Markets Magazine
Portugal Once Launched Ships, Now It Launches Startups
Europe’s best and brightest hunt down a new world of opportunities outside of the U.K.
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Back in 2012, Jaime Jorge did something few of his Portuguese compatriots ever did: He turned down a job at Google in London. Jorge, then a 24-year-old software developer, chose to start his own enterprise instead. Five years later, Codacy, the company he co-founded with Joao Caxaria, uses algorithms to automatically correct mistakes in software code for scores of businesses worldwide, including PayPal and Adobe.
They’ve never looked back. “Instead of working 18 hours a day for someone else, we did this cool project for ourselves,” Jorge says at a cafe in Baixa, Lisbon’s historic district. “We had an alternative.”