In 2018, Techsylvania reached across the globe for the ultimate industry experts and created an intense knowledge transfer between 40+ speakers and over 2.200 attendees, through 70+ keynotes, panels, workshops, satellite events, executive roundtables, pitching and Q&A sessions.

After such an intense 5th edition we’ve given everybody the opportunity to watch all speeches from Techsylvania 2018 for free. We’ve even included the pitches from Startup Avalanche.

Through these you can catch a glimpse of the fabulous event hosted every year in Easter Europe. Make sure you don’t miss the 2019 edition! Buy a €44,5 Builder Ticket or a €99 Premium Pass for a 360 experience.

As a reminder of all the knowledge shared on the Techsylvania stage, let’s recall some of the highlights. We’ve made a top 10 of the most viewed 2018 Techsylvania talks on Youtube and the most voted speakers (a big thank you goes out to all our attendees that filled in our feedback form!).

Sebastian Dobrincu (Storyheap) — What School Doesn’t Teach You About Building Companies

Sebastian Dobrincu is a serial entrepreneur, investor and software engineer. He serves as the Founder and CEO of Storyheap, the leading analytics and management platform for social media stories, helping brands and influencers such as Tumblr, Universal Studios, HubSpot, Selena Gomez, Kevin Hart and more, optimize their campaigns to maximize the return on investment.

Robert Altinger (Crossover) — The Soul of Engineering: How to be the Solution

Robert Altinger, SVP Engineering & Operations at Crossover has an interesting history with both Microsoft and Avanade technologies, with a hands-on experience in designing system processes, recruiting teams, and running multi-tiered, partially outsourced IT operations.

Niv Liran (Auto1 Group) — Optimizing Tech Throughput

Niv Liran is Auto1 Group’s Chief Product Officer and co-leads its tech department, which he scaled from 5 people to over 150 within 3 years. He joined Auto1 from Rocket Internet, where he was Vice President managing online payments and checkout experience for the group’s portfolio companies. Before that, he was a Director of Product Management at Groupon.

Ashley Carroll (Social Capital)- Capital as a Service Democratizing Venture Through Data

Ashley Carroll is a former Partner at Social Capital where she focused on early stage venture investments. She currently serves on the boards of mParticle, a multi-channel customer data platform for marketers, mPharma, a pharmacy benefits manager for sub-Saharan Africa, and Sempre Health, a US-based individualized healthcare pricing platform that improves medical adherence and affordability. She also leads the Capital-as-a-Service initiative.

In Conversation with Yossi Vardi — What it Takes to reate a Successful Startup Ecosystem

Yossi Vardi is an Israeli investor most famous for being the original investor in ICQ — the first Internet-wide instant messaging system. Vardi has invested in over 80 tech companies in diverse areas of software, energy, Internet, mobile, cleantech, and others. Many went public; and others were acquired — such as Gteko (by Microsoft); Tivella (by Cisco); and FoxyTunes (by Yahoo).

In Conversation with Florin Talpes — Using Market Knowledge to Catalyse a Fast Growing

Florin Talpes, is a visionary entrepreneur, who has worked in the IT security business for the past 20 years. Right after the “fall” of the soviet block in 1990, with his wife Mariuca, he created Softwin, one of the first ever Romanian private software companies and the mother company of Bitdefender.

Sonny Vu (Misfit) — Lessons Learned from Failure and the Most Important Skill for Entrepreneurs

Sonny Vu, Founder of Misfit (Acquired by Fossil for $260 million)works with founders to build companies that will have a positive, lasting impact on a lot of people. Much of his work is about getting technology resulting from scientific breakthroughs to market quickly. Current themes include materials science and chips that enable energy-related and other engineering breakthroughs and novel biotechnology that can massively scale synthetic biology for delicious, affordable and clean food production.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for more exclusive content. In 2019, Techsylvania is taking place on June 8–11.

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Botond Szekely is the CEO of Halcyon Mobile, a full-service mobile agency specialized in the design and development of mobile and web applications. Besides the projects they do for startups and brands, they’ve launched their own products — like Dollarbird, MimeChat, and Tweet7 — and have established their very own research team to work on the applicabilities of artificial intelligence on mobile.

Founded in 2005, the company has grown into a team of more than 100 people, uniting UX/UI designers, iOS, Android and web developers, product and project managers and quality assurance engineers. Their work brought them Webby Awards, three mFWA awards and a Google Play Editor’s Choice app, as well as media features in Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Mashable, TheNextWeb, Re/code, Lifehacker, iMore and The Guardian.

