Postcards from Elsewhere: Athens, Greece
As Greek founders build unicorns from San Francisco and New York, Athens is transforming into a mobile, globally-connected startup ecosystem rather than a fixed home base.
Right now, AI has concentrated on the frontier in the US and Silicon Valley. And because everyone, including Greeks, has been building with AI, more of our recent success stories are being built outside of the country than within it. We’ve measured it: startups with Greek founders who started abroad are worth roughly 15x more than those that started here.
That might seem like a problem. But it’s not. I believe it speaks to the future of ecosystems.
There’s an ancient Greek saying that goes something like “Those who speak our language are Greeks.” Language was the cornerstone of our culture. We tried to teach it to the whole world, and also welcomed the whole world as our own. I’ve always liked this idea: You don’t have to be Greek to be Greek. And don’t have to be in Greece to be connected to Greece, either. We just needed to make sure people maintain a strong connection to the local ecosystem and know how much it was worth betting on.
Maps from Elsewhere: Athens, Greece
Athens is the kind of place where a walk through ancient streets can lead you straight to a startup’s front door. Where 3,000 years of history sit right next to a conversation about what the next 10 or 20 will look like. The map below highlights the companies, cafés, coworking spaces, and event hubs that you can add to your itinerary between a visit to the Acropolis or a taverna in Monastiraki.
The challenge is that for 15 out of the last 20 years, our economy was basically bankrupt, and that’s all the rest of the world would hear about. Whenever we invited diaspora founders to be mentors, they’d reply “Where? I don’t even know what’s going on there.” And if we asked our local entrepreneurs about fundraising, they replied that “as soon as investors hear ‘Greece,’ they bail.” We couldn’t blame them, but that went on even as genuinely exciting things started happening, like VivaWallet becoming our first unicorn in 2021, or giants like JPMorgan, Meta, Microsoft, and Samsung closing M&A deals with Greek startups.
Greece is an incredible turnaround story that deserves to be told, so we decided to correct the narrative and shine a light on the rising companies, energy, and venture funding numbers we saw from up close. We aimed to not only bring diaspora founders closer, but also more international players.
Through a partnership with the European tech news site, Sifted, we put together the Greeking Out report, whose first edition came out in 2022. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. We toured the world, literally, to connect hundreds of people and share our findings. Our first stops were San Francisco, New York, Dubai, and London. Then came Singapore, Cairo, Paris, and beyond. Greeking Out became a movement, a community that unites founders and builders who are Greek by blood or by heart.
The momentum continued. Greece now has special visas and work permits for the tech ecosystem. Innovation Nation helps anyone navigate relocation, opening a business, or investing here. New Greek Endeavor Entrepreneurs leading incredible companies from the US, such as Runway, Reflection AI, and Resolve AI, have been deeply involved with their home ecosystem. And capital has followed: since 2020, more than 30% of the partners in new VC funds created in Greece are either diaspora Greeks or foreigners.
Even our Endeavor Greece Board is composed of 20% diaspora Greeks or foreigners. The brain drain trend has finally begun to reverse, and of the roughly 600,000 Greeks who emigrated between 2010 and 2021, about 350,000 have come back. For the first time in years, there are more people moving into Greece than leaving it.
But the goal was never to keep everyone in Greece indefinitely. The goal is for Athens to be a city that the best people in the world, as mobile global citizens, choose to come through. To build, to connect, to stay for a season or a decade. To feel that this place is partly theirs. Most people first come here for vacation and then start to see the opportunities all around the country the more they get to know it. Without even getting into how beautiful this city is, there’s something about the atmosphere, the depth of its history, the resilience in its recovery, that makes people feel like co-creators rather than visitors.
We see it clearly across our network. ICEYE, an Endeavor decacorn from Poland, has a major Greek operation. Kostas Chalkias, founder of billion-dollar California-based blockchain company Mysten Labs, has a full office here and lectures at Greek universities.
Anastasis Germanidis, the Endeavor Entrepreneur who co-heads Runway, a $5B AI video company based in New York, shared that he would like to grow the team here and actively engages with universities about how to approach AI education. The editor-in-chief of TechCrunch, who is herself is second-generation Greek, came to Athens for an event recently and just texted me saying the momentum she sees now is unlike anything she has witnessed before. This time, she brought her sister and they visited the village where their grandmother was from.
That story — of reconnection, return, and people choosing to become Athenians — is the one I want the world to hear. The future of ecosystems is a network held together by shared values and mutual trust, one that moves with the people in it. We want Athens to be one of the highest-priority nodes in that network: a place you come through often enough that it becomes part of who you are. You don’t have to stay forever. But you will want to keep coming back.
