Sergiu Neguț: ”if there is no next level, a step back is the way to grow”

It's tragic when you hear talking about three decades of career makes you feel old, which I don't normally because it's about doing things. When you do things, you forget the passing of time and you build stuff. Eventually, if that stuff works, then you feel fulfilled and it moves to the next level. Throughout my career, what has happened is that I've always tended to do a bit more than one thing, only because occasionally the thing on the side had the chance to become the main thing as I was fading out from a potential activity. I found this particular idea, this particular process, to be something that helps in spotting opportunities, helps in shifting away from things that don't work anymore, helps in rebuilding a career when it's crashed for whatever reason, and then exploring what else might be interesting and fun to do and useful for others in this universe.

I think things have definitely changed. Luckily, I have very bad memories, so I don't remember how they were, I only remember how they are. In perspective, in hindsight, everything adds up, everything looks coherent. In the future, it's less coherent than that. I'm teaching strategy, something called Global Corporate Strategy, to an MBA program overseen by one of the largest universities in Europe. But I still believe that strategy is a word, and in most of the occasions where we use strategy, it's just something that signals importance, signals long-term commitment, risk, all that. You're better served in your judgment if you just ignore the word. Strategic project? It's a project. Strategic client? It's a client. Let's measure what's plus, what's minus, the strategy, what do we need to do and how in order to get somewhere where we have to build something. Look into the concrete, look into the things that are possible, and then look obviously with the growth mindset, because I believe that businesses and careers, unless you focus on growth, you're doomed to at best plateau. That's why in everything that we do business-wise, career-wise, it's so important to think in terms of growth. 'Okay, I have achieved this, how can I get to the next level?' And sometimes, funny enough, if there is no next level, a step back is the way to grow. This reminds me of when I was very young and I was a programmer, of backtracking. You go on a route, then you reach the end and have to go a few steps back, then you go to another route. But it's all about creating those opportunities for growth, understanding those opportunities for growth. This is not the only side of strategy, it's the only side of strategy that I really care about. There are other sides of strategy like covering risk, shifting, downsizing, taking other things into consideration that are very rational at a certain moment in time. It's just that I have focused on growth because it felt very early in my career that we are perhaps less wealthy and less able to generate wealth and value for the society in this part of the universe than in others. Why is that in the first place, and how can we fix it? Because for me, it was wrong, we have to fix it. I think I got to some little bit of fixing in my career in different cases, in different situations, in different companies that I helped build, that I helped grow, to the level that I think we have opportunities. I am really happy that we have potentially a very good mix of immediate opportunities, of marketing consistencies that we can exploit, access to the latest technology that we can work with, access to a very interesting and powerful pool of professionals, and at the same time, so many things that don't work well. So we're good.

There are ages. You typically get asked what you want to become when you grow up as a preschooler, as a very young child. Then eventually you don't really get asked, only in a serious setting. When you get asked about what you want to pursue as a teenager, that's the first frightening moment because you have no clue what you want to do, except for the few. I remember there were just a few of my colleagues in high school that really wanted to be a physician, that really knew what they wanted to do. Being a physician, some of them were really into that. Being a lawyer, they had a vocational career. Very few choose to become a priest or a singer or something else, and it's vocational, it comes from you, you can't oppose it. But as the rest of the people in this universe, we have not been born with the blessing of knowing from day one what we are meant to build. What do we do? We have to explore and we have to start trying things. 'Do I like this? Maybe do I like something else?' I thought I was very fit for being a programmer for two reasons. When you work as a programmer, you work with a machine, you don't work with people. I had seen when I was a child that very smart people had to be responsible for the work of less smart people and take responsibility for shitty work that was being done. I didn't want to do that. I thought the best thing is to be self-sufficient, and I thought the job of a programmer is good for self-sufficiency because it keeps your mind bright, you solve problems, it's very clear, no subjectivity. The program either works or doesn't, at the end of the day it has bugs or it doesn't. I thought pursuing a career as a programmer is the best thing in the universe. The problem with that was that I got a feeling when I was a programmer that I was very good at it, compared to my peers, of course not with the senior programmers of the time, but with my colleagues from university. I thought I was very good at it and I had a career ahead of me. But funny enough, at the time, and different from the situation now, the market price of a junior programmer wasn't very offering. I wanted to figure out how to build a bit of wealth, or in my personal case, to get out of poverty somehow. For that reason, I started to look at, 'Okay, I understand this, but I have to understand economy, I have to understand how things are connected, I have to understand how business is built, how business is grown.' That became a sort of obsession. Why are we not able to make more money? Why were salaries in Eastern Europe 10 times lower than in Western Europe at the time? All these things boiled in my head. I was thinking, 'I need to find out.' Reading was an option, studying seemed to be the better option. I did get to distance learning to get a second degree from the Economics University part-time. That was sort of semi-disappointing because I was getting lots of classes about how markets work and stuff like that, and I didn't see that happening in the real world. I did not see the connection between the classes that we were having and the work that was being done in the market, while I was seeing a certain connection between whatever engineering programming we were taught in the engineering school and what was needed in the marketplace as work. Things became fluffy. At some point, I had the opportunity to jump boat and move from a programmer engineer kind of role into a business kind of role, equally junior, equally not understanding, less understanding of what I was supposed to do as a junior business person than what I knew I was able to use as a junior software engineer. But it was better paid and it allowed me, by interacting with a business world, to understand how people make money. I think that, as mundane and as trivial as it sounds, is something that had an impact eventually. There is no way, I still believe that today, although I'm very much aware that creating value is something that is so much broader than making money. I still believe that as an organization, as a business, you absolutely need to make money as a measure of the value that you're creating. The moment you stop doing that, the other pillars of value that you're trying to build are kind of collapsing to some extent. That's something that you always have to keep in mind. You have to build this money engine in your organization, in your business. I'm using organization because even if you're an NGO and you're not in the business for profit, you still have this money machine that is able to fund resources, and those resources to produce more value, and that value to be shared in a way where you can take part of that value and reinvest in something that grows and changes the lives of people.

