Meet the CxO – Victor Dragomirescu, CEO Romanian Software

Tell us a few words about how your company started.

It all started 22 years ago when Romanian Software was a company that specialized in developing custom software for worldwide clients. Together with my twin brother, we used that experience to acquire a great deal of knowledge about automation. At that time, we saw automation as a business opportunity applied to the field of human resources. In 2004, we developed a product to address the Romanian market of HR: “SAL, your expert in payroll”. At that time, we had no satisfactory payroll software available, which meant that individuals were grappling with the complexity of salary issues using pen and paper. This served as the foundation of what would eventually evolve into colorful.hr. Today, I am extremely gratified to state that colorful.hr is a complete HR software solution utilized by more than 750 companies to streamline and automate almost every aspect of the HR process.

What drives you each day?

My motivation relies on the fact that I still combine my passion for mathematics with my job. I approach each challenge as a mathematical problem and strive to discover solutions. My love for mathematics has been present since childhood and has been passed down through my family for generations. Although complex problems are the most captivating, the journey to reach a solution is ultimately the most fulfilling. This perspective has allowed me to maintain my passion for years, as I believe that growth is only achieved through effort, and innovation is made possible through growth.

What do you believe are the 3 main accomplishments that brought you here today?

Starting a family business has been and will always continue to be one of my greatest accomplishments. Although it may seem cliché, having a familial mindset when dealing with those around you aids in maintaining relationships in the long term. The transition from SAL to colorful.hr was pivotal for the business. During this time, we decided to develop a complete digital HR solution, and we accepted the responsibility that came with it. Finally, my ability to recognize opportunities has played a crucial role. Trends and new consumer needs will always arise in the market, and those who can seize these opportunities will emerge victorious.

Do you ever disconnect from the office? How?

To be honest, I am extremely passionate about my work and do not feel the need to disengage from it. But when it comes to free time, I indulge in calming hobbies such as playing chess and fishing.

Tell us more about the business you are running. Let’s start with the number of clients you currently work with.

colorful.hr is a comprehensive digital platform for managing human resources processes utilized by over 750 companies in Romania. For more than 22 years, colorful.hr has been transforming HR by providing professionals with the necessary tools to increase efficiency. Our product has been customized and modified to accommodate any business model, regardless of the number of employees. We are thrilled to have a varied portfolio and to cater to businesses from almost any industry, ranging in size from 2 to over 5000 employees.

What is your most beloved project you worked on?

Determining a favorite project is challenging because every project I participate in holds a special place in my heart. Nevertheless, colorful.hr will always hold a distinct place because it was a risk that I took, and I made it a triumph, growing it into a prosperous business with over 160 employees and a successful product. Our effort to enhance the payroll solution for colorful.hr resulted in the creation of CalculatorVenituri.ro in 2016. With CalculatorVenituri.ro, we broaden the functionalities we offer to companies through colorful.hr and assist employees, authorized natural persons, and entrepreneurs with payroll calculations.

My ardor for mathematics and informatics led me to another project that I cherish deeply, an NGO I co-founded with my associates to promote high-performance STEM education. The Upper.School NGO brings together outstanding educators and impassioned youngsters who require mentors, encouragement, recognition, and a community. Each of these ventures holds an equal amount of pride for me, and I am content to be able to bring about positive change today and for future generations.

 What makes your company different from others in your field of expertise?

In today’s job market, where benefit packages, salary offers, and job roles are no longer significant differentiators for companies, we believe how we treat our employees in a professional environment sets us apart. Since we started as a family business, we have always treated our employees with care, like they were part of our family. This approach has led us to create a diverse team, with employees ranging in age from 22 to 66 years old.

When organizing events or team-building activities, we take into account our employees’ diverse opinions, and we have seen the positive impact of this on their satisfaction. During recruitment, we have always avoided discrimination, both in job descriptions and during interviews. We provide a tailored onboarding process specific to each department and employee learning style but uniform in duration and welcome package.

Our high retention rate reflects our commitment to diversity, communication, and employee growth. Despite being a company with over 22 years of experience in the market, we have team members who have been with us for over 15 years. By valuing our employees and encouraging their growth, we have found building a strong and loyal team easy.

What advice do you have for a young entrepreneur?

I have had the opportunity to interact with many successful entrepreneurs and observe their journeys, and some pieces of advice I would give to a young entrepreneur would be simple but important to maintain sight of them.

1. Identify a problem and provide a solution: Successful entrepreneurs are problem solvers. Find a problem you are passionate about and devise a solution that can help people.
2. Focus on your strengths: Identify them and use them to your advantage. If you are good at marketing, use that to promote your business. If you are good at technology, use that to develop your product.
3. Be flexible and adaptable: The business world is constantly changing, and you need to be able to adapt to stay relevant. Be open to new ideas and be willing to pivot if necessary.
4. Build a strong team: Surround yourself with people who share your vision and can help you achieve your goals. A strong team can make all the difference in the success of your business.
5. Be persistent: Building a successful business takes time and effort. Stay focused on your goals, and don’t give up when things get tough.

Why did you join Smart Alliance – Innovation Technology Cluster?

I joined Smart Alliance – Innovation Technology Cluster to have the chance to work together with other entrepreneurs to promote innovation and technological development. I see the cluster as a platform for collaboration, networking, and knowledge sharing among its members to drive growth and competitiveness.

Meet the CXO – Soft Dreams, Ionut Dumitru

How was your company incorporated?

I started coding as a freelancer during the University. I used to apply for jobs on a website called https://www.rentacoder.com/. At first, I did other people’s homework and then, as my rating was growing, I started to get better and bigger projects. I got to the point where I was in the 40^th position out of hundreds of thousands of coders around the world and this allowed me to bid and be considered for bigger projects. Actually, the idea of incorporating my own company came in 2004 after winning such a project. Don’t imagine it was a fortune, just a couple of hundred dollars, but that was the spark I needed to move things further to the next level and start my own company.

