Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis participated in a conversation with journalist Connie Loizos at an event organized by the online newspaper TechCrunch, held at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Centre. Below is the discussion:
Connie Loizos: Again, I’m just thrilled to be here with you. I’ve been getting educated in real-time by Endeavour and your team. There is so much happening here. I feel that from the outside looking in, Greece has really shifted its standing or the perception of Greece. I know you’ve called it earlier on in time “the sick child of Europe”, and now it’s very much seen as a welcome, wonderful partner in the EU. I think that’s a huge credit to you.
There’s, of course, a long way to go, and the Greek ecosystem and innovation is a big part of that. I wanted to talk to you primarily about that today. Then if there’s time, I would love to talk to you about some of the other headwinds that you’re facing and trying to overcome, including your demographics and what’s happening in the US right now with the tariff war, creating all kinds of new and “fun” uncertainties. I guess as a starting point, maybe we could talk a little bit about this transformation that’s underway. I love the slogan, and I’ve seen the signs, “Innovation Nation”. So clever. Tell me a little bit about the hard data to support that there is a transformation underway.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Well, first of all, thank you for giving me the opportunity to have this discussion. Thank you for being here in Greece. You’re incredibly influential when it comes to the international tech world. As Panos said, I think the Greek story is worth spreading in the sense that what’s been happening in Greece over the past years was not obvious, but it is, I think, an important success story, and there is still significant room to grow.
If you think of Greece and where Greece was 10 years ago, on the precipice of being thrown out of the Euro, a country with deeply problematic public finances, and a general perception that there wasn’t really a promising future, especially for the young people or the talented people or the entrepreneurs. I think we’ve been able to change that perception, and that in itself has been incredibly important.
I’m not going to talk about the overall state of the economy, but when we were looking back in 2019, in terms of which sectors can we really grow in Greece, we made a very conscious decision that the Greek growth story could not just be about tourism or hospitality.
We’re a wonderful country, and tourism is incredibly important, but we needed to diversify. As someone who’s had some experience in tech investing in the sense that I was a venture capitalist before I went into politics, I founded the first incubator back in 2001 at a time when all these ideas were still quite foreign to Greece.
But now I think the stars are aligned. If you look at the overall success in terms of the VC funds that are present here, the amount of capital raised by startups, the number of startups that are being created, and in general, something which you can’t really measure, but I’m sure you pick it up, the general buzz of the ecosystem, something is really happening here, and something is.
Why not have tech be 10% of our economy. This is perfectly doable in the next years. We are just catalysts in the sense that we want to create the proper conditions and let them, the ecosystem, flourish. I think that the conditions have been put in place. I’m not just talking about the overall political stability, the fact that Greece has a promising future ahead of it. I’m talking about a government that from the very first day, put in place a right incentive structure, from things like stock options, angel investor, a favourable non-dom regime for people to actually return to Greece.
We’re leveraging our strength. What is our strength? Basically, our tremendous human talent pool. There are two types of talent pools. There are the people in Greece. We still have a very good public education system that is producing excellent graduates, especially from our technical universities. But we also have an incredible asset, which is our diaspora. Diaspora, we’ve always been talking about how can we engage more with it, but nothing really has been happening.
But for the first time, now we see the diaspora being reconnected to Greece. We see people returning to Greece. We see people investing in Greece, and especially in a space such as AI, Greece is overrepresented. As Panos said, when it comes to AI, when it comes to crypto, we have amazing talent.
How do we build the bridge to bring these people back? Maybe we can talk a little bit more about our AI strategy, because I think there we really have a very compelling story to tell. The idea is always punch above our weight, make sure we create an ecosystem that is self-sustained and that can grow with its own energy, and make sure that we also use technology in general to leapfrog and to catch up, not just to catch up, but to actually do better than many European countries.
I was speaking to the new German Chancellor, who is a good friend, and when I went to see him in Berlin before the elections, he told me that he’s setting up a Ministry for Digitization. Because the truth is that Germany is behind Greece now when you look at how digital the state is. These were all decisions that were taken some years ago, but now we see the impact.
