European Bootstrapping Champions

Balazs Sandorfi is the CEO and founder of Bankmonitor Ltd., the market leader in banking products comparison in Hungary. 

Balazs is an enthusiastic start-up guy in the field of online financial services. His ultimate goal is to achieve everlasting #1 market position by applying very new business models. 

He is a passionate fan of finance. The word of the new times, the Internet, quickly took hold of the banking sector, so he mostly carried out innovative activities in his own companies. As founder and company manager, Balazs built Portfolio.hu for 10 years. When he felt that it was too narrow to deal exclusively with the investment area, he came up with the idea of ​​Bankmonitor.hu, where they tried to cover the entire financial needs of households and small and medium-sized companies and serve them with expertise that is unique in the country.

Today Balazs has 20 years of financial experience. He regularly deals with everything from the finances of the average person, to the questions of the wealthiest individuals, and questions of corporate financing. As a guest lecturer, he visits the leading institutions of higher economic education in Hungary and from time to time he is in a leadership position at well-known, market-leading domestic companies

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Bogdan Badea is the CEO of eJobs Romania, the first recruitment platform launched in Romania. He is an experienced business leader with +16 years of working in the HR business services environment. 

Bogdan is proficient in Business Development, Strategy, Marketing, HR Software, Job Classifieds, HR Outsourcing and Recruitment. Throughout the years he held positions of Business Development Director, Managing Director, Associate Director, Business Development & Strategic Alliances Director at companies such as eJobs, Procter & Gamble, Smartree, Accace and EY. 

At eJobs, he is responsible for developing business strategies and aligning them with the company's long-term and short-term goals, as well as motivating, developing and growing the team.

Bogdan has a proven track record in building high performance teams and a devoted advocate of moving things forward through the means of critical business thinking and creativity. He is passionate about innovation in HR and new technologies that can improve our lives.

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Ioana Dragomir co-founded together with Larisa Burca a B2B marketplace for event management named TULIPR. Ioana leads global digital transformation projects in the corporate environment, while Larisa is familiar with the events industry where she works as an Event Planner.

Ioana talks about automation, event services, customer experience, tools and technologies, and digital transformation. 

She previously founded The Inside (www.theinside.ro), being also its Corporate Well-being Advocate. For more than 11 years she has worked at Genpact, making her way up to Senior Manager Transitions. 

TULIPR is a B2B marketplace that brings digital transformation in the Events Industry. Their platform seamlessly connects businesses who service the events industry (venues, vendors, event managers, event tech platforms) with those organising events (meetings, conferences, workshops, exhibitions a.o.) Their mission is to empower event organisers & professionals to build outstanding events, through automation and digital tools.

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Eva (Micheva) Vucheva has worked during her professional career in 12 companies, founding and co-founding some of them. In present time she is the Co-Founder and GM of CONTENTO.tech (7 yrs 5 mos) and Founder of Impakt_ID (2 yrs 5 mos).

Her educational background includes Harvard Business School Online (other; CORe and Sustainable Business Strategies), SPD (Visual Communication), Universitet za nacionalno i svetovno stopanstvo with a Bachelor Degree in Marketing and Pforzheim University with an IMP in International Management.

When Eva Vucheva, CEO of Bulgaria’s Contento, started the business with her cofounder Silviya Dineva in 2016, they wanted to conduct “a company culture experiment”. “We wanted to build a decentralised company with up to 40 people who are independent of one another but at the same time act as a team,” she says. “Happy to report we have succeeded.” Today Contento.tech — an outsourcing business which focuses on supporting ecommerce businesses with data management and digital marketing solutions — is 60 people strong, and its revenue last year reached €1.2m. 

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Chalid El Ashker is the Founder and CEO of Spacewise, a pioneering all-in-one solution for leasing of flexible spaces. He is also the founder of Ashker Ventures. He founded two other companies and has worked amongst others as lawyer and Head of Digital Unit for several  companies. 

Spacewise is a digital platform that offers digital end-to-end solutions, which cover all aspects of the (flexible) leasing process - tools to optimize revenue & occupancy, and attract exciting new tenants.

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Bogdan Bocse has been working as an IT professional for 12 years, in organizations of varied size and industry, in roles such as solution architect, project manager and technology consultant. He is the managing partner of Knosis.ai, a marketplace for quality-controlled machine learning data sets, and Envisage.ai, a end-to-end solution for computer vision and face recognition. He is also leading the open source, non-profit DeepVISS initiative, aimed at bridging the gap between industry and academia in visual machine learning. Bogdan has experience in filing patents, both in Romania and the US.

