Startup Nations Summit 2017, Tallinn: Policy Levers for New Businesses
On November 20–22, 2017, KG Labs founder Aziz Soltobaev attended the sixth Startup Nations Summit in Tallinn, Estonia. The Startup Nations Summit is the annual gathering of the policy-adviser network that KG Labs joined in 2015 — a group focused not on building startups but on the conditions under which startups form: regulatory frameworks, public sector programmes, licensing costs, immigration rules for founders, and the other levers that make a country easier or harder to start a company in.
The sixth summit convened entrepreneurship policy shapers from around the world to identify, test, and track what was working in different contexts. For KG Labs, participation in the Tallinn summit was part of a consistent presence in the Startup Nations network since 2015 — the earlier Cork summit in 2016 had also been attended — and an opportunity to connect the current state of the Kyrgyz ecosystem to an international conversation that, in 2017, was increasingly concerned with how digital-first economies could be built in countries with limited capital markets and thin institutional infrastructure.
The summit offered direct access to case studies from regions that had made measurable progress on startup-enabling policy — Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America — in contexts close enough to Kyrgyzstan’s to be relevant rather than simply aspirational. The network logic is that policy learning travels faster through direct practitioner exchange than through formal technical-assistance channels, and the summit is designed as a space for exactly that exchange.
Details
| Event | Startup Nations Summit 2017 (6th edition) |
| Dates | November 20–22, 2017 |
| Location | Tallinn, Estonia |
| KG Labs delegate | Aziz Soltobaev (founder, KG Labs Public Foundation) |
| Summit focus | Policy levers for new and young businesses; smart public-sector programmes for entrepreneurship; international case studies |
| KG Labs SNS history | Member since May 2015; attended Mexico City (2015), Cork (2016), Tallinn (2017) |
