Ask HN: You're the Prime Minister. How would you help creating startup unicorns?
You're elected Prime Minister of your country. What are the first initiatives you'd work on to help your country create a few startup unicorns (and a lot of jobs)? 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. 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. Yeah, isn't part of government using progressive tax, regulations, and antitrust laws to prevent that sort of dominance? 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 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. I think (1) pushing equality of opportunity in education, (2) pushing strong STEM education, and (3) nurturing innovation and entrepreneurship at universities and colleges. I would stop giving subsidies to companies.