Technology, and in particular, AI, is also an incredible tool to improve public service delivery. This is not just about what is a startup community doing? It’s what we can do, how we can be clients of the services that are being developed, and how do we also, as government, have more of a startup mentality? What does it mean to have a startup mentality if you run a government, which is not necessarily obvious. But sometimes we can be quite progressive when it comes to these ideas.
Connie Loizos: Well, I love your background. It is very Silicon Valley-esque. As you mentioned, you started a venture fund, an incubator, you worked in finance, in consulting, Harvard, Stanford. I do think it gives you a fresh perspective compared with many other politicians. There’s a lot to unpack. Starting with the diaspora, I encounter so many really brilliant Greek-Americans in the Bay Area, among other places. But what are you doing to, I guess, keep that brainpower here? Obviously, this is something that you’ve answered a million times, but there was a lot of people who left during the economic crisis. I know some are coming back, but maybe beyond tax breaks, what are some of the plans you put in place?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Tax breaks are there. They’re not insignificant, 50% discount on your income tax for seven years. But people are not going to come back just for a tax break. They will come back if they have a good job opportunity, if they feel that they can do something which is rewarding, and they feel they can actually grow their business in Greece. I think one of the challenges, and this is not just a Greek challenge, I think it’s a European challenge, we talk a lot in Europe about fostering entrepreneurship and how don’t we lose our talent to the US.
The challenges there are very, very clear. We have a vibrant VC scene now in Greece, but we also need later stage capital. We need more regular private equity to be able to finance these companies without them selling out to US companies. We need to give these companies and the startupers who are here, access to a true European single market. Because when you talk about the European single market, it’s there on paper. But if you look at how difficult it is for many of you to do business in many European countries, it’s not really there.
So simplification, what we call this famous “28th regime”. What could it mean to have one European registration that will allow you to do business in all European countries? I think this is absolutely critical in order for the companies to feel that they can grow. The startup is here, they’re not just interested in the Greek market, but the European market is big. We want to make sure that this works.
Then, of course, what we call, it’s a technical term, but very important, what we call Capital Markets Union, Savings and Investment Union. Why is it in Europe that we still export our savings to the US? What does it mean for a company to list in a European stock exchange? Or even in Greece. I’m very happy that now we see the Greek Stock Market again picking up. For younger companies, an exit through a listing on the Athens Stock Exchange was inconceivable years ago. Now, it could be an option. It’s a Greek challenge, but it’s also a European challenge.
Our advantage is that we have the talent, and we’re building the bridges with proper incentives for these people to actually start looking at Greece with a different mindset.
When we wrote our AI strategy document, we basically spoke to top people from abroad, some top VC investors in the Valley, some top AI researchers, and we asked them, Look, AI is here. We’re a middle-sized country. How do we position ourselves in this? I think we’ve come up with very interesting ideas in terms of how we can actually leverage AI, but also areas where we need to be very careful.
Connie Loizos: Well, I do think AI is going to be the great equaliser. It’s certainly disrupting everything where I live. I did want to ask, you mentioned leapfrogging Germany, which is not the first time I’ve heard you say that. I think it’s interesting because I do think Berlin, at least for some number of years, had the mantle of the tech hub of Europe. I think that’s maybe gone back to London. But can you talk a little bit more about that, and I guess in a more concrete way, where you think you’ve advanced? Because they have much more money to spend than you do, something like 7 times more.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: “Leapfrogging Germany” is a term I would use very, very carefully, because Germany is a superpower. But I’m careful when I talk about digital services and about how digital the state is. There, I think we have really made big progress.
Why did this happen? I think because we took a decision in 2019, at the beginning of our first term, to set up a Ministry for Digital Transformation with horizontal powers over all other ministries and with the ability to also get all the data and deliver digital services. We broke down the silos. Every ministry on its own, every ministry looking at its own data.
What does it mean to actually have a more horizontal structure? In the beginning, we had reactions, but then all the line ministers realised, “Oh, there is an incentive here. If I team up with the Ministry of Digital Infrastructure to deliver a new service online, this is actually good for me as a minister because it makes people’s lives easier and because people in general like to have their lives simplified”. Then we had COVID, where we run a completely digitised vaccination. Friends of mine from the US were sending me little paper slips. That never existed in Greece. There was no paper involved in our vaccination certificates. Then we took some important initiatives at the European level in terms of vaccination certificates in order for people to travel. We also came up with ideas that were interesting at the European level.