I think my experience on the platform taught me the basics of business: how to make yourself visible and differentiate yourself from others – there’s no tougher coding school than the one where you’re bidding against highly competitive markets, how to value ratings and make them work for you, and how important it is to do your job well, to keep clients closer on the long run. It pays back, one of the biggest clients we had on the platform is now our client.

What drives you every day?

I think it is a combination of passion and the wish to do things that matter, goals you believe in. I absolutely love coding and I never get tired of doing it. And I don’t mind working overtime, going the extra mile, stepping out of the box, sometimes sacrificing my free time…

Of course, as in every business, there’ve been hard times and more challenging circumstances.

What do you believe are the three main accomplishments that brought you here today?

I think working with American companies has influenced me and my leadership style a lot.  I learned how to coach and nurture solid relationships in the workplace. I am all the time present and willing to help, I enjoy sharing my experience and I think I managed to build a healthy relationship with my team in which they know I am there for them. Besides coaching, I could say that the continuous learning mindset is something I borrowed and have been practicing and preaching.

Then, our server management product is an important accomplishment. We invested a lot of work in it and has a huge potential to go internationally. It would be a great step for us as a small company and a nice return on our investment.

Last, but every time on top of our list of priorities and most important is our team. Probably the pandemic was my toughest lesson because then I could see how important it is to be and work together and made the team even more relevant for the entire business.

What do you believe are the main failures that brought you here today?

We’ve had some. For example, food platforms are trending now, and I remember a project we had before apps such as Oliviera and Food Panda were launched. We created something nice, but when we went to the restaurants, we realized they did not know and were not willing to learn to use the tablets. Then, bigger players came with bigger marketing budgets, and we decided to give up the project. It would have been an unfair competition and I think it is good to know when to stop

Do you ever disconnect from the office? How?

In spite of my working long and random hours, my family comes first. I’ve tried to separate things a bit lately, so I invest my energy 100% there every time we are together or we plan holidays, outings, and events together, it doesn’t matter if I need to work during the night to catch up with my work.

Now tells us more about the business you are running. Before the pandemic, our clients’ portfolio included many American companies, but with the lockdown and all the budget cuts that in some cases left us out, we needed to find more sustainable solutions on the Romanian market, too. And the clients we started working with, brought us other clients.

We also work on a project we received financing for, Cluster CS, and we have an entire year to conclude that and get to the next level with the product. It’s a complex product that requires adding new functionalities, and the reconstruction of certain parts of the product, and we aim at getting with the product in an area where we can meet the quality and security demands to get bigger clients. The product is very interesting as it refers to scaling a server infrastructure in case of heavy traffic and it is something that could work in integrating very complex structures. We have only a few steps to take to be able to cover all key security aspects.

What makes your company different from others in your field of expertise?

We are a relatively small company, and we are all quite technical, therefore we have a similar understanding in terms of quality. We have extended experience in product delivery, and it is easy for us to be in our clients’ shoes and deliver the level of quality expected from all points of view: website structure, flow, server infrastructures, and cloud solutions. We understand very well the process, we come up with good recommendations and generally, the result is a high-quality product.

What advice do you have for a young entrepreneur?

First, be ready to invest a lot of time and energy. You need to be willing to continually learn and study best practices. A mentor would also help you see if the path you’ve chosen is the right one and avoid making mistakes others have already made.

What do you want to accomplish this year?

This year is going to be focused on promoting our product, and that involves an entire switch from the service provider mindset to the product provider one. We’ll have two divisions, each focused on its own target and currently, we are evaluating the proper assignment of resources.

Why Smart Alliance?

You can’t work in your own box and expect to be discovered. Smart Alliance has been the perfect place to meet other Romanian tech companies and be introduced to their products as well as find partners. Being part of this community is also good PR for us as we had the opportunity to introduce ourselves and our products not only among the Smart Alliance members but to the entire tech community.

Have you had any projects with the members of the cluster?

Yes, actually the project I was mentioning above was gained with the help of Omega Trust.

Meet the CxO – Codruț CHERESTEȘ, CEO at DosiTracker

Codruţ Cheresteş is a physicist-entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the field of ionizing radiation, founder of one of the companies of reference in Romania. Acknowledging that the value of a business is given by the quality of the people working for it, Codruț promotes competence and integrity, trust and respect, as principles underlying any action, raising the quality standard in individual dosimetry and gaining recognition at the level European. In 2015, Codruţ sold the leading market company he built to an international corporation and made the exit in 2017 to meet new challenges. His new “challenge” is called radon and is related to the health level of the population and employees as a result of their exposure to indoor radon at home or in the workplace. Although the impact of radon on health is in the attention of the European Commission since the early 1990s, monitoring of radon in Romania is a new field, with specific legislation being adopted only this summer. Thus, in a market that is only in the making and where the level of information about radon oscillate between ”shocking”news and ignorance, this new project calls for involvement, passion and responsibility, that is, those values that Codruţ has always been building on. He is also a member of the European Radiation Dosimetry Group and the European Radon Association, actively involved in the harmonization of procedures specific to the field of radiation dosimetry.

Tell us a few words about how your company started.

Being an entrepreneurial doctor in physics, after the exit from the company that I built into market leader in the regulated business of dosimetry, I embarked on a new journey called radon, the no. 1 cause of pulmonary cancer among non-smokers according to the American Cancer Society. Radon is a worldwide important topic for decades and starting 2013 it’s being standardized and regulated by the European Commission into the EURATOM Basic Safety Standards (BSS) Directive 59 that has to be applied to all European Union (EU) Member States. The health risks of long-term radon exposure are not widely known in Romania and even less the necessary steps towards radon mitigation. So, in a way we are the Evangelists of the matter, concentrating our efforts into increasing the public awareness, especially the one of the authorities and local decision makers.

What drives you each day?

The passion for science, but most of all for the way we can translate it into the benefit of professionals and general public.

What do you believe are the 3 main accomplishments that brought you here today?

There are three values that are guiding both my life and the way I do business: passion, involvement and responsibility.

What do you believe are the 3 main failures that brought you here today?

