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Comment by opportune | Hacker News Reader

I'm heavily considering Tallinn for a tech startup -

It's easy to get residence status (IIRC basically requires a ~$60k investment in a business you are starting) and extremely easy to start a business. You get access to the EU labor/trade markets in a low COL city which already has a decent sized tech and entrepreneurship presence. The government is actively courting you and in general seems very easy to interact with and move forward with - reducing the PM/lawyer overhead of operating a medium sized business in other countries. And if you stay there long enough it's not overly complicated to get EU permanent resident status.

Overall, Tallinn beats SV in almost every way except for two - developer talent/concentration (though it's still pretty good) and local capital.

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I’d worry about talent pool being too small (Estonia has a population of only over a million people). It might not be easy to get people from outside to relocate there, as no one else in EU (expect apparently some Finnish people) speaks Estonian, the weather is grim and wages aren’t that enticing. That’s probably why the government is trying very hard to attract foreign startup investors, as otherwise Tallin is at a disadvantage vs say Warsaw.

Yes but Estonia has https://ccdcoe.org/ as well as numerous IT companies and startups already (most famously, Skype, now a Microsoft office). Plus I don't think you would have any issues having an English-speaking software development office.

Honestly Poland's far-right is a big turn off for me and if I were an ethnically Indian/Pakistani/Turkish software engineer I wouldn't want to live there. It also just doesn't seem like as nice of a place to live. Admittedly, I haven't done much research in terms of what I would need to do as a non-EU resident to get temporary residence there though. I would love for my notions to be proven wrong.

I’ve worked with a number of Indian and Arab people in Poland. I’ve never heard them complain, and some have settled here for good. I am sure there is some level of latent racism here, but that’s true of any society.

Regarding tech companies, Poland has Google, Amazon and some pretty good game studios (CDPRed). It is not an innovation hub by any means though and most people just do regular corporate programming (frontend, backend) or maybe some not terribly innovative startups. If you want to create something based on existing tech, Poland will be fine, but if you want to develop new one, you might have trouble finding the people for it (that’s true for 99.9% places in the world though, Tallin included most likely).

As for Poland being a nice place to live - just come to Wroclaw or Krakow for a weekend when you have a chance and see for yourself. IMO there’s very little difference in living in Warsaw vs say London or New York. The air quality is a worse in the winter - on the other hand, there are no drugs/drug dealers on the streets, no homeless people (or very few), no guns/murders and no terrorism.

Regarding the temp visa, sadly I don’t know anything about it.

Hmm, ok, maybe I'll spend a couple days in Warsaw during my trip to Tallinn and Riga. Thanks!

Warsaw isn't especially pleasant as Polish cities go.

I'd suggest asking what is uniquely beneficial about Tallinn that will make your business more likely to succeed. Lots of places are cheap and the two exceptions you identify, talent and capital, are absolutely critical to the success of high-growth tech companies.

Very good point. I am actually visiting Tallinn later this year to try to meet with people in the entrepeneurship scene and learn more about the city.

While you're right that talent and capital are important, it's also true that no place on the planet has more capital and software talent than SV. So you're never going to beat SV measuring only those metrics. The challenge of an entrepeneur who wants to found a startup outside of the Bay area is to pick a location that is beneficial in other ways while not sacrificing too much in terms of capital and talent. I'm not too sure about the local capital in Tallinn (not that you necessarily need to raise money locally) but I do know it has a pretty strong developer community by european standards, maybe in the top 5 in europe. And it also excels in terms of government support for entrepreneurship and, afaik, local cybersecurity talent. So it's not just a cheap place, it's a cheap place that also has basically every other thing that makes founding a software business attractive with the possible exception of capital.

How did you get information about Tallinn specifically and what other cities did you consider in the same category?

I was reading about the best places to be an expat on something like nomadcapitalist.com and Estonia kept coming up due to the ease of immigrating + starting a business there. And I've just done personal research from there. For example https://ccdcoe.org/ is also based there which is a huge draw for software talent.

Other cities I've been considering - Lisbon, Riga, , Bucharest, Berlin, Prague, Dublin. Mostly was just looking for cheap places with developers that are in the EU and not too hard to immigrate to. Prague in particular seems like a pretty big nexus for EU developers and it's pretty inexpensive. There's undoubtedly many other cities that fit well in this category, I just haven't heard of them. But Tallinn punches above its weight in terms of software presence and it's basically the easiest to immigrate to so I focused on that pretty early on in terms of good places to found an EU-based company.

Nomadcapitalist sells residency services. His info is good, but he has an angle and shouldn't be used as a single source of truth. I like Wroclaw (which gives you access to Ukrainian programmers also) and Lisbon myself. Since Portuguese is easier to learn, and I already have people there, it will probably be Lisbon.

There was a decent overview of entrepreneur passport options on here the other week. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wLPGB2BdRxHWbdOXXtKA...

This one was left off the list for some reason (I have a pal who uses this visa, though he's in Ukraine a lot of the time): http://www.czechstartups.org/en/start-up-visa/

Yeah, I'm aware he's a consultant of some kind but from what I can tell it shouldn't be too hard to navigate the process on your own. A lot of what he focuses on are capital gains/taxes which I don't really care about too much.

Thanks for those links, super helpful, didn't know so many countries offered startup-specific visas. In that google doc spreadsheet it's missing some important investor visas (the startup visa for Estonia looks cool but since the investor visa has such low capital requirements, without digging deeper, it still looks like a better deal). And do you know the name of the program you are referencing with Wroclaw? Does Poland have some special program where you can sponsor Ukrainians' work visas there?

Just curious, what about Lisbon is so attractive to you? I know Spanish and can read most basic Portuguese but still was mostly ruling out Portugal due to what I perceived as too-small tech and entrepreneurial communities. Spain and Portugal seem like great places to work on an MVP with a couple other cofounders but I had kind of ruled them out for a place to really launch.

That's right: Poland and Ukraine have a special visa regime (strong historical ties). I dunno what it is called, but you can google it up: http://www.vfsglobal.com/poland/Ukraine/English/how-to-apply...

There's a host more investor visas of various kinds and "if you feel like it" visas. If you're a US national, you can basically stay in most EU countries if you want to. Each one will be a little different, but ultimately you have to work pretty hard to get tossed out of the EU. Some of these visa regimes are informal, like "OK, you seem like a nice guy and you're not going to go on the dole here." This is the kind of info that you WON'T get from concierge residency guys like NomadDude -he's trying to steer people towards things which he actually provides.

Lisbon: I like the food, climate and architecture better than Poland, and I have more friends who live there. Pretty simple, really: people on the ground trumps any information you're going to get on the internets. The projects on my horizons are all fairly high skill (ph.d. in math), low head count projects, and it's a lot easier to convince high skill people to move to Lisbon than Wroclaw or Lviv. There's also a decent nomadconsultant scene which has interesting social aspects. If I needed head count for a Bay Area type startup, I'd probably go straight to Ukraine, as I got people with top connections there. It's a beautiful country, and lots of the talent wants to stay there.

Tallinn's climate pales in comparison - and I wouldn't exactly call SV's climate ideal.

It practically never snows in SV.

That’s a feature, not a bug: we keep our snow in Tahoe, where it belongs!

How far can one get if he speaks English but neither Estonian nor Russian?

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