Eastern Europe Exposed - A podcast about startups, founders and investors, created by Techsylvania

This episode of Eastern European Podcast puts Irina Haivas, Partner at high-profile VC fund Atomico, under the spotlight about her career journey from a surgeon to a startup investor. Knowing the healthcare industry from within and having a deeper understanding of it, Irina has a strong eye when it comes to the companies they invest in. Discover more insights found at the intersection of healthcare, tech and VC funds, in this dedicated session.

Ivan Klaric founded the first tech company to introduce native mobile apps to the sports betting industry in 2012 and got acquired by Superbet in 2017. In this episode, Vlad Ciurca discusses with him about his background, entrepreneurial journey and the tech ecosystem in this region of Europe.

In this episode of Eastern European Exposed, Fang is helping us understand the traditional VC options as well as identifying some alternative paths. Even if you have a strong business model or an innovation that makes you stand out, there still are some questions that can help us differentiate between a great business idea and a VC-backable idea—discover them by hitting play.

In this episode, Calin Vaduva, the CEO of Fortech, one of the fastest-growing technology companies in Central and Eastern Europe reveals details about their risk mitigation plan. The COVID-19 situation also affects the workflows within a large company, and Calin talks about Fortech and how its well-defined organizational structure can be the backbone of a productive output at all times.

in this episode of Eastern Europe Exposed, Vlad is talking to Andrei Cionca, Founder of Roca X, an investment fund that invests in technology startups, bridging early-stage startups with experienced VCs. Find out useful insights on what investors look for when choosing to support the right startups.

in this episode of Eastern Europe Exposed, Vlad is talking to Voicu Oprean, founder and CEO of AROBS (https://www.arobs.com/), one of the biggest Romanian IT company. Voicu reveals the challenges of growing an IT company in this landscape and market developing forecasts. He is also exposing his investor’s point of view, listing key startup success attributes.

in this episode of Eastern Europe Exposed, Vlad interviews Dennis Vilovic, Founder of TroopTravel, a European startup success story. They discuss how they came up with the startup idea, tips and tricks for successful investors pitches and how TroopTravel really works.

in this episode of Eastern Europe Exposed, Vlad is talking to Mikael Fredholm, Founder of Monday App, a platform that offers a variety of healthy solutions for improving wellbeing. Mikael gives some insights on their success recipe, but also on his switch from corporate to IT entrepreneurship.

in this episode of Eastern Europe Exposed, Vlad is eager to get more insights from Bogdan Herea, Founder and CEO at PitechPlus, about their recent company acquisition, the entire process, from envisioning this moment, to finding the right partner and future plans.

In this episode of Eastern Europe Exposed, Vlad gets some insights from Karel Obluk, General Partner at Evolution Equity Partners. The experienced investor shares the challenges that startups face on the path of becoming unicorns, changes and improvements in preparing for growth, but also the source of startups’ ideas and future investing opportunities.

Deep in Eastern Europe a company build on fresh ideas and innovation is rocking the image recognition global scene. Imagga is based in Sofia (Bulgaria) and has created the next generation of image recognition applications for developers and businesses. Georgi Kadrev, founder and CTO explained for us how Imagga's API was born and what it can do. Hit play and you can find out more about the future of AI and how can an API like this evolve.

To create a successful company is hard enough, but to scale it to international markets and all that from Eastern Europe it's a true challenge. Four founders & CEOs - Dan Isai (Salad Box), Sergiu Biris (Zonga), Mihai Dragan (Oveit), Bogdan Colceriu (Frisbo) - took their businesses international and are now sharing some key advice about the process.

Florin Talpes, founder and CEO of Bitdefender, the most successful Romanian IT company and a leading technology player in the global software security market, talks about cybersecurity at Techsylvania 2018. He also covers the subject of startups in this sector and how they can rise from Eastern Europe.

An in-depth look at digital banking and how Revolut will change the future by allowing everyone to have a secure, mobile-based current account that allows users to hold, exchange and transfer without fees in 25 different currencies. Irina Scarlat, Country Manager at Revolut shares the challenges the digital banking alternative is facing in Eastern Europe.

Romanian startup founder, Mihai Raneti talks about the challenges an entrepreneur from Eastern Europe faces when developing a CPU specialized for cybersecurity which empowers every device to defend itself in case of a cyber attack. Find out how he convinced Tim Draper to invest a million dollar in CyberSwarm.

In this episode we are taking an in-depth look at the future of advertising. Who better to explore this segment and predict the challenges we are going to face in the next years than Katherine Manderfield, Director of Content Strategy at The New York Times’ T Brand Studio and Anda Gansca, CEO and Co-Founder of Knotch, the leading, independent provider of real-time intelligence for marketers. This conversation took place on the stage of the 5th edition of Techsylvania and it is an eye opener for sure.

In the fourth episode of Eastern Europe Exposed, Vlad interviews Emoke Starr, the Head of HR for Prezi (https://prezi.com). They discuss about Prezi’s products, how you develop a tech company out of Eastern Europe, how you stimulate a product oriented culture. Bonus: The kitchen experiment and why Prezi is better than other presentation tools in a Harvard University study: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0178774

In the third episode of Eastern Europe Exposed, Vlad interviews Cory Reid, Managing Director at Tyton Partners. Cory will talk about his journey from starting and leading multiple companies in the US, to why he’s now spending time in Romania and how he’s planning to get involved in the local startup ecosystem.

In the second episode of Eastern Europe Exposed, Vlad interviews Rumen Iliev, at Bulgarian seed fund LAUNCHub. Rumen will talk about how they got started with one of the first investment funds focusing on Eastern European startups, how we got into venture capital and what he’s looking at when deciding to fund an entrepreneur.

In the first episode of Eastern Europe Exposed, Vlad interviews Philipp Kandal, a German entrepreneur who was the co-founder and CTO of skobbler and now is the VP of Engineering at Telenav. Phillipp will talk about how he built skobbler into a company with over 2 million users, his decision to set-up an engineering office in Eastern Europe and some of his angel investments in the Romanian startup scene.