My academic evolution was quite sinuous and it was hard to find my way, at some point made me feel like I was in caught in a vicious circle from which I strongly felt the need to get out. I had the feeling that I was stuck in the mud or that I was missing the boat, all of which made me more determined about what I had to do. This engine kept me going to this day.

Do you ever disconnect from the office? How?

I do, quite often I would say. I like to discover and enjoy remote places that are  not on every tourist wish-list, preferably where there’s no GSM signal.

Do you have any books you wish you could forget just so you can read it again?

Dune, Frank Herbert

 Education – classic or alternative? Both?

Both.

Now tells us more about the business you are running. Let’s start with the number of clients you currently work on (name them if possible)

DosiTracker is a Romanian start-up that offers top integrated solutions for monitoring the radiation exposure of the health and industry professionals in their work environments, for both domestic and international clients. Currently, the core business of DosiTracker is represented by RadonAir, the brand that encompasses the intelligent solutions we offer for radon monitoring in samples of air, water and soil.

At RadonAir we developed a smart solution for indoor radon monitoring that is currently testing in a pilot conducted in some selected locations in different cities. RadonAir is the  proud partner of Alba Iulia City Hall in the Alba Iulia Smart City project, our solution being one of the +100 smart solutions implemented in which we are actively monitoring the indoor levels of radon in three different public buildings.

We are now concentrating to extend our pilot in few other cities apart from Alba Iulia and Bucharest (where we are currently present) so that we have a compelling and reliable showcase for all local authorities and private businesses that need to comply with the new set of regulations set in place this spring (Law no. 63/12.04.2018).

What is your most beloved project you worked on?

Since we are at the beginning, everything we do in relation to our latest passion, radon, is as exciting and beloved.

What project forced you to be creative and innovative (if possible)

Our smart solution for indoor radon monitoring that is aggregating in real-time the data gathered from our radon detectors and sends it to the building administrator, manager or employer to improve wellbeing and increase productivity by easily monitoring serious indoor air pollutants. Everything via RadonAir Dashboard, mobile app and an API option available for corporate use. This way, you are able to have a constant remote control of the radon levels in your building or workplace by getting automated alarms each time the average level of radon set to 300 Bq/m3 is breached.

What was the biggest struggle?

To detach myself from my previous business.

What makes your company different from others in your field of expertise?

As far as we know, RadonAir is the first private company offering integrated solutions for indoor radon monitoring in Romania along with being the exclusive provider of top detection and measurement equipments offered by renowned European companies.

Who is the biggest innovator for you?

Nikola Tesla

What advice do you have for a young entrepreneur?

To not allow people who say ‘it’s not possible’ to influence their business decisions.

What do you want to accomplish in the next year?

To become profitable and include at least 5 big clients in our portfolio.

What would you like to achieve in the next 5 years?

Our vision is to become the reference company in raising the standard of protection against indoor exposure to radon both in the private and business environments with a company value of minimum 5 M euro.

Why did you join Smart Alliance – Innovation Technology Cluster?

With our RadonAir App solution we use a variety of devices from the IoT area to collect data, being capable of communicating with the full range of smart radon detectors in our portfolio. By joining Smart Alliance we can only add our knowledge and expertise in a rather niche business to the assets of the other members, having in the same time the benefit of the synergies that can spring from other businesses that are at the beginning of the road like us.

How does it benefit you?

In this centennial year, I would quote few verses from ‘Hora Unirii’

Unde-i unul nu-i putere…

Unde-s doi, puterea crește…

(Where is one there is no strength…

Where is two the strength grows…)

Smart Alliance is the glue that binds different gems together into the most valuable piece of jewelry and, in the same time, it is the centerpiece that presents the jewelry to the world.

In other words, together, we are stronger!

How do you see your company as being part of the cluster?

As active ‘sharers’ of our particular expertise among members of the cluster and ‘gainers’ of more experience and credibility in the innovation technology area that is fundamental to our business positioning.

People of Smart Alliance – Innovation Technology Cluster – Dana BUTUC

When you picture Dana, you picture the energy of observation, of taking notice, of experiencing life. Dana is consciously making attention the first and foremost important gift from her to you and everything else comes after.

Why did you choose this company to work?

I choose this company because it presented the opportunity to work on various challenging projects and within an young and professional team.

Who’s the biggest innovator for you?

In my opinion, Elon Musk is the biggest innovator of our time. As a young child he always dreamed of going into space and following that dream resulted into SpaceX, a company that revolutionized the space industry.

What project made you proud of your work?

My favorite project was the implementation of AvanDoc for the City Hall District 5. It was a big challenge for me and my team because we had to teach 250 employees to use the platform.

If an outsider were to look at your team, what would they say?

Commitment for delivering quality.

What was the biggest struggle your team had to overcome?

Conflict between users of different departments is always a big struggle to work with. By trying to facilitate a healthy discussion in wich all the parties are heard  and make each user feel that he or she has been given a fair chance to present his or her oppinion is the approach that worked.

If God would ask you to build an app, what do you think it would be?

A CRM, because God has a lot to work with.

Meet the CxO – Mihai “Mike” Drăghici, CEO Techsource

Mihai ”Mike” Drăghici is a serial entrepreneur with over 18 years of experience turning ideas into products and launching startups in several countries including USA, Canada, Romania, Mexico, and India. He has founded over 15 companies that range from sole proprietorship in smaller local markets to several limited liability partnerships and corporations doing business across the United States. He has two provisional patents on proprietary technology for a mobile dispatching terminal used in taxis, a lottery gaming system for non-banked markets and a non-provisional application submitted for a luggage tracking device. He also has filed a US trademark on “PayByFace” (a face recognition payment processing platform). He is also a full stack senior software engineer and system architect with many years of experience working on enterprise cloud platforms, mobile apps, databases, web services, front office applications, business intelligence systems, ML/AI & data science, scalability and performance frameworks.

Tell us a few words about how your company started.

