What a thrilling day at Techsylvania, the place where the brightest people come to share their passion and experiences in the tech world and learn from each other. Center Stage, Impact Stage, Technical Workshops Stage or Q&A Session Stage — all of them had remarkable speakers and mind-blowing ideas. It was hard to choose which event to attend, wasn’t it?
Day 2 officially started on the Center Stage with the opening remarks from 𝐏𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐩𝐩 𝐊𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐥, Techsylvania Chairman, Moderator and a keen observer of technology by default and through a lot of valuable experience! First we had Sacha Dragic who talked about the secrets and 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐛𝐮𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢 𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐲. Shortly after Sacha, Suthen Thomas (CTO Grab) shared with us how the company is currently bringing big changes to Southeast Asia’s digital economy and how Grab has grown into a legitimate Super App.
Moving on, Pranay Prakash (Windsor) talked about deepfakes and how unethical they are. Although it’s an industry where you can earn a lot of money it is dangerous and deepfakes leverage powerful techniques from machine learning and A.I. to manipulate or generate content that can more easily deceive. Unfortunately, “Deepfakes are here to stay”, said Pranay.
Jasper Schulte, Director of Engineering at Getir, encouraged us to change our mindset and embrace failure. YES, “You should fail more”, said Jasper. This main advice is based on more than 10 years of solid experience as entrepreneur, engineering leader, professional skydiver and pilot. Remember: “If you feel protected, you eventually become lazy and you will make mistakes.”
What a busy morning on Center Stage! But after having a freshly brewed coffee we got back in business with Jan Matas from Deepnote talking about how to build your data stack for your startup as you grow and that “You don’t need the right data to make the right decision. There is a right time to implement different technologies.”
The Metaverse is a Universe that is still unknown to many of us. But QuHarrison Terry, Growth Marketer at Mark Cuban Companies gave us some insights about this new chapter of the Internet. “You will interact with the internet as you can interact with reality. We are here — it is not SF anymore.” Big companies like Nike and Disney have already created a Metaverse department. What about your business?
Right before lunch break Vladimir Dănilă, founder & CEO of Vectornator wants to change the future of design and dethrone the big red giant. Also, he has great advice for us: ”Get the best advisors, of course, that can handle the most. Don’t try to learn everything from 0. It takes a lot of time which nobody has.”
”Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems.” Artificial Intelligence is still one of the most controversial topics — Why? Because we assume that it will perform the majority of work in the future. We had an interesting conversation with 𝐍𝐞𝐰𝐭𝐨𝐧 𝐇𝐨𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 (ni2o Inc.) and 𝐃𝐚𝐯𝐢𝐝 𝐉𝐨𝐡𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐧 (Center for Advanced Defense Studies) about A.I vs Hybrid Intelligence.
To build a strong tech ecosystem is hard, but not impossible. Dexter Ligot-Gordon, CEO & Co-Founder of Swarm gave some guidance: ”A good entrepreneur needs to strike a balance: be honest and confident. You have to be confident about your idea, but you have to be honest and open minded when your idea is not working. That ultimately differentiates a strong entrepreneur from the rest.”
𝐀𝐥𝐛𝐚𝐧𝐞 𝐁𝐫𝐮𝐲𝐚𝐬 — COO at Scaleway — during the talk about Why a Sustainable Cloud Makes Business — And Social-Sense mentioned: “When innovations are disruptive, one thing to remember is that you also need to work with the market and bring the products to future users rather than the other way around.”
Have you ever thought about the job of a founder? Well, Lloyed Lobo (Boast.AI) gave a pretty clear answer: “The job of a founder is about Vision, Culture, Communication, Recruiting, Investors relations, Go-to when things go south.” But being the owner of a 𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢-𝐡𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐨𝐧 $ 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐲 is not that easy. If you are not ok, the team won’t be ok. So, keep in mind to “Prioritize physical health, practice mindfulness, build a support system of peers, see a therapist, set intentional boundaries for personal time, learn something new, perform acts of service and kindness.”
How can we change the mindset and support the development of product based companies instead of service based ones? Romania has a great potential for the future unicorn companies. 𝐋𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐮 𝐃𝐫𝐚̆𝐠𝐚𝐧 (DRUID) and 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐢𝐮 𝐍𝐞𝐠𝐮𝐭̦ (Fintech OS) shared some great perspectives about this in a conversation with Mihnea Crăciun (Endeavor Romania).