Now, of course, the challenge is, okay, digitization is 1.0, but AI is the future. What does AI for government really mean? Which are the services or the processes that you can actually help do a productivity leap when it comes to AI? This is exactly what we’re looking at now.
For example, we ran a pilot project which went extremely well. We actually made it with Microsoft and OpenAI. Microsoft really publicised it, where we had an AI tool screen contracts, and basically it took notaries now and our officials of the land registry, whereas it took them two hours to check the contract, the contract has been pre-read, with little notifications, it takes them 10 minutes now to do a job that took two hours. So, there are lots of processes where AI can actually help you streamline the business of government.
Then we started looking at verticals, which are the areas where AI can really be critical. For example, civil protection, where things such as flood prevention, fire prevention are incredibly important, and we have lots of data. The other area I really care about, where I think we really want to be leaders is health. AI and health, there we don’t just have the talent, but we have another great advantage, and that is we have well-curated data sets which are centrally managed. We have a country of 10 million. We already have a digital health app, and we have good quality data. We’re running lots of general population screening tests for the prevention of diseases. This gives us a lot of input.
There I’m speaking both from the perspective of the state as a client, but also giving access and opportunities to companies to develop new applications that they could test in Greece and then possibly export abroad.
The third segment, which is fascinating, is defence. Why should you all care about defence? I think because we’re going to spend a lot of money on defence as Europe. We want critical autonomy, strategic autonomy. The defence landscape is changing. This is no longer just going to be about planes, tanks. This is all going to be much more digitally and AI-driven.
What we’ve done, which is really innovative, for the first time, we have an innovation centre at the Ministry of Defence that can actually test prototypes. We can write a small contract, do a small test. We are the clients of the technologies. Then we, of course, want to make sure that we give our startups the opportunity to publicise what they do with us and then create a European, possibly open up a European market.
This is an area I would really focus on if I were, now, wearing my investor hat because there’s a lot of money and there’s a willingness to think outside the box and not just talk about the big defence contracts. These will always be there. We will always have to buy ships and planes. But there’s more, much more than that.
There we’re also looking at the community to come with solutions and ideas to us. This is no longer a Department of Defence that thinks maybe in terms of a 20th century war. We want to hear about ideas and about projects and about solutions and how you can add value to what it is we want to do.
Connie Loizos: It’s all fascinating. I was just talking to Dimitrios Kottas of Delian. He was saying it does seem like a really special opportunity right now. His biggest competitor is Anduril, but if their company can compete on software, they can scale up much more quickly than has ever been possible historically. I feel like there’s an opportunity to displace incumbents that we haven’t seen before.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: You really kill two birds with one stone. We do our job because we have access to cutting-edge technology. We, I mean the Department of Defence. At the same time, we offer companies the opportunity to work with us through a more flexible arrangement and do things here. Really, the story of defence, it’s been a big disappointment. We’ve spent, I don’t know, we’ve spent like 300 billion over the past 30 years. What has been left within the domestic defence industry? Very little.
I don’t want to make the same mistake in the age of AI. I know that if I’m going to spend 28 billion over the next 12 years, which is our plan, I want at least to make sure that there is a booming defence industry from the nuts and bolts, the more traditional stuff, to the cutting-edge technology. We have the talent. It would be a huge pity if we don’t take advantage of this.
Connie Loizos: I did want to spend a few more minutes talking to you about talent. One of my questions is very, very self-centered, self-interested, but it is about the country’s stance on repatriating people of Greek ancestry. I happen to know, even in my own family, people with multiple degrees who speak Greek fluently, who would love to come back here and get dual citizenship. One cousin has spent a 25-year journey toward that objective, and she’s there now. But I just wonder, is that something that you’re focused on making that easier?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Yes. The citizenship laws are maybe sometimes cumbersome, but if you can prove your Greek lineage, we want to make it easier for people to get Greek citizenship. But we also want to make sure that we bring people from abroad who are not Greek citizens, who are not interested in becoming Greek citizens, to make sure that we give them an opportunity to work here.