I recently returned to Bucharest in February 2018 after living in the USA for the past 35 years. I’ve been working in the technology sector as a software engineer and serial entrepreneur for over 18 years and it was very logical to start my first company in Bucharest as a technology service provider. Tech Source Consulting SRL will be the technology base and IT consulting for all the other incubator companies I have already started building here in Bucharest which focuses on disruptive fintech solutions, legal system software, enterprise risk management, entertainment networks, advertising networks, robotics & automation, B2C and B2B marketplace applications.

What drives you each day?

I love turning ideas into real products and services that solve problems, are disruptive and innovative. I’ve launched startups in several countries including Mexico, Canada, USA, India and now Romania. I enjoy all the innovation challenges and process inefficiencies that a new market presents when legacy systems can’t keep up with trends in society, human resource demand and infrastructure scalability problems. There will always be problems to solve and as an engineer this keeps me going every day.

What do you believe are the three main accomplishments that brought you here today?

In winter of 2017 I decided to sell all my property in Seattle, Washington and find a new investment venture for 2018. I closed the deal on my 40-acre property in western Washington and sold my sailboat and three cars. I also quit my job as senior engineer for Vertafore and was at a point where I could do anything I want next. I decided to buy a plane ticket to Bucharest and the rest is history…

What do you believe are the three main failures that brought you here today?

Going back to the situation in Seattle, the primary failure that guided me to come to Bucharest was that Vertafore decided to move their headquarters to Denver, Colorado and so over 80% of the Seattle headquarter staff was laid off, asked to relocate, or be part of the elite few who got to remain there. I was part of the elite few who was asked to stay behind but I wasn’t ok with the situation and therefore I decided to resign. The second failure which guided me to choose a new adventure in Europe was that my investment property to build an off-grid resort and vineyard in western Washington was becoming too challenging and too expensive to keep building and I decided to list it for sale and it sold right in time. The third failure which motivated me to fly to Romania was a strategic partnership with a VC firm that didn’t have sales traction in the initial phases while I was advising them on their enterprise technology solutions and architecture strategy for their portfolio companies and product offerings, so I decided to end that joint venture and look for something new.

Do you ever disconnect from the office? How?

Yes, absolutely. I like watching movies with my girlfriend and going on road trips on the weekends. We travel every chance we get, and we’ve already been to Italy this summer and she has shown me many places throughout Romania including the mountainside and the coastline and several castles and lots of sightseeing. But because I love what I do and have so many different projects and startups even work is not really work. There is a saying that when you love what you do it’s not work anymore, and it becomes fun!

Do you have any books you wish you could forget just so you can read it again?

I actually don’t read very much surprisingly. Since I write code as a programmer I try to stay away from “words” when I close my laptop at the end of the day. I prefer to be outdoors and gain knowledge purely from real experiences and from deep conversations with other smart people.

Education – classic or alternative? Both?

I didn’t obtain a degree and dropped out of school because my career took off at an early age and I was already learning more at my job than they were teaching in school and I was getting paid for it. So, it was an easy choice to choose “work experience” over school and I’m grateful I made this choice, especially because I’ve followed a serial entrepreneurship path in life and I believe having the freedom to explore ideas without judgments or direction and learning from multiple failures is perhaps a more advantageous and a more robust “educational system” in the long run.

Now tells us more about the business you are running. Let’s start with the number of clients you currently work on.

I’ve had many clients in the past 18+ years since I’ve been doing business in the tech space in several countries around the world.

Name a few of the biggest clients you work for.

My most noteworthy client here in Bucharest right now is Société General – European Business Services and I was selected to be part of their Catalyst 3.0 Accelerator program this year.

Name a few of the projects that made you a force to be reckon on the market.

I’d like to start with the most beloved project – PaybyFace. Its meant to make electronic payments with biometric means, in this case using facial recognition through a simple selfie. Although worldwide technology has allowed this for several years, such projects have not been outlined in Romania for the time being. From the start, PaybyFace was an application designed to scale and be deployed in many industries. For example, in retail,  I even started testing in beta, how a customer enters the supermarket, makes his purchases and then stays at a home where he can pay for himself, only through a selfie, then at that special house to receive discounts for making the payment in this way.

Another project ARTFIRST, which made me be creative and innovative in the same time. The purpose is to build a community of highly creative people and sets the stage for everyone to experience an art exhibit of original paintings, sculptures, photography and poetry alongside the artists who created them. ARTFIRST events happen in the capital city of Bucharest, Romania renown for its European and International art museums and art galleries that attract visitors from across the country and tourists from around the World. The appetite for art in the city is prevalent all the way from the endless graffiti in the streets to the National Art Museum’s one-of-a-kind collections and famous masterpieces. ARTFIRST gives artists a unique opportunity to shine in the spotlight at our art exhibits in different locations around town on the first Saturday of every month. Artists get a chance to stand by their creations, meet the audience face to face and talk to potential buyers during the silent auction events.

What was the biggest struggle?

Selling off my majority shares in a digital marketing company I built over three years back in 2011 in Seattle to my business partners.

What makes your company different from others in your field of expertise?

I have several companies and each one is unique with the solution, services and product offerings. I typically launch incubator startups in the disruptive tech space and I try to provide cutting-edge innovation to solve real problems. This strategy and vision usually put me ahead of my competition and sometimes I have no competition at all depending on the market I choose to launch in.

How are your products innovative?

I solve complex problems using a combination of existing, well-defined solutions from other sub-problems in order to achieve real innovation with a simple and easy to understand methodological process for the consumer/client.

Who is the biggest innovator for you?

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

What advice do you have for a young entrepreneur?

Don’t be afraid to fail, learn to negotiate and get what you want, hire a good accountant and a good attorney.

What do you want to accomplish in the next year?

Raise seed funding for any one of my Bucharest incubator startups.

What would you like to achieve in the next 5 years?

Build a unicorn company in Romania. (billion valuation)

Why did you join Smart Alliance – Innovation Technology Cluster?

The people in the group I met with are in the same business mindset as me and their openness and willingness to help you succeed is priceless. Choosing your partners in business is critical to the level of success that you can achieve and my choice with Smart Alliance aligns with my company goals and my vision & culture.

