Startup Grind Journal

Lorand Soares Szasz is a well-known business coach and trainer here in Romania. He has decades of experience with the entire process of building a business, and he shared a lot of that with us.

But it doesn’t end here. Lorand didn’t limit himself to traditional business training - he took it a step further and founded Upriserz, an on-demand business training platform featuring lessons from the top names in everything from sales to finance.

With millions in turnover, he’s not only talking about what you could do, in theory. He’s talking from experience.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

The things you need to know when starting a business

Special Guest: Lorand Soares Szasz.

Valentin Maior is the CEO of Techmatch, an up and coming lead generation startup focused on providing qualitative software solutions.

But he started from scratch. He was a software developer for a long time, mixed in with some business development practice in a few companies and an unwavering dedication for working with people.

All of his experiences also helped him to found Romanian IT, the first community for romanian developers, which is still active today and counting thousands of members all across the country.

He took a break from his daily tasks to have this fireside chat with us, and we couldn’t have been happier.

What you’ll learn in this episode:

How Valentin went from a simple developer to a successful business developer

Sergiu Biris is an entrepreneur with more than 14 years of experience in digital businesses. He is passionate about creating and managing successful organisations and teams, and he’s capable of building successful online products used by millions of people.

His toolset is impressive too. He’s specialised in management, product development, online marketing, business development, branding and web design.

He helped build successful brands like Trilulilu or Zonga and he’s an angel investor always on the lookout for the next opportunity.

In our chat, we found out why he chose Cluj Napoca over Silicon Valley, and we managed to get some valuable insights out of him.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

How Sergiu Biris got to where he is today

People growing up with a lot of books around are more likely to grow into a writer. Well, Vladimir Oane, one of the creators of uberVU and Deepstash, ended up being a writer, only a different kind: the one that writes code.

Perhaps more importantly, one that writes his own story.

He’s worn a lot of hats during his career, which involved starting several businesses, a small exit when uberVU was bought by Hootsuite, and a ton of projects of his own.

Through it all, one thing stayed constant: the willingness to break things up just to patch them up again after learning their inner workings.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

How Vladimir Oane built his career

Philipp Kandal embodies hard work and perseverance. He’s the EU General Manager for Telenav, but he wasn’t always on top of the corporate ladder.

In the past, he was Head of Engineering at Grab, he was the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Telenav, he co-founded Skobbler, he used to work as Product Manager Content at Navigon and he’s also mentoring startups in developing regions.

The mix of tech and navigation changed our life. Just think about how your latest trip would’ve gone without Google Maps.

Philipp Kandal has been in the trenches of this change.

And he shared what he learned along the way.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

How Philipp Kandal got where he is today

Loredana Padurean is resilient and fearless. She’s managed three startups in three different parts of the world, she’s a University professor at one of the biggest MBA programmes in Asia and she has a lot to say about startups, the Romanian scene and women in business.

She’s managed three distinct startups that were successful in one area or another, but each of them came with its own challenges and lessons.

And that’s a given. You start a business, you’re going to fail at something, at some point.

But if you want to do your best to avoid that, make sure you listen to our chat with Loredana: we go deep into what she got wrong, what went right, and how you can learn from her experience.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

How Loredana Padurean became the person she is today

Robert Muresan is a pioneer for Romanian Game Development. He started his career as a freelance programmer in 2001 (yup!) and then he went on to build one of the largest indie game development studios in Romania: exoSyphen.

Robert has built well-received video games, some even making it on the top 10 best sellers list on Steam.

So it’s obvious that Robert had an unwavering passion for lines of code.

To find out how that came to be, we went deep into his past, present and plans for the future.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

How Robert Muresan went from an IT student to the head of an important indie studio

Erik Barna has been around. He’s the Founder and CEO of Life is Hard, a Founding Member for FintechGuardian, and he’s on the board of directors at a lot of companies. He’s experienced, driven and passionate.

Above anything else, Erik believes in the value of digitalization. He sees how the digital medium is constantly changing our entire world, so he’s positioned himself to enable and encourage that change.

We sat down to talk about his journey. You’re listening to that conversation.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

How Erik got where he is today

Daniel Tamas is a serial Entrepreneur based in Cluj Napoca. He’s been in the business for over five years and among his most famous projects are the Ideas Studio, Jellycs and Transygamia.

Moreover, he set up Digitap, which is building the first hypercasual mobile esports platform.

Daniel Tamas’ enterprises help develop and market videogames. It’s an emerging medium in Romania, but he’s been passionate about it for a long time.

We had a chat about his life’s work. Since some of us are video game aficionados, so we really liked it.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

How Daniel Tamas fell in love with video games and technology

Frederic Lasnier is an entrepreneur, VC and relentless globetrotter, passionate about IT and the development of emerging markets.

He founded Pentalog together with four university mates in 1993 in Orléans, France. Since 1997 he has set up 8 branch offices in Europe, 1 in Asia and 2 in North America, enabling Pentalog to become a leading IT engineering service provider with global reach and high growth performance.

In 2010, he founded Pentalabbs (start-up accelerator and VC) and has been a VC partner for several French and US startups.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

How Frederic Lasnier grew up