Today we celebrate the 14th year of VCIT, and with it 15 years of cultivating a commitment culture with the Portuguese Entrepreneurial Community.
It has been at the cost of a compromising culture that Gesventure has gathered efforts and wills to reach the great objective of giving the deserved dimension to the national Entrepreneurial Ecosystem.
But this compromising culture implies being persistent, and, I would even say, obstinate.
The persistence and obstination of who has the hope of a new time, with more economic development and a better future for our companies.
At Gesventure, we were always aware that hope is built with very hard work. We knew, since the beginning, that without it, we would never get results.
We knew that it would be like a natural water course.
The water always finds its way. It searches for almost invisible cracks and then works patiently in solid stone until it can cross it.
Gesventure’s last 15 years have been this the way, finding small cracks which allow to overcome growth barriers to the national Entrepreneurial Ecosystem, with the perfect notion that sometimes by overcoming a small rupture we can take down a huge dam.
That is why we think it’s worth to keep gathering the several agents in the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem – each one with its own vocation – in a unique and crossed space to debate barriers to be eliminated and the so needed structural changes that our economy needs in order to grow.
According to recent studies, 99.5% of Portuguese businesses is made of micro, small and medium enterprises. Of 276.645 companies that, in 2014, filled in the Simplified Enterprise Information of 2013, 230.039 businesses exported “zero”.
However, it’s known by all that the survival rate in our economy depends on the capacity to increase exports and decrease imports.
The great question here is: How do we get there? (…)
XIV Venture Capital IT Opening Speech, by Francisco Banha – .pdf file (0,20MB)