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Comment by jmspring | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

"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).

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