I think the only job that is similar to the job of an entrepreneur is the job of a salesman. It's something of a continuous hustle. You're trying to get the next deal, you're trying to build towards the next deal, you're trying to build towards your capacity to bring more deals, to create a team of junior salespersons that are doing this. I think it resembles a lot the job of an entrepreneur. Of course, the job of an entrepreneur is sales plus plus plus many other things, because it has to be sales to some extent. But it's the only similarity. If you think of it, maybe very few people when they are young think, 'I'm going to pursue a career in sales.' Definitely there is no university of sales that you would register to in order to learn how it's done. So it's still something that requires a certain amount of street smartness. Being street smart is about understanding how the world works, how value chain gets connected, how people are making money, businesses are making money, opportunities are being created and exploited in the market. This is not as prescriptive or as scientific as one would expect, but yet, as much as sales, entrepreneurship can be taught, can be learned as an approach, as a mentality, as a mindset, as a way of seeing things in connection and trying to figure out how to create an opportunity and build from something that is one person working part-time on an idea into a company that has hundreds of thousands of people and making an impact.

I think fundamentally, it's required to be pragmatic, to understand what you're doing, to know the value of money, and to have the ability to work with people. These are the two things, money and people, that we have to work with as an entrepreneur, as practically every other work in general management. The ability to work with people, the ability to work with money, to understand, to have these two engines of a business or a business unit in perfect coordination and moving ahead at speed. This requires a certain amount of skills and a certain amount of training. It's like a fabulous musician. Some of them have not been to music school at all, they are extremely talented, they are fabulous to listen to. Others have been to all the music schools that they could have been, and they achieve a certain professional level, it's never fantastic, but they achieve that certain professional level. That's also my take on business. I'm teaching in MBAs. There's a long-lived debate about how useful an MBA is on your CV, if it brings any kind of value, if you should get an MBA if you want to get into general management or entrepreneurship. There are so many extraordinary examples of dropout college boys that have created business empires. But I think there is a certain continuum. Obviously, you're better off if you train yourself for the same set of skills. Obviously, there is a certain threshold of skills that if you don't pass, you can get all the training in the world, it's not going to help you. You need a certain minimum level of talent to some extent in order to start with. But I think it's not like in music. It's a bit for everybody, a bit more democratic. That set of fundamental skills that you need, that you can train, that you can learn on top of, is not that complex. So it's more democratic, the access to the world of entrepreneurship, as we can see from all the boutiques and the small shops and the businesses that we see around. I think the world of entrepreneurship is far more accessible to everyone than other vocational careers. But this is about talent. There is also something else that talks about passion. I think you can't possibly be a priest or an educator for that matter without having that passion in your heart that tells you, 'This is what fulfills you, this is what you have to do, because otherwise it would not be you, you wouldn't feel fulfilled.' I think entrepreneurship is also something of that sort. It takes passion, it takes a certain commitment, a certain kind of career view, a certain kind of world view. If you don't feel it as part of yourself, it's going to be an immense struggle to deal with it. That's why I'm putting it to some extent in the same area as sales jobs, because in sales jobs you also have this. You do everything right, yet you may not achieve your goals. Or you are lucky once and you achieve all your goals. There is a bit of non-deterministic thing that you have to get used to, and still that should always continue to motivate you, as opposed to 'I fail this, I fail that, I'm worthless.' You can't really get into that kind of mindset if you're an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs inherently have to be optimistic, have to trust their capacity, have to build something that at the beginning is definitely not as good as it should be, whether it's a product, a service, a company. Yet you live with it, improve it, grow it further, sell it even when it's inferior, even if it's not the best product on the market at the very beginning. Sell it, improve, grow. It's very interesting as a career choice from that point of view because it helps you build yourself, not only the business that you're building.

