The company itself: the UK, Portugal, Lithuania, the European Union

This chapter is a placeholder, and it says so. By the end of this book you are meant to have started a company, so this is where the book should say how to actually do it, for real: the steps to create a limited company in the UK; the case for Lithuania; Portugal, and what it costs to run a small company there; the European Union and what exists in it for a founder; the cloud providers and the startup programmes as they stand this year. All of it from experience, mine and the people I work with, and none of it legal or tax advice. The material is not written yet. The newsroom has no article on any of it, and the journalist is waiting on memos of mine. Here is what the sources already give.

Two lines on Portugal and Lithuania

Everything the newsroom has on the two countries, as of 12 October 2026, is in one paragraph of Not a straight line, and the book should not say more than this from that source. The company I created in Portugal for MyFeeds is being closed, because running a company with little revenue in Portugal is expensive in a way it is not in England. I am looking at Lithuania for the next one, for its digital advantages. The article's own limit stands here too: the company move is a consideration, not a decision; Lithuania is being looked at, and nothing has been registered.

The UK and the European Union are, for now, questions: creating a limited company in the UK, from experience, and what exists in the EU for a founder. Neither is written.

What spending millions on a distributed workforce taught me

One piece does exist, on how a small company hires. As a CISO and a CTO I used Upwork a great deal; across the open source projects and the teams I ran we spent millions on it, and it was one of the most successful things we did. We built distributed teams, hired people as good as, and often better than, those we could hire the ordinary way, and delivered faster than was possible before. Those numbers are mine and are not independently verifiable from the article.

It worked because we invested first in the infrastructure around it: a project management team, a structure team and an onboarding team, and then Upwork to manage Upwork, so the internal teams carried no overhead. People said hiring that way was buying the cheapest. It never was. It was the right talent at a price fair where they lived, good value for both sides, and a real career for the person.

The second lesson is where the jobs go. A good job today means moving to a capital city and spending most of what you earn on being there, when what most people want is to go back to where the family and the lifestyle are. A small country that builds the plumbing, forming a company, hiring across a border, being paid across Europe, makes the jobs available everywhere inside it. Romania's technology sector is close to 8% of GDP, with more than 250,000 professionals and over ten billion euros a year of service exports. The talent is not the constraint; the plumbing is, and Civic responsibility takes the small countries from here. For the founder, the lesson is practical: the team can be anywhere, if you build the structure before the first hire.

Until the memos arrive, the honest version of this chapter is short. The book will say how when I have said how.