Viktor Prokopenya, leading Belarusian technology entrepreneur and venture investor, believes that new technologies will be the main driver of the country’s development. On November 28 he has described his vision of the future during the session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Central European Initiative (CEI) in Minsk.
StrategEast brings full text of his speech, as he published it on his Facebook page.
Dear Colleagues and Members of Central European Initiative, thank you for inviting me to this assembly. It is a great honour for me to be here. I am here to talk about a very exciting topic: Can Belarus become an IT country?
The law always follows our life. That happens because we never know what will happen in the future. The only way for the regulation to be ahead is to provide freedom. IT business is all about attracting best talent. Creative people love freedom, which is why freedom is the central paradigm of the new legislation.
Belarus has prepared a new law which provides full freedom for the IT sector. This chart shows the world’s GDP for the last 30 years that has increased significantly. A lot of this growth was fuelled by the development of Internet and multiple benefits from software development.
We believe that the world’s GDP will continue to grow. New technologies will be the main driver of that. We believe that in the future all companies will be IT companies. Today top five companies in the world with the highest market capitalisation are in IT sector.
One of the things which has transformed our lives in the last 30 years was software development. The future will be transformed even stronger with the new, more efficient way to develop software – artificial intelligence. Instead of building complex trees of algorithms with traditional software development, AI software development is all about teaching an algorithm with data. Data, not oil, today is the most valuable resource. The more data you have, the better you can teach your algorithms – the more value you can create. AI will make our lives better, save us millions of hours of boring and routine work, free up more time for creative and important things.
Internet was definitely a huge driver of productivity in the recent 30 years. The paradigm which lies under the idea of Internet is decentralisation. Blockchain is a new way to decentralise our society further. The same way internet has disrupted traditional media, communications, and business processes, the same way blockchain will disrupt banking, insurance, administrative procedures and many more. Blockchain is internet 2.0 of the 21st century.
Today it is clear that back in 2005 Belarus made a right decision about the development of IT sector. The government created High Technology Park, which residents got unprecedented tax privileges for IT companies. Exports skyrocketed from tens of millions to 1 billion USD. Talented people have an opportunity to create value without immigration. In the last 15 years a strong IT foundation was created. However, today the rate of IT growth started to decrease. What got us here cannot get us to the next level. The 2005 regulation is not enough to continue double digit growth of the IT industry. A new legislation was prepared to answer this challenge.
The new legislation is a product of high cooperation between private and public sector. The legislation is ready to be approved. Like for a baby, it took Belarus 9 month to pass all bureaucratic procedures, which is really fast and possible only because there is a strong consensus in our society around the importance of IT. The main purpose of the new IT legislation is to make Belarus an IT Hong Kong of Eastern Europe. We already have strong technical expertise, amazing geographical position and a beautiful, innovative oriented country.
How will the new legislation help?
The legislation provides full freedom for any kind of IT-enabled business models, e.g. development of autonomous cars, artificial intelligence, blockchain, biotechnologies, space technologies and other industries.
Full freedom from bureaucracy. No Soviet style stamps, no requirements for contracts with seals and physical correspondence of documents, no currency controls, no foreign trade control – total removal of all the frictions in business. We want to make sure that our entrepreneurs focus on right things – solving real world problems and making amazing world-class products. We don’t want them to spend their precious time by moving paper around the world.
The sector is administered by High Technology Park – a very friendly regulator with a strong visionary leadership. The new law assumes significant amount of self-regulation as the most efficient way to combine private and public sectors interests.
Full support of international modern legal structures such as: indemnities, convertible loans, non-compete agreements, stock options and many more. Any agreement, concluded by an HTP resident can be governed by foreign law. Investors will be able to structure the relationships between shareholders of a Belarussian IT company under any law they prefer.
No visas for IT professionals for up to 180 days of stay within one year. No work permits are required to hire a foreign IT professional.
If the new legislation will be pass, Belarus will become the first country in the world to introduce full regulatory framework for blockchain. Other countries have only regulated certain parts of blockchain applications. The new legislation regulates mining, crypto exchanges, smart contracts and other aspects of the blockchain technology applications.
The opportunity to become an IT Hong Kong for the Slavic world has never been so close as it is today. European Union creates more and more regulations, which not always help the real sector. Unfortunately, Ukraine lacks political stability, Russia faces more and more sanctions. As you can see on the slide, according to the latest crunchbase.com report, the US investments in the Russian IT sector have zeroed. On the other hand, Facebook, Google and other public world famous companies are not afraid to perform M&A activities in our country. Belarus can be a gateway for the international capital to the Slavic world. A company headquartered in Belarus will be able to have development centres in Ukraine or Russia. The new legislation is drafted to support that.
Obviously, this legislation is only the beginning of the IT country. We need more innovations in education, general improvements of the service, which foreigners get in our country, and other sectors. Close cooperation between public and private sectors, together with visionary High Technology Park leadership can definitely achieve the ambitious goals our country decided to pursue – to become an IT country.
The economy growth is the best way to create political stability. We hope that the new legislation will provide an opportunity for the IT sector to flourish. We believe in great success. We hope that if this success happens this will be a great example to create political cooperation to provide more freedom for the IT sector in neighbouring countries. I personally believe that our children want us to do that. So, in future they will have a chance to succeed in the new world, in the new economy.
Thank you for your attention!
(Photo – Wikipedia)