Bogdan set up his first two startups in college. Subsequently, in 2016 he made the first attempts in the area of ​​recommendation systems. In 2017 he pivoted towards machine learning, face recognition and computer vision.

"The mission of the two start-ups is to teach computers to define what they see. When a person looks at a photo, they recognize the characters, objects, and the place. However, a computer does not do this by default ", he explained. Recognition of characters, action, and place in images, whether it's video or pictures, is extremely useful especially in the field of video surveillance, biometric IDs for online payments, or for quick check-ins at the airport, or events, for example.

Bogdan strongly believes that to an open mind there are no closed doors. As a science-fiction fan and a chief-executive-geek, his life mission is to craft the truce between humans and machines before Skynet comes online completely.

”My vision is to bridge the gap between business needs for automation and digital enablement, on the one hand, and the wave of innovation rising from computer vision, visual machine learning and artificial intelligence, on the other hand. My mission is to bring the advancements from the research community and academia into the mainstream, where they can deliver business and societal value, as well as consideration and protection for privacy, objective, fair decision-making and sustainable development.”

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Co-Founder & CEO of Busuu, one of the world's leading mobile apps for language learning with more than 100m+ users. Their vision is to inspire the world to learn together!

Bernhard is frequently invited to speak at international conferences about Edtech and entrepreneurship, such as DLD, Webit Congress, Noah Conference, SIME, SXSW Edtech, BETT, GET Beijing etc.

Originally from Vienna, he traveled around the world during his studies, spending 5 years in Madrid and now living in London where their headquarters are based.

In 2009 he was awarded “Entrepreneur of the year” in Austria for his academic achievements. UK Winner of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year™ 2018 award in the 'Disruptor' category.

He has a Bachelor's Degree at Vienna Business School, one at Universidad de Belgrano and an International MBA (with honors) in Business Administration from IE Business School. He also has a Magister degree in International Business Administration from WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business), graduating with "summa cum laude"; among the top 3% of all students.

When Bernhard Niesner relocated to Spain to study his MBA he didn't know that he would end up creating a new company with fellow student Adrian Hilti. The result was busuu.com, the largest and most active language learning community in the world.

Before founding Busuu, Bernhard worked at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants in the area of consumer goods and retail in consulting projects around Europe. In addition to busuu, he is an Associate Professor at IE Business School in the area of online marketing.

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CEO & Founder Expertwired.com. Reinier Huisman is a disruptive tech enthusiast & experienced (+15 yrs) strategy consultant and entrepreneur. In-depth marketplaces experience (ex-eBay corpdev). Reinier Huisman studied Econometrics and Business Economics at the University of Amsterdam.

Reinier Huisman said: “Strategy is making choices today which will significantly impact the company’s future performance. No entrepreneur or investor wants to make blind sighted choices and this is exactly why strategic analysis of market trends, customer behavior and the competitive landscape is so incredibly valuable. What motivates me is a client who is impressed that our work would yield so many actionable and quantifiable insights about the future, and is subsequently able to make judgment calls on acquisition and investments with higher comfort”. 

Reinier's experience is characterized by the quantitative approach to strategic advice and the consistent quality with reliable findings.

Listen this podcast episode and find out more about Reiner's experience and advice for tech entrepreneurs.

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Andreas Millonig is the Chief Operating Officer of IMMOunited GmbH. Born in Carinthia, he successfully completed his studies in applied business administration at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt in 2009 and started his professional career as a key account manager in the Immounited sales team. In June 2012 he took over the business development agenda and at the beginning of 2018 he was promoted to Chief Innovation Officer and was responsible for innovation management and the innovation processes of the entire group of companies.

In January 2021, Andreas took over the operational management of Immounited, the market leader in the online provision of information about real estate transactions in Austria. The business economist and data mining expert has been with the company for almost ten years and, as a close confidante of company founder Roland Schmid.

IMMOunited is the market leader in the online provision of land register and real estate data throughout Austria. 

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Sander Van de Rijdt is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of construction documentation and task management platform PlanRadar, being responsible for the corporate and growth strategy at PlanRadar, but the Finance, HR, Legal and Administration departments also report to him. 

Sander studied at the Vienna University of Technology and Vienna University of Economics. Prior to PlanRadar, he founded five other IT companies with operations in Europe, the U.S., the Middle East and Central Asia and guided them from concepts to growth companies by leveraging his international experience as a business consultant.

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