You need to make sure that Austrians don’t think you’re taking advantage of them,” says Mariza Wellesley-Wesley. “Austrians need to be sure that you are not there for a quick buck.”
Wellesley-Wesley is head of the Austrian subsidiary Green Edge Cloud, a tech cloud-server start-up that has attracted significant investment in both Britain and Austria since its launch in the UK in 2018. Austrian by birth, but a resident of London by choice despite the Brexit chaos of recent years, she is still happy in her adopted UK home. “I love England, I love the Brits,” she declares. “I wouldn’t be there if not. It has given me so many opportunities, and I have a British husband. My heart bleeds to see what is happening at the moment, to be honest.”
An international perspective
Wellesley-Wesley and her British entrepreneur husband, Michael, have not given up on their European dream. Like many people in continental Europe, she feels deep sorrow over Brexit and is happy to say that she was, and is, a remainer. But she is determined that the company she created in the UK with her husband will be a shining beacon of European cooperation. She also thinks Brexit could be something of a wake-up call for the EU: “Brexit has forced Europe to think smarter about its position in the world and to position itself as an economically stable element,” she says.
Mariza Wellesley-Wesley’s philosophy is steeped in the notion of European understanding. “We decided very early on that our values, technology and product plans were best aligned with European values and the European market — and its ambitions for data sovereignty, data privacy, data security, sustainability, open-source technology and price transparency.”
Internationalism burns brightly in Wellesley-Wesley. Born in Austria, she studied law in Vienna and did a master’s in New York as a Fulbright scholar. Returning to Vienna in the mid-1980s, she worked for one of the most important law firms in the country, focusing on corporate business, finance and banking. She then set up her own law firm, but, after around a year, had the opportunity to go to London.
From 1990, she worked for the London-based law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and was tasked with expanding its European business. In the wake of the fall of communism in central and eastern Europe, she worked from 1993 to 2001 for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, where she was responsible for oil and gas transactions. “I was a chief council, with my own team, and we were working with many countries.” She says it gave her a grounding in international relations, in the way different people work and “how different people interpret different information”.
Superfast and secure
Mariza Wellesley-Wesley sees Green Edge Cloud as a manifestation of her European vision and philosophy. In one sense, she never really “left” her home country: she still has an apartment in Vienna and has an Austrian, not a British, passport. And taking Green Edge to Austria made perfect sense to her. It is no accident, she explains, that “half of our shareholders are Austrian and half are British”. With an understanding of both countries’ business environments, Wellesley-Wesley knows how a British company can be successful in Austria.
After a year of fundraising, in April 2018, the Wellesley-Wesleys — along with a third founder, Michael Troughton — founded Green Edge Cloud Limited in the UK. It was the first time Mariza had set up a company with her husband, a tech start-up entrepreneur who has created several companies in the UK and the US. By late 2020, they had attracted a £3.5 million (€4 million) investment in the UK and a further €1 million in Austria. Green Edge has positioned itself as a superfast, highly secure cloud server. After successful proofs of concept and technology, the product launch is planned for early 2021.
“Our operating system allows you to be far more energy-efficient than the big hyper-scale data centres,” says Wellesley- Wesley. Just as importantly, she explains, in contrast to many larger, well-established competitors, Green Edge provides a local service. This is where “edge computing” comes into play — it refers to data centres that are geographically local rather than centralized. For this reason, the company has data centres in Vienna, Salzburg, Frankfurt and St Gallen (and smaller servers in Canada and the US). “Data should be local,” Wellesley- Wesley says. “All our data centres are close to customers. The data is stored and computed locally.” She goes into detail about a Zoom-like videoconferencing tool the company is developing. “If we were doing a videoconference from Salzburg to Vienna, the data would go directly from Salzburg to Vienna. The data does not go via a US-based data centre.”
The culture of business
Wellesley-Wesley appreciates how easy it is to set up a company in the UK: “It’s all very straightforward setting up a limited liability company.” Austria, on the other hand, has a higher level of bureaucracy. “Setting up a company with limited liability — a GmbH — entails a disproportionate amount of red tape in Austria compared with other European jurisdictions,” explained a 2020 Financial Times article on Austrian attempts to cut bureaucracy. But, as the article said, things are changing: “A blossoming start-up scene, a focus on entrepreneurialism and innovation by the country’s new government, and shifting consumer and economic behaviour [as a result of] digitalization, sustainability and the pandemic, are beginning to bring change — albeit unevenly.”
It is this culture of change in the Austrian business environment that Green Edge is buying into. “Austria is a small and friendly country, but it is also dynamic,” says Wellesley-Wesley. She points to the Austrian government’s declared aim for the country to become Europe’s best in terms of digitalization. Considering that Austria ranked a modest 13th-best in the EU’s Digital Economy and Society Index for 2020, it will not be easy.
Wellesley-Wesley believes that her local knowledge, and the fact that she speaks German, has been a great advantage. Her advice to Brits looking to invest in Austria is to build relationships and invest in people. “Our business partners in Austria understand that we are a young start-up. But they also know we are committed to Austria. In more capitalistic Britain, people like to make a quick buck. Here, they want you to be steady.”
The importance of trust
British companies have a greater chance of succeeding if they understand the intercultural nuances, says Wellesley-Wesley: “Austria has a highly educated population and a very advanced economy, with a very strong social contract.” Her country is often overshadowed by its German powerhouse neighbour across the Alps, so she stresses the importance of treating Austria, and Austrians, with respect. “Austrians are very sensitive to being patronized or having the feeling that they have been taken advantage of. When speaking to business partners here in Austria, it is important to them that they trust you.”