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Comment by saym | Hacker News Reader

Estonia has impressed me with their forward thinking policies. Everything about their execution of this plan has me impressed. They have executed well in financing the building of this network and in creating a sustainable business model for the future.

Related note: 5 Months ago I remember hearing about their plan to introduce programming into elementary curriculum. http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/09/04/2136256/estoni...

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On the related note: Wolfram announced a few days ago Estonia becoming their first CBM country for computerbasedmath.org to rewrite key years of school probability and statistics from scratch: http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/02/11/announcement-our-first-cb...

"They have executed well in financing the building of this network..."

They have executed well in the building. Financing is kinda easy for a country of only 1.3 million people heavily subsidized by the European Union (which Estonia is a part of).

During the 2008-2009 crisis (which is not done yet but I digress), the Estonian GDP took a gigantic hit: -20% of the GDP. That's what you get when you're taxing the private sector like crazy: the private sector, in usual circumstances, can barely survive. If any crisis happens, then the private sector dies and the economy crumbles (thank you socialism for the crazy high confiscatory tax rates on the private sector).

It's like Poland, for example: I love this country and it feels incredibly more "new" and even sometimes more "hi-tech" (e.g. in big cities malls) than western europe... But Poland is receiving crazy funding from the EU to get up to speed.

As an EU taxpayer, that said, it's good that at least some of money is used to invest in technologies that are bound to become very important in the future...

Agree with your point about both the size of the country and the funding they are receiving. That said, when I visited Estonia in the early 2000s, prior to being in the EU, their broadband infrastructure seemed better than that of Finland and Germany (two countries I spent time in). That may have well been due to it's overall size.

What is interesting to me about Estonia now is the lack of overall diversity in the tech sector there. The biggest tech employers seem to be the government, the banks, and Skype.

Maybe Skype buyout V2 will inject more in the way of a startup culture there.

"What is interesting to me about Estonia now is the lack of overall diversity in the tech sector there. The biggest tech employers seem to be the government, the banks, and Skype."

I believe that's not unique to Estonia. The biggest tech employers in my country are the government and the banks as well (No Skype here).

Estonia has ~15000 people working in the tech sector. There are 1500 tech/IT companies, 26 of them above 100 employees. IT/Tech is ~5.8% of GDP (2010).

Here is one Estonian Startups list: http://hub.garage48.org/estonian-startups - all in all, there are 100+ active startups in Estonia, which I would say for a country of 1 million people is quite a startup culture. Estonia now has I believe 7 or 8 European startup accelerator Seedcamp winners, trailing only UK, Seedcamp's home country.

This is kind of misleading. Many of the start-ups on that list are headquartered (or host major operations) outside of Estonia; they're considered Estonian only because the founders hold Estonian nationality. You wouldn't call start-ups headquartered in the US and founded by Indians "Indian start-ups", would you?

This might not be the case for quite a few Estonian startups though -- with 1.3 million people you're desperately lacking a large enough target market for the niche products that some startups are developing, and looking to other countries may actually be a part of a strategy, not simply a case of 'I happen to be an Estonian living in the UK so I'll just go with the flow and do my startup here'. I would call these startups Estonian.

Which ones do you mean? Most if not all of those companies have majority of the team and original entity in Estonia.

Even then, we as Estonian startup people don't care where the main legal entity is. If it's started and run by Estonians, we consider it Estonian.

> It's like Poland, for example: I love this country and it feels incredibly more "new" and even sometimes more "hi-tech" (e.g. in big cities malls) than western europe...

wow, it's nice you say that, but could you elaborate?

5D cinema!

http://www.aboutpoland.net/2011/10/10/watch-5d-at-fort-wola/

;]

Because 3D is soooo 1st decade of the 21st century..

Estonia is a former Soviet republic and now a fairly poor European country one does have to ask is there not better things to spend this on?

Support for start ups that create long term jobs and values might be a better use of the carbon credits they sold to Mitsubishi.

Off Wikipedia:

"Estonia has the highest gross domestic product per person among the former Soviet republics.[10] It is listed as a "high-income economy" by the World Bank, is identified as an "advanced economy" by the International Monetary Fund, and is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The United Nations classifies Estonia as a developed country with a very high Human Development Index,[5] and the country ranks highly in measures of press freedom (3rd in the World in 2012[11]), economic freedom, political freedom and education."

Then why are there tons of educated Estonians moving to the UK doing the low level jobs then.

And first amongst former soviet states is not exactly knocking it out of the ball park.

> Then why are there tons of educated Estonians moving to the UK doing the low level jobs then.

Better weather?

> And first amongst former soviet states is not exactly knocking it out of the ball park.

Clearly, they should be ZEROTH.

well compared to Seattle anywheres weather is better :-)

Not tons, but just some. In percentage terms, there are probably proportionally the least number of Estonians who have left their country to work abroad compared to most if not all Eastern European countries.

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