Startup Slovenia

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Today I attended a talk by Robert Farazin about DoubleRecall's successful application to Y Combinator. While the talk was great, what has really impressed me was the attendance of some 200 people. Startups are mushrooming in Slovenia at the moment and hopefully many more will join the ranks of Zemanta, Celtra, Outfit7, Vox.io and DoubleRecall. Everything seems to be in place for Ljubljana to become Boulder of Europe. I hold my fingers crossed for some great exits that would enable the creation of a proper startup ecosystem.

Ten years ago I was trying to start a company that had set to achieve something similar to what NetSuite later managed to achieve. As I recollect those times now, the first thing that comes to my mind is how doomed to fail we really were. At that time the only VC fund at least remotely interested in funding eastern European ventures was a murky fund from Vienna called Red-stars.com whose motto was "from communism to .com". At that time there were no people around here to tell us that a startup does not need a fifty-page business plan. At that time the only two other "start-ups" that we could share experience with were two dubious endeavors, the first being Telemach and the second EON of Zoran Thaler. At that time the nearest event for start-ups was First Tuesday in Zagreb.

I am so glad to see how much environment for start-ups has changed for the better in these ten years and I am really grateful that I have an opportunity to contribute to Startup Slovenia myself.

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