This idea of tech visas, we’re looking at making sure we can bring in talent. I know that we have startups with Indian CEOs here. There are certain countries we really want to focus on where we have natural synergies, and India would be one of them. I just saw the CEO of Indigo They’re going to start a nonstop flight between Delhi and Athens within the next year.
This is a global war for talent. We need to make it easy for either Greek talent to return to Greece or for people who can live anywhere and can work out of anywhere, to work here. This is not just about Athens. We have a new hub, Thess INTEC, which is going to be built in Thessaloniki.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: You have tech companies emerging in cities such as Ioannina, in Heraklion, because you have good public universities here. If you have good tech schools, the companies are going to go where they can actually recruit. This should also be a story about regional development. It doesn’t have to be that everyone has to be in Athens. There are other places where you can actually grow businesses.
I know that one defence company is setting up a small drone facility in Chania, which happens to be my hometown. They did it without telling me anything, and I don’t think it played any role that I am from Chania, but I said, I mean, that’s where we found a good part of land. We have talent. We’re going to do it. We’re going to do it there.
Connie Loizos: Chania is one of my favourite places. I did want to ask, you mentioned the visas. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you found to be most effective. You’ve got this talent visa, this tech visa, and then the golden visa, which I think is interesting, but I do wonder how you make sure you’re inviting innovators to the country and not people who are just trying to buy a European address and probably…
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: This golden visa started with the idea of bringing in money, basically, for the real estate sector. At some point, we realised that, look, I mean, these people sometimes are crowding out the Greeks who want to buy a house, so we significantly raised the threshold for real estate investment. But we said: if you want to put 250,000 in a startup investment, you can essentially get a golden visa. Instead of investing it in real estate, invest it in a company. I don’t think we have anything to lose. It seems to me that, yes, the risk is always there, but I don’t think that anyone would necessarily throw away €250,000 without doing some basic due diligence where they’re actually putting their money. It’s an additional way to get some seed capital into Greece.
Connie Loizos: I also wanted to ask you, I’ve heard it, people half kidding, half not kidding that you need a law degree to navigate the laws here because they’ve been changing so much. It makes it a little bit harder for foreign investors to feel that they are on solid ground investing in Greece. Can you address that concern?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I think we’re in a better state than we were, but still, of course, there’s still significant room for improvement. I think if you talk to, for example, the big VC funds, international funds, they have difficulties making investments in Greece, too. They have the infrastructure, the legal services, the certainty that contracts are going to be honoured. I think that’s something which is in place.
Are those structural problems? Yes, which are general structural problems. We still need to accelerate justice across the board, and this is a big reform we’re undertaking in our second term. This is not just related to investors.
But I think overall, what I do consider the most important aspect is, again, it’s soft, but it’s also quite tangible: is this country moving in the right direction? If I’m going to invest in Greece, looking three, five, seven years out, is there a macroeconomic risk? Is there a political risk? Is the general environment going to be conducive? I think we can tick those boxes because we sorted out the macro situation. We have a significant primary surplus. We’re borrowing much cheaper than the US. Who would have… Τhe US can afford to run big deficits, we can’t. But this fiscal discipline and this focus on reforms is here.
We have an absolute majority. I think we have a good chance of winning the next election. You come into a country and say, okay, I don’t just look at the company, I look at the general context. Is this a stable country? Is this a country that’s moving in the right direction? The answer is yes. I think investors have been voting with their feet, both in terms of the investors that are investing in our funds, in our startups, the big international investors that are looking at bigger companies in terms of attracting foreign direct investment. We’re doing quite well. Then, of course, we can always do better, but we know what we have to do to improve.
Connie Loizos: Do you think the country broadly understands what you’re doing here? Because, it’s inescapable, you have to move toward innovation, but the country, its national character is more traditional, smaller businesses, family-owned businesses. I wonder how you square these competing interests.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I think that’s a great question that you are asking. Yes, there is, of course, a divide when it comes to technology. But we want to also help small, medium enterprises use technology to be more efficient because it’s a tool for survival. We run many programmes to actually do that.
