from Hacker News

Ask HN: You're the Prime Minister. How would you help creating startup unicorns?

by pog92 on 10/5/21, 1:46 PM with 7 comments

• by anamax on 10/5/21, 2:46 PM

  If you have to choose between unicorns and jobs, which do you chose?

  I ask because many unicorns don't involve many jobs.

  If you want more jobs, the problem is that your country doesn't let people benefit from making jobs and/or has policies/practices/laws that discourage people from making jobs.

  The latter will always have positive sounding names, usually including some variation of "protect". People who aren't making jobs will fight to protect said policies/practicies/laws.

• by speedgoose on 10/5/21, 5:51 PM

  I don't think unicorns are necessarily a good thing. A successful company is for sure very positive, but it needs to be valued correctly.

• by qnsi on 10/5/21, 2:48 PM

  You can do what the Polish government does. They make Polish VC's get a lot of dollars from government run and financed fund-of-funds PFR Ventures. After it was introduced, the vc investments in Poland has naturally been growing pretty strongly.

  Is this the best way to spend money? I guess not.

  Is this making Poland a capital of startups? It helps. In 2018 we had 35M$ invested in startups. In 2020 it was 477M

• by _448 on 10/5/21, 5:42 PM

  Start funding space and defence sector, and parallelly start funding university research labs to feed talent to those sectors. Attract domain experts into both education sector and the space and defence sector. Once this ball starts rolling, other things follow. It takes some planning and strategy to get this working.

• by BGthaOG on 10/5/21, 2:55 PM

  I think (1) pushing equality of opportunity in education, (2) pushing strong STEM education, and (3) nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship at universities and colleges.

• by I_am_tiberius on 10/6/21, 3:32 PM

  I would stop giving subsidies to companies.