If you attend industry events, chances are you’ve already met someone from Halcyon Mobile, as their designers and developers are a frequent presence on the stages of well-known local and foreign tech and design conferences and are happy to chat with passionate industry fellows.

Which is the most important step in developing a product? The one that you can’t skip if you want an exceptional app.

Let’s talk about what an exceptional app looks like today because every product startup aims for that. Mobile has become ubiquitous, and more personal at the same time. First of all, it needs to stand out in an overcrowded market. It needs to bring value to the user, whether that means solving a problem or offering enjoyment and to do this with a personal touch. After all, most people think of smartphones as an extension of themselves. So the bar is set very high.

Now let’s look at the steps of building an app.

You need to start with the research. Knowing your market, knowing your audience and who you’re competing against sets the playing field. This will also shape your business plan: how are your competitors making sure their product is financially sustainable? How can you do it? Will you do it in the same way, or come up with something new?

Then you need to make sure that you put enough emphasis on creating a user experience that makes your product meaningful to the people who’ll download and use it. This translates both in the functionalities you choose and the way you present those, but also in the visual choices you make for the app’s interface. Ultimately, you want your users to keep returning to your app and feel good doing so while getting something of value out of it.

Then you get to the development stage: your app has to always work — since people are using their devices all the time, in all places. And this is one part where you constantly have to invest resources because devices change, updates happen, newly launched features break, and your app still has to always work.

Finally, you get to the part we’re all still working to figure out: how do you successfully launch your product and how do you grow from there? How do you make marketing part of the process, with everything it entails: user acquisition, retention, and offering support to get to know them and their needs better?

With all these in mind, I don’t think there’s one particular step that makes the app exceptional. Instead, it’s the ability to go through this process wholeheartedly that brings the best results. And then you re-start the cycle and do it again, and again, and each time you strive to do better. At the end of the day, that’s what keeps users engaged, you in business, and the product on the market.

Tell us more about your flagship products, for example, Dollarbird or the SmartUp platform that was featured in the Best New Apps section. What challenges have you faced during the development process and how did your team manage to solve them and create a successful product?

The experience behind building, launching and maintaining Dollarbird, our calendar-based personal finance app, was really intense. But we managed to build our concept into a product that users love. We’re currently counting a 6-figure user base and a 4.7 rating in the App Store.

Naturally, there were bigger and smaller challenges along the way. Probably the biggest difficulty we encountered was monetizing Dollarbird. The first monetization model we chose was a one-time payment of $1.99. It was a fee that we soon learned wasn’t going to be enough to ensure sustainability or funds to invest in further development.

So we did what seemed to be the most reasonable step from a business point of view: we migrated to a freemium subscription model. Most of the core features were free, while premium functionalities were available for a monthly cost of $5. At that time, subscriptions were still a new wave to ride. While it proved to be a better model, it was hard to nurture Dollarbird to the level of a sustainable product.

Monetizing directly to consumers in the fintech space is extremely hard. An alternative solution to this would be to establish B2B partnerships that would help us with our overall mission. It’s still an ongoing project for us. However, if you hop on a journey like this, you must be willing to tackle the challenges of traveling to western markets where the tech ecosystem is larger and more evolved. Not to mention the hurdle of hiring local product marketers or product-focused people in general.

Fortunately, we’ve seen some improvements on this front lately. The tech events like Techsylvania, the meetups, and other initiatives sure help. And we’re happy we get to contribute too: we get to send speakers to these events, and mentor young talents, and hold courses at universities, and generally promote product-thinking in our community. There’s a lot the local tech industry can do.

At Halcyon Mobile, you are creating top-notch products and some of them won impressive awards. Tell us more about your accolades and what made you the winner.

I think it speaks to the quality of our team that the awards we’ve received were both for in-house products and client projects. We’ve won a Webby, 3 FWA Mobile App of the Day awards, and had a client product selected as an Editor’s Choice on Google Play. We were humbled to be a Mobile Juror at Cannes Lions 2016, and we’re happy to have our Design Lead as a member of the FWA Jury since 2018.

Being a part of the industry for the last 15 years, we’ve discovered there’s no secret mobile app success recipe. As much as we’d like to, we cannot share that with you. There are, however, a few key aspects that improve your chances of succeeding. It all starts with the deep desire of building a meaningful digital product, followed by great expertise, hard work, and product-first thinking.