The 2022 edition of Techsylvania was in hybrid mode. Due to the fact that some flights were canceled some of our guests couldn’t join us so we had multiple virtual sessions. One of them was a conversation with Christian Angermayer from Apeiron Investment Group, deepening in 𝐏𝐬𝐲𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐬, 𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞 𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐫𝐲𝐩𝐭𝐨 — wonderfully moderated by 𝐀𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚 𝐀𝐧𝐭𝐨𝐧 from 𝐒𝐢𝐥𝐤 𝐕𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞𝐬.
𝐑𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐢 𝐍𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠, Co-founder & CEO of Pioneer gave us pragmatic backstage advice on what you need to do in order to see your dream come true: “Recognize where you aren’t strong and trust in your ability to fill the gaps by learning yourself or leaning on others. The key to productivity is making quick decisions.”
Good to know that we have so many people interested in the future of start-ups and plan to shape this world. 𝐀𝐥𝐞𝐱 𝐁𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐚𝐬𝐡 and 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐠 𝐍𝐠𝐮𝐲𝐞𝐧, co-founders and general partners of 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭, want to seek out the world’s most innovative companies and invests in tomorrow’s category-defining leaders.
Many thanks to our moderator Irina Obushtarova for a great welcome on Day 2 at Impact Stage! Rumen Iliev from LAUNCHub Ventures talked about the metrics and KPIs that both investors and CEOs should follow. “The more complexity you build in the sales process the harder will be the recovery. The growth of the company can come from the existing customers. There is a timing for everything. “
Radu Negulescu (Sessions) is another prodigy who founded his first company at 16 and he is still managing the company he founded in high-school. He talked about Switching Models From Service to Product Company. “Everybody dreams of building a product company, a global one. My wish is also to have a product with global impact. It is hard when you want to create a product company because you have to build something unique, the biggest companies started with a unique idea and that is why it is complicated to find references. But for the services it is easier because you have a lot of models around you.”
Julie Xu, senior product designer at Carta talked on the Impact Stage about versioning vs visioning: “An experience vision visualizes the story of how a customer is impacted by your product experience in the future. Best companies foster emotional loyalty like Tesla, Disney or Apple.”
Marie Astrid Molina from Scaleway gave us some tips about the learning process of the day showing how to design for a product you understand nothing about. “No one understands everything 100%. The challenge in the tech industry is to demistify the knowledge. Bring a positive and significant experience to our clients.”
Pavlo Pedenko from Wise was very excited for being for the first time at Techsylvania. He told us that he was surprised by the hospitality and how nice people are. We couldn’t agree more! He talked about having a product mindset when launching a charity or fundraising: “Launching a new charity is like launching a product in a red ocean full of generic products with unclear positioning.”
Being an entrepreneur requires a lot of determination, courage and an ongoing willingness to learn. Ingvar Kraatz, Co-Founder & COO at Bidnamic suggested that from time to time we should “Step backwards and try to see where you are, communicate with the others to reassess.”
Scaling is always a challenge. When is the right time to scale? Owen Meyer from Meyer Global Equity told us why startups fail: “Over 1/3 stated that it is because of NO MARKET NEED.”
Aarik Mudgal, Solutions Architect at METRO.digital showed us some fancy ways of coding. “In the Web Development world, to achieve these important goals we need to introduce a new idea, called “Component”. It’s not a new concept and it has been around for a long time. I can think about Component like a Class in OOP.”
We ended the day at Impact Stage with 𝐑𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐞 𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 Endeavor 𝐆𝐥𝐨𝐛𝐚𝐥! Endeavor’s network of entrepreneurs transforms economies, fuels job creation and inspires future generations of leaders. There were 9 start-ups and each one of them had 9 minutes to present their pitch and demos. Hope you did not miss their stories.
THIS WAS IT! Two days with more than 50 speakers, 4 stages, hundreds of participants, and, not to mention, the satellite events. We gathered from all across the world and it was our pleasure to invite bright minds to promote what the local ecosystem has to offer — great knowledge, great people and valuable resources. But none of this would have been possible without you, Techsylvanians! Thank you for your support and for joining us every year no matter what! We are so grateful for everything! Many thanks to the speakers, partners, media and, of course, to our team for all the thousands of working hours. It was a blast!
Until next time!
