By Rokas Peciulaitis

Lithuania.

Many have heard of this country for a number of very different reasons. Whether it’s basketball, beautiful women, shimmering Baltic Sea and spectacular dunes in Neringa or the fact that it lies in the geographical centre of Europe.

Hmm, wait a second..

W rong reasons, pals. Lithuania should be on your “next destination” list for its start-up scene, supported by one of the fastest broadband connections and an unprecedented wealth of multilingual tech savvy talent. Three million peeps that live here are highly confident they can house the next Silicon Valley and you bet me right they are correct. After all, it’s getting ludicrously expensive and crowded in some of the leading ecosystems, not to mention the difficulties with hiring and sourcing exceptionally skilled development talent. That’s where such emerging ecosystems as ours will stand out for international founders with no geographical boundaries.

But first — some history.

Ok. It all started innocently with a “first-big-transatlantic-check” from Tiger Global Management in New York, when GetJar, the biggest and first app store at the time, put Lithuania on the international investors’ map and attracted $4.5 million in 2007. Ilja Laurs, the CEO of GetJar, and a poster child of the newly emerging start-up ecosystem created a vibe of success and interest in the community and since then the game was on. With first JEREMIE backed VC funds being established in 2010 and first accelerator set up in the same year by StartupHighway everything took off pretty fast.

So what’s happening now?

Five years later we are now a fully functioning and booming start-up ecosystem — LOGIN as the biggest start-up event in the region attracting over 5000 people every year, 6 local VC funds, over 150 start-up events yearly, multiple Unicorn and Decacorn development offices popping up every month and over 65 start-ups being funded over the last 8 years totalling north of 100 Million euros. And we are not talking local monies, as big boys are also writing big cheques. Be it Vinted that recently received 20 million EUR from Insight Venture Partners, a venture capital fund behind decacorns such as Twitter and Tumblr. Or YPlan, who managed to keep it classy and get Ashton Kutcher to put some bucks, Pharell to be “happy” and join as a special advisor and other rockstar VC’s including General Catalyst Partners (AirBnB), Octopus Investments (Zoopla) and Wellington Partners (Spotify). We even managed to step on the “Steve Jobs stage” at Apple Special Event where Pixelmator — a full-featured image-editing app for Mac and iPad — had an honour to share their success with Apple fan community.

What’s Next?

So to sum things up, we are doing pretty well. I recently hosted one of the most successful seed VC fund partners from Israel, and something they said really stuck in my head: “People in Tel Aviv, Silicon Valley or London are not smarter — they just have better tools and access”. Ambition to make CEE the number one “go to” place for start-ups is not an easy job. However, with the hands-on government help and funding, right education tools, foreign community and smart money presence it is certainly doable. If you ask me, I believe Lithuania is on the right track to win this regional rat race!

PS. And always remember — have fun while getting there!