At the end of the day, while awards are a lovely validation to get from the industry, the real measure of our success is in the positive feedback we receive from our users and our clients’ users.

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The 2019 Techsylvania Conference started today and we enjoyed together a whole new overview of the latest trends and use-cases in technology.

The first day of the conference had a strong start with Ion Stoica telling us about how they got to Apache Spark from Databricks, moderated by John Biggs from TechCrunch. We are more than pleased to have this opportunity — to create the right context for technology professionals to discuss because this way there are always new ideas or new perspectives born.

Of course, most of us, #techsylvanians, are in love with Unicorns so what better topic to be brought into light than the successful scale-up of a Unicorn startup? Ahmed Aljunied presented the story of his organization — GO-JEK, providing both an entrepreneurial and a cultural point of view.

But speaking of Unicorns, we must return to the basics: what is a startup? In this over-competitional world, some forget to fortify the theoretical parts before getting to the practical ones. John Biggs went to the core of these problems, presenting the challenges found within a startup, how to overcome them and what are the natural steps in its development.

In this area also, we had some other interesting points of view from Matt Michelsen who presented lessons learned from successful startups and discussed within a panel between Andrei Pitiș, Mihaela Urzica, Viktoria Albrecht, Sean Kane, and Delia Iliasa a contemporary problem, that of startups and corporations working together.

How safe are we?

If you were present today, you certainly found out some unknown facts regarding your online safety, from the one and only Ethical Hacker — Ralph Echemendia. Touching the same matters, Ricardo Mendez from Samsung NEXT, told us more about identity & privacy in these times and revealed on-point insights due to his company’s expertize.

When it comes to the success of a technology team, most of the experts are uncertain, because there seem to be a lot of factors to be taken into consideration. But Aryk Grosz put forth an idea: only the odd survive. After scaling his technology teams from Mixbook, we can certainly learn from his viewpoint.

During this day we also transited many areas of technology: healthcare, aerospace, fintech. The following topics completed our agenda:

• Andrei Pitis (Fitbit)- Traits of Outstanding Consumer Products
• Panel: How Does Technology Transform the Healthcare Industry
• Jon Gruen (Starburst Ventures)- Global Aerospace and Defense Innovation Ecosystem
• Donald DeSantis- Obsession Hiring: A New Framework for Attracting Tech Talent
• Adam Jackson (Braintrust)- Raising a Seed Round: How to Win the Real Numbers Game
• Nan Zhou (Baidu Changcheng Investment Partners)- China’s New Tech Investment Outlook
• The Vision Fund with Sakshi Chhabra Mittal (Softbank Vision Fund)
• Acceleration 4.0; Big Business Disruption & Big Business Opportunity- in Conversation with Sergiu Manea (BCR)

The Workshops

Moving over to the workshop scene, we sensed some new ideas being born under the close watch of our mentors. The ice-breaker of the day was Andre Duis from Metronom, presenting modern operations approaches for microservice architectures. IT organizations are overwhelmed with demands of moving faster and faster, and abilities such as breaking up monolithic applications into smaller, independently managed and updated components seem the way forward, so Andre’s workshop was well-appreciated.

Legal matters can stand in the way of the success of your business, but can also propel it when done rightly. For these topics to be clarified, we had Achim-Sorin Răzoare from Laurenţiu, Laurențiu & Associates to present tricks & tips for venture deals.

And since we are pretty self-centered as beings, we found out that product designs should take the same shape: human-centered. Leaving the jokes behind, we had a really insightful workshop with J. Cornelius from Nine Labs putting the technical aspects of human-centered product design into the light.

We also discovered Fitbit behind the scenes with Andrei Dragomir, Scaling-up internationally with digital, alongside Anabela Luca from Adlemonade and Journey Mapping with Caroline Zenss from Macadamian.

The Q & A stage

The Q & A stages have proven to be a success at their first edition, last year, and we decided to proceed further with them this year also. People who are really interested in certain topics presented on the conference stage, seem to leave the room with questions because they don’t have the opportunity to detail the topics with the speakers.

Thus, this year, the second in the history of Techsylvania Q&A, there were a lot of questions answered and problems solved due to the interaction between the speakers and attendees. We had the pleasure to discuss with Ion Stoica, Ajey Gore, Shane Luke, Donald DeSantis, Rohan Chandran, Adam Jackson, and Sakshi Chhabra Mittal.

Thank you for your energy and curiosity and see you tomorrow for another round!

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