How does it benefit you?

To gain more exposure in the local and global marketplace and to build my network of influence to achieve the goals I’ve set for my company growth trajectory into 2019 and beyond.

How do you see your company as being part of the cluster?

A mutual beneficial relationship.

How do you see the evolution of the cluster?

This group of smart individuals and the intellectual property they all bring creates a true potential for future growth and builds a force to break our limiting barriers, expedite solutions for all our customers, and deliver the highest quality products and services in the marketplace with the constant changing landscape from technology impacting our society year after year.

Meet the CxO – Marius PANĂ, CEO Spearhead

A nerd by definition, an american by philosophy, a Romanian by heart, Marius is a  multicultural blend of ideas and values, partly because he lived in USA for half of his life. He sees opportunity where there is not, and has an relentless source of energy when it comes to successfully accomplishing an idea. He identifies himself with the concept of high-performance and lives by it. A gamer with a desire to change the face of the Romanian IT industry, he never actually passed over the line of being a soldier in the front lines. Even though he leads his own company, he still gets his ”hands dirty” every time he has the possibility, that’s how he created a feedback loop, a technology that made employees from Amazon and Google struck with awe.

Tell us a few words about how your company started.

In 2001 I came back to Romania from the United States and in 2004 I started my own IT company. My parents moved right after the fall of the communism and I spent my childhood in the USA. When I came back I had a sudden realization that IT services we’re not yet a professional service here.  Back then the mentality was something like,” everyone has a neighbor that knows computers”. There wasn’t this proficiency that we like to brag about. So, I entered in this game because I realized my knowledge could mean something – infrastructure administration with more complex technologies that despite the fact that these technologies were being used, they didn’t have so much impact. So, in 2004 I started like many other IT firms – with a desire to do things as they should be, but with no straight direction.

Without any strategy but with a drive that made us feel we could accomplish everything, I managed to land some clients that could almost touch this energy. The biggest downside to this is that we did lots of things from a bunch of different fields and that soon became a difficult to manage. I soon came to the conclusion that it did not represent me anymore because over the years I started to develop as well, to become better on a certain type of technology, with more clearer concepts, methodologies and so on.

So we started fresh. In 2010 we took the decision, in 2011 we implemented the strategy. The company I had shut down, we made a screening over the clients and we reduced from 7-8 business lines to only 3 but very, very focused and we started to build. The concept was Spearhead, as the name of the actual company, and we wanted and we still do, to be on the front line with modern, advanced and open technologies.

• The most important thing is to be modern. Nowadays you have to be able to shift with ease from one technology to another, and the legacy ones do not allow you to have this mobility. At the same time, I’m extremely interested in how the methodology is applied and how it brings you the results you wanted.
• Advanced because the concepts are pretty complex. What is easy is already done by others. There is no place for us. We have to do the hard stuff.
• Last but not least, open source. Somewhere inside myself is a hippie that is very keen on things to be open source. I am very convinced about a single thing – in IT we managed to be where we are because of open source. How you see me right now and everything that is around you I managed to learn and do these things because some other fellows said “no, what I write, what I think, belongs to the community”. If they wouldn’t have been like that, I wouldn’t have been able to be here. So, I truly believe in this and I hope we can make some good with it.

What drives you each day?

The concept of high-performance. If you do a search on Google you will find a ton of materials on marketing, self-motivating, habits and what not. Some are very sad because you can see they are made only to make you feel better and to sell. I believe in another type of high performance that doesn’t have all this blabber – the one that I apply has ups and downs, it’s the real life as you feel it and how it actually is as a matter of fact. Its not like in the American movies where everything is going to be pretty in the end. There are days where you just watch the clock waiting to go home, and there are others when you do not know how to make the time stop. The whole concept of high performance means to know that life gives you lemons and honey and you must be prepared to manage everything, in one way or another but to always focus on getting things done.

This is especially something I learned while I was in the USA. While I lived there, we were fairly poor. All of us had to work hard to survive. That’s because their system is very well built –if you work, you are rewarded, if you work harder, you get bigger rewards, regardless if it means physical or intellectual work. I came back with this mind-set and this ambition to do things, to always get things done and we can feel it, as a company, that if we work hard results will come.

What do you believe are the 3 main accomplishments that brought you here today?

Probably, when we get older we remember more about our childhood and what formed us.

I remember my first job, as a newspaper delivery boy. At 5AM the pile of newspapers would come, I had to pack them up, put them in a bag and I started to deliver. I remember that I would get quite consistent tips. Let’s be straight – my salary was next to nothing, but there were some pensionaries that were very nice and they would tip me. I remember that each one of them had some special method of how they wanted their newspaper delivered. Thanks to this experience, I could figure out that if I take into consideration the personal needs of those to whom I deliver the newspapers I will have that human  touch and appreciation of the client and this is a universal truth applicable even now with all the technology and a much higher scale of doing business.

Persistence – you must be persistent and always have to work hard. I always wanted a business that will explode and I would be a billionaire overnight. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen but who knows. What we are now doing is applying ideas we had in 2005-2006, we are only now able to put them into practice. I’m not a superstitious person, but it seems that everything happens at its time, there is an element of luck to this as well.

I have a huge thirst and I like to believe that the company has it as well, for technologies, methodologies and the concepts of high performance. We are a company that delivers services in IT – this means that if I don’t know the latest technologies, I can’t serve your needs. And if you don’t have a methodology that can be efficient, you can’t scale the business. And this became a huge passion. I’m always up to date with ideas, models, agile and non-agile ways, you name it. Im trying to be part of those conversations so I could find what can be more appropriate for our clients.

What do you believe are the 3 main failures that brought you here today?

As you can imagine, there are a lot. There are so many different failures from which you can learn. Some force you to learn faster, others you need to be repeated. I can’t put my finger on something specific. I know that I can learn better from a mistake than from a win, and when I have a failure I put myself under scrutiny – what went wrong, what not, why did it come to this etc. Thomas Edison said – “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”.

Do you ever disconnect from the office? How?

