Greece has suffered a big economic recession, which resulted in the evaporation of a quarter of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over the past five years. Greece, in order to overcome the economic crisis must find a way to encourage Greek entrepreneurs. For this reason, “Google Launchpad” was recently inaugurated. It was a four-day camp for early stage start-ups and developers, which was held in Athens. The goal of this boot-camp was to introduce fresh ideas and innovations, new products, technologies and to boost the newly founded enterprises.
The Greek young people are considered to be of high qualifications, ranking 10th in the world in availability of scientists and engineers, yet the unemployment among youth under the age of 30 hits 60 percent in Greece. This is the highest percentage in the European Union. Google Launchpad aims to exploit this source of talented youth in Greece and create new job opportunities.
The project brought together 80 developers and entrepreneurs from all over Greece. They formed new groups and organized their startups over the course of a week. Greek and Israeli Googlers helped the teams by giving their piece of advice and by transmitting their knowledge to the new entrepreneurs and developers. The contribution of Israeli Googlers to the project was of great importance, as they already had experienced the first Google Launchpad that took place in Tel-Aviv.
The three winners of Google Launchpad, were SpeakerZen, SponsorBoat and Processus.io. Each received a three-month package of support with office space, facilities, legal/accounting advice and mentoring, recruiting services as well as the Google Developers Startup Pack, including $18,000 towards Google Cloud Platform products.
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