mozambique and Brazil, according to Mbwana, Founder and Managing Partner of Savannah Fund.
If you leave Portugal, 5 other jobs will be lost
What happens when a Developer leaves Portugal? 5 jobs in local services will be lost! This terrifying statistic comes from Enrico Moretti of Berkeley University who analysed data from 8 million workers in 320 metropolitan areas. His finding: for each new high-tech job in a city, five additional jobs are ultimately created in local services. This means, for every tech job lost, 5 additional jobs will disappear as he explains in his book “The New Geography of Jobs”.
Change things!
So what can I do to change that? Events like Silicon Valley Comes to Lisbon, Codebits or Startup Weekend are a great start.
Silicon Valley Comes to Lisbon promotes entrepreneurship in Portugal. Startup Weekend helps people to take the first steps in developing their ideas, and to starting a company. New companies create the most new jobs, and will ultimately pave the way out of the recession.
Join Webnographer
A few months back I joined Webnographer. It has been a constantly challenging experience, and that’s the fun of it! Everyday is different and I’m always learning something new and pushing myself further. Reaching my limits and establishing new ones.
If you’re interested in joining our team and get a hot career here in Portugal, please find more about our job opennings here: http://jobs.webnographer.com
I’m sympathetic towards your idea. Nevertheless, going abroad is an experience that will change completely your circle of people, work in a different culture, work with different customers….I can point to oblivion all the good. Were world citizens. What, in my opinion, can change the future of entrepreneurs in Portugal is receiving outsiders (as we have a very open culture) and profit from newly departed’s.
Those are all great events, i attended all of them. Codebits was very good this year.
But they lack one very important thing, a real connection between students and the majority of companies (not just one or two). This is an issue because, not everyone is going to build it’s own company, and lot’s of people actually don’t want to. There are several students that already think that to get a good job or to work on interesting projects, they need to go abroad, which is not true.
To complement those events i would recommend some of the college/student organized events (the good ones), that attend to all those aspects although, only focusing on college students and graduates.
The best one is, without doubt, SINFO at IST (Técnico Lisboa), that also brings lots of international speakers for Talks, and hosts a technological exhibition, besides workshops, and presentations from lots of companies. (Attending this matters it’s probably the best one in Portugal, Minho is also pretty good).
If you’re looking to expand your team you should definitely get in touch with the organization or so.