We want digital literacy programmes. It’s always very moving when I go to some community centres and I see older people getting basic introductory courses in digital skills. Because I went and asked this older lady and said “Why are you doing this? I said. “Look, I want to be able to use my gov. gr or do a digital transfer on my own. I don’t want to ask my grandkid to do it for me”.
There’s a general push towards understanding that this is the future, and certainly the young generation is understanding it. For me, the most fascinating aspect is the cultural change. You look at what’s happening at schools. We have the junior achievement competitions where we have so many initiatives in terms of kids experimenting with ideas of how to set up a startup. We send robotics kits to all schools because we want to encourage engineering.
Basically, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, the idea of setting up a company was very foreign to young graduates from university. We also have this taboo that universities -is a very leftist approach- and the private sector need to be completely separated. That is also changing. You look at universities now, the framework, the research that they do, the startups that are emerging, the fact that companies have actually made it into the universities. In the first place, for Greece, is a very big step.
The most encouraging thing is that you have more people interested in doing something on their own. Thirty years ago, it would have been, I want to become a civil servant or I want to become a salaried employee. That’s not the case. As you said, technology is a great equaliser, and you never know where the next great idea is going to come from.
Connie Loizos: Yeah, I think it’s exciting. I mean, it’s obviously, people can start companies much more readily and scale them. In a way, I sometimes wonder if Greece is better positioned while things are happening in the background because the economy is still very dependent on human relationship-driven businesses, which I think are going to become more critical as we go here.
Prime Minister, I guess for the last question, I just wanted to ask you about your legacy. You’re doing so much here. Obviously, you want to stay in power and continue on this path. Ten years and more into the future, what do you want people to think about when they think about how you reshaped Greece?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Well, first of all, let me make a point about what you said, because I think it’s critical. Again, if you look at the economy and the jobs that may disappear as a result of AI, having also a big service sector is not necessarily bad. As much as the Chinese would focus so much on robots, I don’t see robots replacing the hospitality sector anytime soon, whereas robots will replace a lot of manufacturing jobs. That’s pretty clear to me that this is already happening. So, in that sense, also having a big service sector is not necessarily bad in this changing world.
I think I’m a pretty humble person, so the last thing I want to think about is how will history judge us all. What I know is that we still have two years in our term. We have lots of work to do. What I want to make sure is that the progress we have made is irreversible. Whatever that means, this is not just a legal or constitutional question, it’s also a cultural question.
Of course, the big challenge is catch up with Europe, because we lost a lot of time. The crisis was so painful, it almost tore the country apart. We essentially not only lost a decade, but we really I mean, suffered enormously. For me, the big challenge is to ensure that this progress is irreversible, that it will continue to take place.
We can’t do miracles, we can’t make up the lost ground in a couple of years. But I think we’ve broken out of the vicious cycle of the past, and I do see technology as a great opportunity, both for the private sector and for the government. If there is an opportunity to make a big leap rather than just moving in the right direction, it has to be what’s happening, especially in the world of AI, being fully aware of the fact that there are many risks that need to be managed.
In that sense, we need both a very positive story vis-a-vis AI, but also a very clear narrative, not just as Greece, but Europe, the risks surrounding our democratic discourse, and what does it mean to be a well-functioning democracy in an age of misinformation, bots, AI-driven, -amplified messages.
Of course, a topic I deeply care about, and that is the issues of mental health for children and teenagers in terms of what the impact is of them essentially growing up in a virtual world and what will this mean for their health, for the future of education.
I do think that there we are, especially in the US, engaged in a race to be bolder, faster, more powerful. At some point, I really take a step back and I think, do even the people who write these models understand what they will be capable of doing or is it just the race to produce the next even more powerful version of the next model. I think there, not just Greece, but Europe has a role to play as a balancing force, leveraging the tremendous opportunities of AI, but not forgetting that there is also another side to the coin, which we simply cannot ignore because companies just want to make more profits.
Connie Loizos: No, I completely agree. I’m glad that you’re thinking about this. I’m glad that the EU is thinking about this because obviously there’s many other distractions in the US, and as you said, we’re not focusing on enough. Thank you so much. Such a pleasure to sit down with you. Really appreciate it.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Thank you. A great event. Thank you for having me.
