Forbes: Romania powers up, stepping in as a entrepreneurial tech hotbed

Forbes contributor Allison Coleman sings the praises of Romania’s tech sector in a special feature published on Thursday. The writers calls into attention the country’s excellent existing conditions for creating a flourishing start-up community: growing business sector, a wealth of technical skills and resources, and a enforced entrepreneurial culture of self sufficiency and resilience.

RomanianStartups.com offers a snapshot. The fairly new online database currently lists 169 startups, 348 founders, 30 events and five accelerators/incubators. Twotap.com, Moqups.com and The Pole are given as examples of Romanian success stories. We could ad uberVu to the list, a social media marketing platform set up by three Romanians that was taken over by Canadian company HootSuite in a transaction evaluated by TechCrunch at EUR 15-20 million back in January.

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Three big factors recommend Romania as a technology powerhouse: good internet connectivity, low operating costs and first and foremost, the wealth of technical talent.

Launched last year, Bigstep is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that offers an incredibly fast cloud platform, perfect for crunching Big Data in high volumes and at high speed. While the firm’s sales and marketing function is based in London, all the technical expertise is in Bucharest.

“Many of our engineers are Romanian people who spent their teen years not knowing what the future held for them, as the post-revolution chaos of the 90s unveiled, so they chose to create opportunities for themselves because it wasn’t granted that anyone else would”, according to commercial director, Ioana Hreninciuc.

Smart kids in Romania that could obtain a computer didn’t let the lack of opportunities deter them from learning how to write programming code. Even the kids coming from families too poor to own a computer, would go to public informatics classes, even if they had really, really old machines. They would write programs on audiotapes at the beginning of the 90s.

“Some of our best engineers in Bucharest grew up like this. Romania is good at producing people who are used to making something out of nothing, who see scarcity as an opportunity, who dare to take on great challenges because they’ve always had to fight for every little thing they wanted to improve in their lives,” says Hreninciuc.

The graduates that are emerging from the country’s technical colleges, are being snapped up by larger corporates, such as Adobe, Intel, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and Amazon, which all have development offices in Romania. More and more overseas companies are doing the same, encouraging, developing and nurturing the native entrepreneurial mindset.

With everything going for it, Romania is not without its share of obstacles. Purchasing power is limited and online payments are still uncommon. There is also a serious lack of capital investment in Romania’s tech sector. In the absence of any real VC presence, most start-ups attempt to secure loans, but banks generally require collateral warranty, which these young businesses don’t have.

Ultimately, if the most robust start ups reach a point where they can scale globally, they could turn Romania into a European tech power house that will thrive, the article concludes.

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