I'm definitely an optimist. I'm definitely an optimist because I don't see value in pessimism. Let me rephrase that. There is a value in pessimism for certain kinds of jobs. Obviously, if you're a risk officer, if you're a lawyer, you have to think of what can go wrong in very large detail, and you have to be able to go through that and sort the different categories of risks in a way that is pragmatic. It is about understanding what can go wrong and being ready for those scenarios where things are going wrong. But I think we can't build the better version of our businesses and, big words, a better version of this world unless we believe there is a lot of room for better. A lot of room for better, which maybe a tiny bit of that I will uncover or I will help build, and the big part of it will be some other people around me that will uncover and build that. That new value that is brought into the universe will be shared because we are all connected in this society, in this business, in this value chain. Taking that view, I find to be a lot more practical and joyful than just thinking, 'Hey, in the long term we're all dead, so why bother?' Yes, in the long term we're all dead, that's why we should bother. That's why we should bother to use the time that we spend here on Earth trying to do stuff, and being successful from time to time. If that from time to time means more than zero, that's a very strong reason to be optimistic.

It's very interesting because when I was very young, there wasn't much of a startup scene, not only in Eastern Europe. I think it was the dot-com bubble of 2000 that brought out lots of stories, and some people around me were involved with technology startups that failed or grew to some extent and plateaued. I think that was the first time when I was thinking, 'Hey, there is something there.' Then by the time I kind of got into a position where this could have meant something, like in the early 2000s, the market was, 'Hey, this was a dot-com bubble, everybody lost, we have to be careful with the technology world, things aren't working the way they would.' So for that part of my history, it was very little connected to technology at all. It was more in established industries where there were ways to create value. I remember I worked as a steel trader, and then I worked as a business development manager in pharma, in international pharma, in a big pharma firm. I thought that was very valuable. Pharma still is not as big in terms of spending as it used to be back then, but pharma is still very important and quite rich. It's basically the industry that decides our generation how long we're going to live, and younger generations how long they will live.

