Other side of the life is chaos, crime, pollution and insecurity, and not unimportant for the crowd here, low company valuations vs their profits in those countries. Exactly because laws don&#x27;t work. No startups in the proper sense can exist in such conditions, because contracts can&#x27;t enforced, intellectual property rights can&#x27;t be protected, and venture capital is impossible because money can be only loaned for the physical collaterial - everything else like equity is just paper.<p>Also East Europe is a big place, and it is all different. What works in Russia or Ukraine might work only in a limited way in Hungary and the Baltics, and don&#x27;t work at all in Slovakia. In Europe, it strongly depends on the fraction of Orthodox population. There is nothing like that in Czech Republic, for example. Interestingly wealth doesn&#x27;t change that. Cyprus is rich, and Greece used to be rich until recently, and they are ridden with corruption from top to bottom.