Like a real nerd – I’m playing. I am gamer; thus, I play on my PlayStation and some on PC.  I also like to drive a lot. There are many times I jump in my car and start driving through Bucharest while listening to Bob Dylan. Traveling is also fun but only for short periods, I get home sick quite easily.

Do you have any books you wish you could forget just so you can read it again?

I wouldn’t say this, because I never want to forget. But I have books that I would like to read every time I am reminded of them. “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkings, “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim,  Henry Mintzberg about managing and last but not least “The Grand Design” by Steven Hawking and Leonard Mlodinaw.

I also read the user’s guide – systems manuals, apps and others.

Questions about the company you are running

Now tells us more about the business you are running. Let’s start with the number of clients you currently work on (name them if possible)

We are a IT services supplier. My number 1 product is my know-how and the methodology to implement it.

We love technology and we put it at the basis of our business activity. We are permanently updated with industry innovations and we consider IT as the essential tool for any modern company. Our main focus is to help organizations understand and use technology in order to raise efficiency and the quality of their activities.

We have 2 distinct lines of business:

1. IT systems and applications monitoring. We are that company that gives you unprecedented visibility into your whole infrastructure. You want to know what happens with your server, with a certain app, some metrics inside an app, name it. We take all the data, chew it, prepare it, and present it in a single pane so the client can see from one dashboard the whole infrastructure’s status. If you know how to read it and you pay attention, you can see where there will be problems, where you have problems now and so on.
2. The Cloud. We cover many big projects regarding public and private clouds and we have a fairly advanced understanding of these hyperscale type of solutions. We have to either draw an architecture, or to offer consultancy on projects. With them we work especially for building private clouds. We work with Joyent, Microsoft, Google to name a few, but with the last Joyent we have constant projects. In this area of cloud, you need maximum agility because there aren’t 2 identical clouds. We automate and we have a work metholody with tools from the open source community. Through automation we can save time which is by far one of the most important things nowadays. I can install an application in 5 minutes versus others that do it in 3 hours. Our biggest accomplishment in 2017 is building our own cloud that we are launching in the first quarter of 2018 which delivers high performance and a simplified experience. We want to get out of your way and let you run your business, not become an expert in cloud technologies.

All of our services are tightly coupled with our professional services.

We have somewhere around 60 permanent clients. Many of our projects are based on a subscription model. The number fluctuates from one month to another, but one thing is clear – their number is growing. The total number of clients for which we delivered projects is somewhere around 1,000, since 2011, from all around the globe and now with our public cloud taking shape, we are growing a bit more quickly.

Name a few of the biggest clients you work for (if possible)

Heineken Romania, Orange Romania, Orkla Foods, Ericsson to name a few. Depends on what you see as big.

What is your most beloved project you worked on?

There are plenty, but one took us over the seas. In 2015 I decided to show the world a small part of our methodology and we created something that we in the industry call a feedback loop. Inside the loop, each component output becomes the entry for the next component and so on.  It is a methodology we created for our monitoring software and some automation tools we use. We basically built self-installing, self-configuring and self-healing architectures, that can heal, repair and scale themselves according to some specific needs and it was very well received by the international community. Some employees from Amazon and some architects from Google wrote to us and told us they are quite impressed. And this touched a nerve that made us realize we need to invest more time. Since then we are working to make it better. There are plenty of people that still write to me after all these years because they find me on social media or read some article about what we built, but there are very few people that actually manage to implement it and especially to keep it alive. We only have three clients in Romania that use this particular concept.

What project forced you to be creative and innovative (if possible)

Each and every one. Most of the clients come to us because they have no other solution on the market or the solutions are vendor lock-in and expensive. And when something comes to me it is because it needs a powerful dose of creativity and innovation – and has something extra – it had to be done yesterday.

What was the biggest struggle?

There is not one but many. I can’t put my finger on something and say – this is it. As a personal philosophy, for me to be high performant, I need to be able to move past things quickly. If I stay and dwell on a failure I enter a very damaging and negative loop. But instead, I do an analysis, see where it went wrong and afterwards I say ‘’okay, move on’’. Now my struggle is because we try to be unique on something very specific and is very hard because you ask yourself – if your idea was so good, why didn’t the others do it? While you implement it, you overthink and second guess your every step.

What I can say is the biggest struggle is that I try to convince my clients of our value, because I never liked the idea to regurgitate another company’s solution without adding something of our own.

What makes your company different from others in your field of expertise

We have advanced knowledge, experience and methodologies built around IT service delivery. We are specialized in certain key technologies and this helps us be real allies to those who utilize IT as a tool. At the same time we are almost entirely dedicated to open technologies by design and this opens many opportunities for us.

We are also well positioned in regards to modern technologies and methodologies for service delivery. The cloud is one such area where our IT automation skills, tools and methodologies have proven extremely useful to a large portion of our clients and partners.

What advice do you have for a young entrepreneur?

Be patient and dedicated. Be prepared to lose some sleep.

What do you want to accomplish this year?

We are considering expanding to Eastern Europe and Africa with our IT monitoring solution. And there it is a different approach in almost everything, thus we need a lot of strength.

What would you like to achieve in the next 5 years?

We are launching a public cloud. We will present it in detail during this year, but is quite a unique thing in Romania. In our country we don’t have something that is as easy to use like in other countries. We hope that in the next 5 years this will be our core business. We want to become one of the main supplier for cloud services in Romania.

Why did you join Smart Alliance – Innovation Technology Cluster?

When I understood the vision Gabi (Gabriel Munteanu, president of Smart Alliance -Innovation Technology Cluster) and what he wants to accomplish through this cluster, especially because we cannot compare ourselves with the giants, I felt that it can come naturally. If we can bring companies that can add value. That ‘’if’’ is very important. There are a lots of companies in Romania that do the same thing. You can change the provider anytime and you really won’t feel the difference. I pointed out that we need to bring in companies that bring a change, not do what 50 other companies can do, that have unique methodologies for their service delivery and are generally modern and great at what they indifferent of their size. I believe we need to bring in companies that can create synergies within the existing ranks and minimalize the cannibalization.