I don't necessarily believe in 'us as Romanians'. I think we are a country, a people with certain geographic, geopolitical, cultural traits, some of them better than others, some of them worse than others. There are very few things in that economy of who we are and what we want to do that I think need fixing as such. We started from a much worse position compared to even the neighbors. We are doing quite okay currently. I think the economy is growing surprisingly well, if you look at all the debate about where value creation is and who does what. Taking this view that media to a certain extent promotes that value creation is immediately impacted by the way a country is managed, as if the country is managed by the politicians. Luckily, unless something very toxic happens, the country is not managed by politicians. The wealth of the country is managed by business people and businesses. That's where the management is. Politicians just interfere with it in order to extract and redirect a certain amount of value. Sometimes they do it so wrong that they screw things up completely, but luckily that was not the case in Romania. That being said, the Romanian economy was 10 times smaller 30 years ago, or actually 25 years ago, 10 times in terms of GDP per capita smaller. That's a lot. That's a difference between sort of upper middle level of economies in the world and the worst in the space, bottom third or whatever. This means that there were stages of the development of entrepreneurship in Romania. I think the first stage was that of small hustlers and corrupt business people. People started small businesses in the '90s. I remember going with their small cars to Istanbul, to Budapest, to buy stuff to sell in a small boutique, to distribute. Many business people started their career in those years this way, and then grew to the next level. Many business people in those years started their business by using their influence to force a privatization of a state company and stripping that company of the assets. At the time, I thought this is us Romanians or us Eastern Europeans, corrupt practices. But later I learned that this overleveraging companies that you would take over and stripping them of those assets was quite a visible way of operating private equity deals in the US market in the '80s. This was how it was done up until it became illegal. So yeah, it is unethical, it is immoral, but it is not something that we have invented. It's good it ended. What I've seen then in time, up until about 20 years ago, some people started to build serious private companies, especially in services that are solving a certain need of people. Here I'm talking about my experience with medical services, but you look at career services, transportation, fleets of cars, do-it-yourself, retail. All these segments were areas where entrepreneurs have emerged as market leaders, and they did it with a transparent business that had values that put a good emphasis on the quality of work and the career of the people that they were hiring. Very solid and serious firms on that front. It was only a later stage, and there were a few exceptions at that time of a few technology companies that emerged. Of course, the usual suspects: Bitdefender, Avangate. I think these were the initial models for a number of software companies, private software companies that also focused on services at the very beginning. They started to grow as entrepreneurial firms doing services, and that created a pool of entrepreneurship that emerged eventually into what is happening maybe in the last five to ten years, not more, where there is a full-fledged plethora of technology startups, software startups, with different levels of productization versus services, but with a continuous stream of opportunities that are being explored at a much greater scale. What we have now and we didn't have 20 or 25 years ago is a local ecosystem that is connected into the global ecosystem, and that allows people of Romania to build for the global market. The other thing is that culturally, being an entrepreneur is no longer a sort of shame tag that inherently means you were doing something dodgy in relationship with the government or with some opportunities. It kind of became the opposite, it became a sort of hero thing. 'This is the best career of all careers, it's the only possibility to become independent.' It has this aura of glamour that especially nowadays teenagers and university students take of it. I think that's also an exaggeration because it's not like that. There are many career opportunities that people should pursue because it fits who they are better, and they can bring more value into the market other than being an entrepreneur. You can discover that you have an idea or an opportunity to become an entrepreneur when you're 30, when you're 40, when you're 50, and not necessarily start your business when you're 19 because you think that's the thing to do, before you have built something that looks like a professional career that may be very necessary for yourself to exploit when you grow older, and you have that experience and those connections into something that is entrepreneurial. I realized I talked a lot, I did not necessarily answer the question. But I see this explosion of opportunities in different streams over the last 20 years, a maturity level that has come, not as a sudden change but was built over time, an ecosystem that has grown and has become more and more integrated in the global ecosystem, a cultural shift that started to promote entrepreneurship as a valuable way of doing business. On top of that, and separate from entrepreneurship, a large pool of management practices and techniques that were brought in by multinationals, by foreign companies, the large pool of professionals and managers that have got that hands-on training in good business practices in foreign companies before approaching or starting or getting employed in local entrepreneurial firms.

First, on the amount of time that it took us to get where we are, I think in hindsight, everything you can do better, cheaper, faster. In reality, it's a struggle of finding your way. I think if you look at the overall performance and you measure it by indicators, measurable indicators like GDP per capita, GDP growth, number of startups, considering where we started from and where we got, we are good. We are good in comparison with others. Now, is that good enough? That should never be good enough. There's always room for more, there's always room for us to build the next level and do it faster and do it better. This is where the only limitation is the resources that we have access to. We have to be aware that the resources that we have access to for a very long time were significantly inferior to our peer groups. Think of the fact that the large majority of Eastern countries would have had at least one Western neighbor that they could very early easily travel to, create personal connections, have family members, cousins, friends, colleagues from school that they would relay very fast to. We didn't have that. Romania is also ethnically quite homogeneous, and that is also a limitation. Culturally very homogeneous, even with two or three minorities that have a certain size, Romania is quite homogeneous culturally, and that is a limitation. If you look at all these things and see what has been achieved, I think the result is spectacular, and I think it creates the base for an even more spectacular next level if we take ourselves seriously about it and we decide that we have something to say and we decide to perhaps take leadership in certain areas where we have the potential to take leadership. Second question, which is more personal: what's the route to entrepreneurship? I don't have a clear path, but I know and I said entrepreneurship is vocational, so you have to feel that you absolutely have to do it. When you feel that you absolutely have to do it, you do it. Sometimes this means you're an 18-year-old that has had an idea and is trying something, and it works or it doesn't work, it fails, it doesn't matter, you do it. I think the only important thing here is that you should not at any moment completely mess up with your potential, sacrifice your potential. If you're really good at something, I mean you're really good, have the potential to become one of the best engineers, doctors, I think you should create that base because that allows you, when you reach your potential and you encounter your entrepreneurial opportunities, you have the possibility to build at a different level with different kinds of experiences, with different kinds of knowledge and understanding of a certain market that you can only get by being a professional for a while. But this is more about each of us, about individuals, about context, about who you are and when and if eventually this entrepreneurial microbe hits you. It may very well not happen at all. Some people are destined to do research, and that is not necessarily an entrepreneurial career, that can be an academic career. Some people are destined to do something else. Leaving your career and understanding how to build it to the next level using some entrepreneurial techniques, that's always useful for everybody. Being an entrepreneur in whatever organization you are, that's useful for everybody. But once again, not everybody needs to be an entrepreneur, and there is definitely no recipe that you have to do it at the age of 18, 23, or 53.

