Marius Burgaila has a simple pitch for why Lithuania needs a national television show about teenage entrepreneurs. “Students are not just learning,” he says. “They are building under real pressure.” The show, MVP (which translates, roughly, as Student Unicorn Hunt), drops 14-to-19-year-olds into real start-up conditions, has them pitch to investors in front of live audiences, and sends them home either with seed funding or hard lessons.
Lithuania’s ambition is suitably bold. Its start-up ecosystem, built essentially from scratch since 2017, is now valued at 16 billion euros, a 39-fold increase in a decade, according to Dealroom. The country’s three unicorns (Vinted, Nord Security, and Baltic Classifieds Group) are by now well-rehearsed in investor pitch decks across the region. Vilnius is, by Dealroom’s reckoning, the fastest-growing tech city in the EU. Lithuanian start-ups contributed 477 million euros to the state budget in 2024 alone, and the sector pays its 20,000 employees roughly double the national average wage.
Which makes the next statistic rather awkward. Despite all this momentum, only 30 to 50 new teams secure pre-seed or seed funding in Lithuania each year. The early-stage pipeline, in a country determined to become the world leader in unicorns per capita, has essentially stalled.
MVP exists, in part, to fix that. So does a thicket of similar initiatives across the region. Turing College, a Vilnius-based online institution, argues that traditional universities are simply too slow for what the AI economy requires. “The technology changes faster than a university can print a new syllabus,” says Melita Tornau, its head of marketing. Her college has spotted something structural: the workforce, she suggests, is shifting from a pyramid to a diamond shape, with fewer entry-level roles and sharply rising demand for people who can think, adapt, and build from day one.
She is right about the shape. Whether TV shows and accelerators can address it is another question.
The morning after
The deeper problem with youth entrepreneurship programmes isn’t that they fail to inspire. They often do. The problem is what happens the morning after. A student who has spent six months stress-testing a business model, pitching under camera lights, and watching their concept get torn apart by founders with real skin in the game graduates with one particular habit that most organisations treat as a threat: the reflex of questioning whether the current approach is the best one.
Corporate onboarding is not designed for this. Graduate intake processes, KPI frameworks, approval chains, and quarterly reporting cycles are built around compliance, not experimentation. A twenty-two-year-old who has been trained to move fast and absorb failure arrives into a system that rewards neither. In studies of UK and Australian student entrepreneurs, 58 per cent reported what researchers call ‘failure stigma’, the sense that having tried and fallen short marks you as high-risk in the eyes of employers and investors. Young people in emerging markets report similar pressures: one study found that 65 per cent of failed youth entrepreneurs gave up on restarting ventures to avoid family and social costs.
Meanwhile, the corporate world keeps sponsoring the programmes. Major firms across Central and Eastern Europe attach their logos to accelerator cohorts, fund pitch competitions, and send mid-level managers to judge regional heats. However, far too often companies treat youth entrepreneurship initiatives as talent pipeline exercises or CSR activities, rather than as a mirror held up to their own internal dysfunction. They want the product of the entrepreneurial mindset (speed, fresh ideas, a tolerance for ambiguity) without redesigning the environment that would let those traits survive contact with the organisation. The two goals are not especially compatible.
The internal architecture needs to change
TechZity, opening in Vilnius this September, will combine one of Europe’s largest co-working hubs with an International Baccalaureate programme. The idea has genuine merit: put students inside working environments from the start, and you begin to blur the line between education and practice. But it still addresses the supply side. What nobody in the room seems particularly keen to discuss is the demand side (specifically, whether large organisations are willing to redesign entry pathways, flatten approval hierarchies, or create internal incubation structures with genuine autonomy and genuine stakes).
Estonia tried something like this, not through a single programme but through a broader cultural willingness to treat regulatory and organisational norms as provisional rather than fixed. The effect was not simply more start-ups, but also a gradual shift in how established organisations thought about risk and iteration.
Lithuania’s own vision for 2030 includes tripling its number of active start-ups to 3,000 and making the ICT sector the country’s number one economic driver, generating at least 20 per cent of GDP. Achieving that will require considerably more than teaching teenagers to pitch convincingly on camera. It will require organisations across the region to stop treating entrepreneurially minded graduates as a resource to be absorbed, and start treating them as a pressure on internal architecture that genuinely needs to change. The unicorn hunt, in the end, may tell us rather less about what schools are doing wrong than about what companies are not yet willing to do right.
Photo: Dreamstime.