How does it benefit you?

For the moment I can’t really say, it may be too early. In the idea of networking and how we can meet for business opportunities it is OK and we still have room to grow. Long term however we need to champion someHow do you see your company as being part of the cluster?

I have some ideas for Smart Alliance Academy. Specifically we can build a platform to empower the next generation of systems engineers that are so sorely needed at the moment.

Meet the CxO – George TUDOR, Managing Partner IT TEAMS

A Pink Floyd fan, a math geek and a tech enthusiast, George TUDOR is a man of few words but with a high level of understanding regarding of what his employees need. Without his knowledge, he applies the maieutics of Socrates everyday to help his staff become better and reach a higher level of truthfulness to themselves. Because of this, he can make sure that each project has the right people working on it and vice-versa, thus hitting two birds with one stone – keeping his employees happy, while delivering amazing projects.

Tell us a few words about how your company started

The core team of IT Teams has been established 7 years ago, so we know each other and have worked together for quite a while. With my previous company we have built a SaaS for the US market and several years later we made a spin-off and decided to continue the outsourcing services under a new brand – IT Teams. IT Teams has been created out of the need to offer software solutions to both startups and established companies. To a certain extent, this vision combines our appetite for helping startups take off and our expertise in building and operating remote development teams.

What drives you each day?

I am starting each day thinking about how I can find the right opportunities for people I work with, regardless if they are employees, clients or partners.

Equally important is my desire to do technology related experiments. I always stayed close to technology so whenever I can afford the time, I read software development articles or watch my developers as they work in a specific development environment.

Yet the most important driver is to inspire my colleagues to learn, to become better at what they do. Coaching gives me the best satisfaction at the end of the day. I had the chance to meet incredible people that inspired me to challenge myself, to aim higher and to do my best to help others. It was funny (he smiles) that none of these people intended to help me in this direction, they were actually guiding me to become more efficient. I was lucky to meet them, right at the moment when I decided to start IT Teams, so coaching is an essential ingredient of my definition for success. I believe that a day without a take away of how to become better is a lost day.

What do you believe are the 3 main accomplishments that brought you here today?

I will mention several achievements that are not providing immediate value and yet are tremendously important in the long run.

The first one is my ability to on board valuable team members. I think that nurtured our ability as a team to on board engineers on the right projects for them. This is how we differentiate from our competition.

The second accomplishment is based on honesty and trust, some of the core values of IT Teams, pillars of our relationship with clients and employees. Most of our clients are key partners for us, we have been working together for a long time and we understand their business quite well.

The third one is perseverance. Perhaps years ago we would have given up facing some of the challenges we now overcome. This is combination of maintaining focus, being determined and willing to work hard.

What do you believe are the 3 main failures that brought you here today?

Partnerships that didn’t work out. Would events have lined up differently, IT Teams would not have been born, so obviously things turned out for the best for everybody, including my current team.

Second, since I mentioned hard work previously, there’s also a downside to it. Too much work kept us away from innovation. But I believe this is a constant challenge for the outsourcing industry in general, where no consistent innovation has been noticed for quite a while.

And the third one? (Tudor pauses and gazes through the window of his office) I could have realized the importance of personal development earlier. That might have helped me to make important business related decisions sooner.

Do you ever disconnect from the office? How?

There’s a secret island of pleasure and comfort I visit each day – my family. It recharges my batteries and gives me purpose for what I do. The noisy evenings with my family give me a sense of peace and tranquility after a day of work.

I play guitar or play with my kids. I was a Pink Floyd fan but now, between playing Pink Floyd tunes on my guitar and rattling Melc Melc Codobelc, my big fans at home, urge for the latter. (he laughs)

Do you have any books you wish you could forget just so you can read it again?

Simon Sinek “Start with why” which helped me understand the importance of core values and beliefs behind our actions, behind how we speak and what we sell. I got many insights from this book and I think it helped me better understand why I started IT Teams and how we can continue to attract talent and grow our team.

Education – classic or alternative? Both?

I am a product of the classic approach and I feel I was not taught but rather let free to learn, to behave as I wish and to be part of various competitions. I participated in Math Olympics Contests, I came up with my own schedule for studying, I was rather independent.

So to respond to your question, I would say both; classic because it brings pure knowledge and nurtures our basic abilities to follow rules and patterns, and alternative to ensure we are able to break patterns and think out-the-box when needed.

Now tells us more about the business you are running. Let’s start with the clients you currently work on

There are four services delivered under the umbrella of IT Teams, each designed to respond to specific client needs.

Our main model is building and managing teams of IT engineers for our clients. Usually, these companies are IT companies maintaining or improving their web and mobile products. We create dedicated teams that ensure the development and QA capacity for our clients in Europe, USA and Australia.

We also provide software services for Startups. Even though this is not our largest revenue stream, it is definitely an attractive direction for us. We meet entrepreneurs that have a business idea and we commit to be fully responsible for all technical aspects of their business. We provide guidance about technology to be employed, innovation trends, we help them develop their budget estimations so we really help them in various stages of their business. We advise them on how to reach the maximum business result in the shortest term possible with reasonable budgets. Last year we helped two Amsterdam-based startups creating their web and mobile platforms. They were targeting in fashion / e-commerce and recruitment industries.

IT Teams is able to provide tailor-made solutions and on a needed basis maintenance services to its clients. A few examples of applications we have built lately are an enterprise solution for manufacturing plants, an HR solution, a Point Of Sale software. Such solutions are used by SME’s in Romania, Europe and USA from various industries such as manufacturing and retail.

Last but not least, there is onsite or remote maintenance. We have both short and long-term commitments with employees that go over to the client and work at their premises in an integrated manner. Again, the typical clients here are large IT providers in Romania and Europe.

Name a few of the biggest clients you work for (if possible)

To respect the confidentiality clauses I will mention only some of our clients such as Tandarts, Baloonr, Robosoft, KiTS. In addition, 6 Romanian mid-large IT providers have been helped by our engineers to deliver their projects on time. We have completed various projects for end clients, represented by well known Romanian banks and one of the big four consultancy houses.

