Building a New Silicon Valley in a Post-Soviet Dictatorship

http://www.wired.com/2015/09/building-new-silicon-valley-europes-last-dictatorship/



WITH RIGA IN the rearview mirror, the bus plods north. Latvia’s flat pine forests flash past under low grey clouds, but Oleg Kuryan, seated towards the back, is interested in neither. Right now, he’s in crisis mode.

Just before the bus left the capital city, he got an automated e-mail that his website was down: His Belarusian data plan hasn’t worked since the bus crossed into the European Union. And he has no one to call, since both of his business partners are sitting across the aisle.

“That’s one thing we’ve learned already on this trip,” Kuryan says. “We need to have at least one person not going anywhere.”

Kuryan works his way up the aisle to the one person on the bus with a solid data plan: me. I hand over my iPhone and Kuryan sets to work, ticking off some of the challenges Belarusian entrepreneurs face as he types. “The government’s focused on supporting state companies, even if they’re not profitable—tractors, big machines. We are closed in borders. We don’t have good relations with the European and, especially, US markets because of our government,” he says.

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