* for each medium to large University, there will usually be at least one person, if not an entire org of people that will guide you through the process, manage comms with the bank and help you to frame the business plan. These institutions (what I referred to as an "accelerator" in my OP) are publicly funded. You do not pay them.
* prepare your business plan (milestones, market research, financial plan) - at this point you can also utilize other financial support (e.g. matched funds for market research)
* you nominate a "mentor" - this is meant to be an independent expert that will serve as an informal advisor and secondary contact for the bank. There's no liability involved, and usually this is an industry expert, or professor, etc.
* bank accepts the business plan and starts payments
* during the scholarship, the bank will keep in touch with you and the mentor to check in on your business plan milestones. This is mostly an anti-fraud check.
It's important to realize there's an alignment of incentives here:
* you want to start a company and get financial support
* the accelerator advanced its mission (get more startups going)
* the bank advances its mission (create more value in the local region)
* the business plan and milestones unlock ultra-low-interest follow-up financing if you need it, since the bank has already been involved for 18 months and knows the potential/liabilities of your business
This all sounds like a lot, but I've seen founders go through the entire process in just a few weeks of planning. And much of the work, like business planning, is what you need to do anyway.
So KFW (state investment bank?) has a thing called StartGeld (startup loan). I've wondered about few practicalities
1) What sort of collateral does bank expect from you?
2) Can you really get 125ke or more like 10-20ke?
3) Interest rate is a single digit number?
4) Can you really get 10 year payback periods?
Reason why I'm asking is that in Finland(where I live) these startgeld terms seem like a dream come true for entrepreneur. To give you an example;
1) Tradiotional bank wants collateral for the loan. For a 5k€ loan, 5k€ in deposits are needed.
2) There a lots of Swedish/Norwegian "loan-houses" advertising their services for companies, with interest rates are somewhere between 23-30% per annum.
Yup, on iOS it's missing Beatsource, on Android it's missing both Beatport and Beatsource. Whether Android version will support Apple Music remains to be seen.
Boards works for basic Kanban projects, but if you want to dwell into scrum stuff like sprints, burndown charts, etc, it's very bad and cumbersome. You'll have to do a lot of stuff manually that Jira does automatically.
Wiki... It's not good. It's extremely slow, and lacks a ton of features that Confluence has.
Pipelines is godawful, and has been suffering severely from a migration from their "Classic" pipelines to YAML. The funny part is that if you go in depth into YAML pipelines, you'll notice there's a very large amount of things that aren't configurable by YAML. Also has a ton of bugs, many of which have been open for over 5 years. To make matters worse, it's currently in an identity crisis with Github Actions (which has more features and is continuously getting them over Pipelines).
I don't know what's the future of Azure DevOps, honestly I feel like they'll eventually shutter it and move everyone to Github Enterprise.
Azure Devops contains lot of things like Jira and Azure Pipelines etc. The Jira equivalent interface is confusing but its not a showstopper, you learn to live with it.
We use it daily. The other option we had was a combination of self-hosted github (which at first didnt have actions), jira, and confluence. When actions was nog available, ADO was used for pipelines, so that was 4 services.
Give me 1 integrated service built with the same stack as Azure anyday. Builtin service connections, managed identities, etc.
Is Azure somehow impacted by this? Or any other of the big providers like AWS or Google Cloud?
Maybe there’s something that Finland and Finnish ISPs could learn from the big providers? And from Ukraine how they moved everything critical into cloud?
The big cloud operators and service providers with their own backbones have redundancies on their network on multiple levels. Not just IP level but also on light path level. Giving them enough bandwidth that even with failure they don’t get congestion.
Finnish ISPs could build more connectivity even inland or higher up in the Gulf of Bothnia. But many of them haven’t as they have optimized for latency and not for redundancy.
Even Finnish government networks were shown during the COVID to be under provisioned, the. pan gateways didn’t handle remote work. And then one roadwork cut a cable next to the road it was shown that the redundant cables were in the same ditch. Service owner has just bought “redundant” connections and never confirmed it.
I don't know about Finland but I read about Ukraine partnered with AWS in 2022 to move all of its digital infrastructure(government and banks) abroad and it worked surprisingly well.
Wow, much better than I expected. How difficult is it to get this scholarship?
reply