Name a few of the projects that made you a force to be reckon on the market

I learned a lot from developing UnifiedPractice, it was really challenging at both technical and business level, and I got a lot of satisfaction seeing the platform going live. It was a huge opportunity to see how hard it is to attract users on a web & mobile platform, and even more difficult to keep them satisfied. It was once again an opportunity to build and retain strong engineering teams inspired by an innovative idea, committed to transform it into a software that ultimately improves the lives of end-users.

Such experience has been used lately to build a platform that connects individuals from different locations around the world to resolve problems by communicating in various languages.

We have also built and maintained the biggest Netherlands dentists portal.

What is your most beloved project you worked on?

My most beloved project is a recent web solution we have developed for a world class manufacturing company using Microsoft and Oracle technologies. We helped the client increase its production efficiency through a continuous data collection process supported by our solution to gather information and provide statistics related to production failures and scraps.

A consistent part of the system revolves around providing a diverse set of statistics and data reporting, both drill down as well as graphical, that help provide an in depth analysis of quality and stability of the production cycle. Not only have we been able to provide the counting of scraps but have also integrated legacy data (SAP) to clearly indicate the financial cost of the occurring defects.

Why is this project particularly relevant to me?  Because of the combination of technologies we have employed – from complex enterprise platforms like SAP to latest approaches like Single Page JavaScript App – Angular, Material design, rich & powerful statistics and graphics over Oracle RDBMS running behind a Microsoft IIS .Net application. The project was well received not only by the local subsidiary of our client but has the potential of being deployed company wide by the head office of the company.

What project forced you to be creative and innovative?

UnifiedPractice definitely required us to be creative and innovative – together with my US business partners we put tremendous efforts to create a slick product for Chinese medicine practitioners that need to take notes on a mobile device while consulting the patient.

What was the biggest struggle?

Understanding the psychology and behaviour of end users was the biggest struggle. This is a constant challenge in all projects. To create a perfect solution, you have to know not only how the user tends to use a software or hardware artefact but also to learn about, if not directly experience the environment in which the end-user uses the solution.

What makes your company different from others in your field of expertise?

What makes us unique is our ability to provide the right engineers for the right project. This is what guides us in what we do. It is the reason for which we are not looking for growth at all costs overlooking the quality of the collaboration between our employees and our clients. We aim to have 100% matching between IT talent and the opportunities brought by our clients.

How are your products innovative?

We are quite close to deliver a platform to support our services. This tool will be used by our clients to get better visibility over the results offered by our teams. Right now our internal tool features recruitment capabilities, project management and activity tracking. Invoicing and objective tracking will be soon implemented before going live, so we will be able to ensure 100% transparency for our clients over the results provided by an outsourced team.

Who is the biggest innovator for you?

I like Google as a company and how they are able to transform the ideas they focus on.

I also like them because they have knowledge and use the technology at its top level combining network hardware, devices, data and services to provide a unique user experience. I also like that they are able to get value out of open source offerings.

I closely followed the evolution of the Google Drive platform and its related cloud space development tools. And whenever we got the chance, we experimented by integrating google drive in our applications to create outstanding features that can be replicated in real life products. One such feature, for instance, is extracting pieces of data (like the phone number or email address) from various types of documents stored in the cloud where various people can collaborate to edit and maintain the information. We used this feature for our internal tool I mentioned earlier. Imagine the money you saved using current tools compared to how you would have solved this request 5 years ago or even more.

What advice do you have for a young entrepreneur?

To have the courage to speak about his or her own ideas and discover the people that are able to help him or her along their entrepreneurial journey. And never overlook the fact that technology is only a part of the solution and most of the time, the actual execution is 10 times more important. So get a mentor, and validate your business plan before spending crazy money and time on original ideas.

What do you want to accomplish in the next year?

Our main goal is sustainable growth. We did big steps towards this goal, we got 4 new clients in the last month and the year ahead of us will definitely bring more projects and more opportunities.

The key is going to be the ability to deliver talent in a challenging market where big IT companies will continue to create more and more opportunities for Romanian IT engineers.

There are several new directions we are looking to expand into such as a new creative & online division, a recruitment service, perhaps some collaboration for GDPR compliance.

What would you like to achieve in the next 5 years?

Since I started IT Teams I always imagined our services being provided from multiple locations across Europe. So opening offices in additional cities in Romania as well as other countries is one goal.

The second goal is to provide higher value for our customers, so offering domain or industry expertise and technology as a packages is a must for coming years.

Why did you join Smart Alliance – Innovation Technology Cluster?

Valentin, Managing Partner Digi Soft introduced us to the concept of Smart Alliance at the right time, when we needed to discover innovative techniques that we can adopt in what we do and how we do it.

Though it may be difficult, there is always room for innovation and I believe we can learn from other cluster members, from their experiences and what went well for them. Innovation comes with risks and changes, it’s like crossing the same river in a way no one has tried before. So having partners help you along the way really makes sense.

How does it benefit you?

In several ways. Firstly, we would like to integrate our cluster presence with our marketing activities to sustain our development. Secondly, it’s very useful to have a discussion group that includes executives that know your business as well as share similar challenges with you.

And of course, I cannot overlook the social part of this experience, our regular meetings outside office, without business or cluster objectives, all being replaced by a dinner with enjoyable people.

How do you see your company as being part of the cluster?

Definitely we can help to deliver large, complex projects together with other members.

And since my goal is to integrate innovation with our services, I will share the progress with others so they can learn and suggest in return what we can do better.

How do you see the evolution of the cluster?

I see the cluster growing and we need better funding for this.The next level for Smart Alliance would be to have one or more ambassadors to promote the cluster across Europe. At that point we would be able to access and deliver considerably large & complex solutions that none of the members can deliver individually.

Until then, I believe we can improve the collaboration between cluster members by identifying additional interests that can be transformed into micro-projects, where small groups can sustain these projects and share results or progress within the cluster.