President to consult Portuguese unicorns on advice on creating new enterprise plan

Portugal’s president Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa is to sound out the founders of six of Portugal’s most successful and disruptive tecnology companies, four of them unicorns, on how to design a new national enterprise plan.

According to the newspaper Jornal de Notícias, he will receive in auditions the CEOs of the unicorns Farfetch, OutSystems, Talkdesk and Feedzai, as well as two of the country’s most successful startups Defined Crowd and Unbabel.
One thing these entrepreneurs all have in common is that they have praised the United States for its competitiveness and business attitude, while at the same time regretting the company environment in Portugal which they say is not very competitive. They also place a high premium on technology, know-how and the free market.
Farfetch’s José Neves in an interview with television channel TVI in 2020 said that the digital skills of Portugal’s citizens needed to be improved as a way of reducing unemployment.
Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems, said in an interview with public broadcaster RTP that the government should make it easier for companies to make redundancies, so that companies can “become leaner and take on staff in a much more flexible way”.
Tiago Paiva of Talkdesk told the magazine ‘Exame’ that Portuguese companies are “small and too focused on the internal market”.
Two other successful startups (Defined Crowd and Unbabel) are also being consulted by the Portuguese president with the audiences expected to be being completed by the end of May.