ATHENS — For years, Greece stood on the sidelines as the rest of the world discovered the joys — and wealth — of the digital sector.

Greeks were mistrustful of the new. After all, the old — the fat public sector — had provided for almost everything, and with little risk.

Then the financial crisis hit. Many Greeks lost everything they had. The country was desperate; poverty and suicide rates soared.

As the public sector all but stopped hiring and private sector firms laid off employees en masse, Greeks were forced to improvise or reinvent themselves.

For young people especially, the future looked bleak. They started looking around at their options. Everyone knew shipping magnates made money — but who could afford a ship? Pretty much everyone, however, had a laptop.

Will Greece’s tech sector, born in crisis, continue to boom, or will it be forced, once more, to keep going it alone?

And with that simple tool they could learn to code or brush up on digital marketing skills; they could start a business from scratch, at home, with almost no overheads.

Today, several thousand people work for Greek start-ups, according to Chris Gasterator of Marathon Venture Capital. And tens of thousands are employed in the country’s technology sector at large.

“The crisis changed everything in this country, everything,” Apostolos Apostolakis, a former entrepreneur turned venture capitalist and founder of VentureFriends, says between sips of coffee.

Long frustrated by the red tape and aversion to risk he said was common in pre-crisis Greece, he launched his food delivery app, e-food, in 2011. Today, it processes a staggering 135,000 orders per day — a sea change in a country that prides itself on eating out.

Now Apostolakis and other Greek tech leaders are watching closely to see whether the country’s new government, under conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, will make good on promises to cut taxes and regulations in order to boost business.

Will Greece’s tech sector, born in crisis, continue to boom, or will it be forced, once more, to keep going it alone?

* * *

At a glass-fronted office in Maroussi, a leafy, middle-class suburb in the northern part of Athens, office workers in their twenties and thirties are tapping away at their computers.

Alex Chatzieleftheriou, 39, founded Blueground in 2013. Like all new ventures, it was a gamble. But in this case, it was taken while the country was still in the throes of the crisis.

The idea, he says, speaking in near-perfect English, was born from his experience as a management consultant for McKinsey. He was constantly on the road, working on projects across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He loved the job — the problem was the lifestyle. He was living in hotels, eating in restaurants or ordering room service, and he was getting fat. The firm was spending around $10,000 per month on accommodation for him. It was insane, he recalls.

He took a sabbatical and launched Blueground, which provides furnished apartments for medium-term stays, catering to expats who are more than tourists, but less than permanent residents. Apostolakis was one of his first investors.

That gamble has paid off. Today, Blueground has more than 300 employees and manages more than 2,000 properties worldwide. Earlier this year it announced record funding levels of $28 million.

Chatzieleftheriou says he’s aiming to grow the company’s portfolio to 50,000 apartments over the next five years.

That kind of growth would have been unthinkable several years ago. And it’s still a bold goal in a country that, though it may no longer be in financial crisis, remains in a precarious economic situation.

* * *

Chatzieleftheriou is betting heavily on the New Democracy government, which came to power in July, to follow through on its pledge of promoting entrepreneurs with new business-friendly legislation.

“It's definitely a more pro-business government,” he says. “You look at things like the disposition of the economy, and simplifying red tape and I think the first signals that we’ve seen are more pro-business and geared toward making it easier to kind of start a business.”

Indeed, people like Chatzieleftheriou are the ones New Democracy wants to reassure and get back on side.

"We are going to reduce taxation, and we are going to vanish bureaucracy,” Adonis Georgiadis, the new minister for growth and investment, said in July, shortly after his party took power in the July 7 general election. “We will have a new legislation that will change almost [everything], in order to make doing business in this country very easy.”

Greece, he predicted, will become "the most business-friendly country of the European Union."

The Greek government is also facing skepticism about just who exactly its proposals are designed to help.

The new government has put technocrats into key positions to lead the economy. Its first budget, which it put forward in October, includes ambitious growth targets centered on tax cuts to encourage private spending and foreign investment. In a sweeping tax bill introduced to parliament in late November, New Democracy proposed the cut the corporate tax rate from 28 percent to 24 percent, and the dividend tax rate from 10 percent to 5 percent. It also wants to reduce social security taxes and cut introductory marginal tax rates from 22 percent to 9 percent.

The change of government will be good for Greece's entrepreneurs, Akis Skertsos, deputy minister in charge of government coordination, said in an interview.

"We want to go further, faster and deeper than any previous government in the past with the reforms needed by the Greek state and economy," the 43-year-old U.S.-educated minister insisted.

New Democracy is also focused on the greater digitization of the Greek state, he said. By 2020, it wants to introduce digital invoicing for companies, e-bookkeeping and connect cash registers with the tax authority's IT systems. A recently created ministry for digital reform is in charge of making sure every level of Greek administration goes digital by 2023.

Analysts have called New Democracy's agenda distinctly pro-business; Deputy Finance Minister Theodoros Skylakakis described it as a "radical turn to growth, employment and income increases.”

Now, young people are “eager to take their lives in their own hands and become entrepreneurs.”

Whether New Democracy can succeed is another question. The power of public sector workers is huge, and of course the Greeks love to strike.

The Greek government is also facing skepticism about just who exactly its proposals are designed to help.

“What is the point of cutting the tax rate on football contracts from 45% to 22% [another mooted policy] if not as a gift to specific businessmen?”says Yiannis Baboulias, a Greek journalist. “It all seems geared towards specific interests, for instance those with big real estate portfolios will benefit from a reduction in [real estate taxes]. They have also deferred the reduction of VAT rates for businesses like restaurants, which was one of their major promises and which hurts smaller businesses directly. So again the little guy suffers.”

Still, entrepreneurs like Apostolakis are hopeful.

Money has been flowing back into the country, as big investors open their wallets for Greek tech firms. German multinational Daimler recently acquired the Greek taxi app Beat, which is headquartered in Athens and has taken the Latin American market by storm.

Perhaps most importantly though, Apostolakis says, is the fact that a major social shift has taken place.

Before the crisis, entrepreneurship was synonymous with “state contracts and oligarchy,” he says. Now, young people are “eager to take their lives in their own hands and become entrepreneurs.”

They’ve done most of the work already. For the government, the key is to keep that momentum going.

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