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Show HN: Support greek startups in this crisis

support-greek-startups.com

15 pointsmarkusschwed16 comments

The idea is commendable but I don't see how it can be effective.

Startups are knowledge intensive business, they don't target those who are in need for a job (usually uneducated, men and women who were working on manufacturing and/or agriculture) which is the vast majority of the population.

Greece is a toxic environment for any kind of legal business, especially now that taxation will become even more aggressive.

Wish you all the best, whatsoever.

It's not about giving them a job or anything.

It's more about the problem that they are blocked due to capital controls and transaction restrictions.

In fact they even can't pay hosters or domain registrars anymore.

Not because they haven't got the money, it's because they can't do transactions.

That's why you can help by offering them your SaaS service for free and in the future we add more stuff to the page to help connecting greek startups who needs help with these basic costs and people / companies which are willing to help.

It's really only about supporting them to get through this crisis and keep the basic operations up and running.

(Sorry for the english, I'm not a native english speaker ;) )

One of the crimes being committed on the Greek populace is the financial system blockade, with blocked access to basic banking services and electronic transactions. The ECB has decided that Euros in a Greek bank account are worthless (apart from a very small daily cash allowance), similarly to what happened to Cyprus recently.

If anything, banks should provide at least money-handling services and should be separate from the more speculative, financial engineering side. Money residing in accounts is not borrowed and does not belong to the government or the ECB, it's not an emergency piggy bank for the state.

Access to modern financial services and online transactions should be a human right. Without those modern business becomes impossible and so does a modern economy.

The codebase is now open source as well, in case you may want to contribute :)

https://github.com/CompanyMood/support_greek_startups

Btw it would be just awesome if you would spread the word about that initiative. (always with the hashtag #supportgreekstartups of course ^^)

Also Producthunt could be an option :)

Had a hickup but its fixed... :^)

Do you have a

#Ialreadysupportedgreekstartupswithmytaxpaimentsgreetingsfromgermany

badge as well?

What's wrong with you... What version of the WW2 did you learn in high-school[1]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Agreement_on_German_Ext...

Whilst I agree with the sentiment, it is probably best to address NumberCruncher's views directly rather than an entire nation.

You're right my bad. Didn't stop and think twice, after all Marx, Engels, a girl I was in love at the elementary school, Schumacher, U2's drummer, Nietzsche, the BMW X6, B. Brecht and Goethe are Germans (or German-made)!

But it has been common on HN, having commentators from Germany making similar remarks.

UPDATE: Fixed. :-)

In fact the above mentioned London Agreement on German External Debts, in most cases is not known by the germans making those remarks. Especially regarding greece, there are still roundabout 300 billions of reparation payments in discussion, compared to 80 billions of loss, in case germany would agree to a debt cut. We should be happy that greece people was polite to us till now. :)

I'm German, and I just want to note that I totally do not align with this guy's opinion. Also, many, many, Germans don't have this opinion either. It's mostly the less informed ones who only consume tabloid newspapers that end up with these opinions. They fail to understand that this whole mess is a great opportunity for tabloids to gain sales & profits by driving home the most simple explanation that everybody wants to hear ("greeks lazy, germans hard-working") while the reality of this problem is an incredibly complex beast with many losers and very few winners :(

I'm German as well and I totally agree with you!

...In fact my company started this initiative, so... :)

Oh, I hadn't even seen that. Awesome initiative, Kudos. You should add a sign-up/newsletter form for people that see it but forget to check back once you have the system in place to link greek companies with people. Also, visiting the page right now gives me a "Something went wrong".

Cheers!

Yeah, that's a really good idea and makes totally sense! Thank you!

The "Something went wrong" was a little problem we had during a deploy but everything works as expected again.

I'm german and i agree totally with you. Unfortunately a lot of people didn't know anything about the reasons for greek crisis, so the media coverage about the "lazy greeks" is working for a lot of stupid people...

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