Technology startups in Central and Eastern Europe: are they CEE-specific?

Analysing qualitative data obtained from experts and technology startups in Central and Eastern Europe, we evaluate Meyer and Peng’s proposition about the fading distinctiveness of the CEE region. Assessing founders’ entrepreneurial journeys, practices, and problems encountered, we find that rather than being CEE-specific, tech entrepreneurs’ contextual constraints and coping strategies resemble those of emerging-economy entrepreneurs. Learning and adaptation throughout CEE founders’ entrepreneurial journey involves convergence to the mainstream practices associated with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The only undisputably CEE-specific features that we identified are related to certain personality traits and capability deficits of the founders. This suggests that the behavioural patterns that entrepreneurs developed in the institutional and cultural environment of the command economy have been transmitted to the subsequent generation: they continue to influence today’s tech entrepreneurs’ ambitions and abilities. Scholars’ widely shared hypothesis that generational change in CEE would create discontinuity in entrepreneurial quality is rejected.