Stayed? I have not stayed. I have left and returned. I'm asking every now and then people why they have chosen not to leave the country, because by now each of us has a large enough number of friends, connections, and colleagues that we were very close to at some point and now they live in whatever US, France, Italy, Spain, UK, name it. For us who live and pay taxes in Romania, this is a choice. Whether we acknowledge that it is a choice or not, it is a choice. It is an explicit choice that we have made because opportunities have been there. Some people took those opportunities and left. Some people decided to take the local opportunities and build here. Some of them, like myself, decided to leave and decided to come back. In my case, there was a moment when I was concerned that the gap between the Romanian economy and the more developed economies is so large, and the gap between the business training that you could get in Romania and the business training that you could get abroad is so large, that I absolutely need to leave in order to realize my potential. That's when I left. I left and I pursued an MBA at one of the top schools, and after that I worked for a large multinational in a management position in international business development. I did take some boxes. But then I also realized that if I am to realize my potential into how I can do my tiny bit of contribution in changing the world for the better, I'm better equipped to do it in Romania. I'm better equipped to take advantage of the local opportunities after simply comparing them with what is happening in the more developed markets and understanding when is the right time for certain opportunities to be replicated in the Romanian market as the Romanian market was evolving. I think this is driven by different sets of arguments. One is personal, where you can build a social network that you're happy with, if you want to stay closer to your family or not. The other one is business. Perhaps you have better chances of exploiting opportunities if you understand the system better, how it works, and you try to take a less complex system and build that complexity. The other one is perhaps the level of significance that you can get in the community. In a less complex environment that you understand very well, it's so much easier to grow into being one of the top at that thing. It's so much easier to become one of the top people at whatever, playing music at parties, writing books, or growing companies, if this is in a smaller and less developed ecosystem. It's so much easier to get to that level, especially if you're from that environment and you know the intricacies of it. Getting to a level of significant contributor and significant member of an ecosystem at some point gives you a better level of accomplishment. 'Hey, I have to a tiny bit contributed to this, to that, to the other thing.' I find this very fulfilling, much more than the alternative of getting into a line job into a large company and shifting from that large company into another large company 10 years later, and from that large company to another large company 10 years later, and get to a senior middle management position that is well paid with a comfortable life, mortgage, kids in school, and all that. I think there is more in life than this, and I think it's so much more entertaining and valuable personally to do it for the people that you come from.

That is a different thing. This is why I have chosen to become a lecturer with the Master School of Management, now Bucharest International School of Management. This was about developing the local ecosystem, creating and passing over a certain level of experience to others, and adding to the ecosystem the capacity of understanding business at a different level, exploiting opportunities, understanding the next level of growth, and building emerging companies for the ecosystem. With FintechOS, it's a different story. As I started to pursue different opportunities as a business angel, as an advisor, I became aware in time that probably the best valued assets in the universe are technology products like SaaS kind of products. Even earlier than that, I became aware of the fact that a lot of business value is built and transferred at the moment when transactions related to equity in a company are taking place. When companies or parts of companies are being sold, bought, when an investment in a company is being generated, that's a singular event that changes the life of the firm much more than the operations, much more than each new deal that you're signing, each new client that you're getting, each new person that you're hiring. There is an operational management part, there is a strategic management, and I'm using the word strategic here that includes this part of transactions that the companies are part of. In this environment where transactions are creating lots of value in the ecosystem, there is a subset of companies that are technology companies that have two things. Number one, they are much better valued than more traditional service-based companies. Number two, they are less confined to a specific geography, so their chances to emerge as global leaders into something are so much higher. FintechOS happened to be the first investment in my portfolio, or the first company where I got early enough in the position to be able to join as a co-founder and help build that towards a global kind of success. You never know when you do that because it's a startup. You don't have the resources, you don't have the knowledge, you don't fully understand what will be the necessary things that will take you to the next level. But you learn very fast, you build very fast, and you believe in that opportunity. For a long while, we did not know if this is going to work, how big it's going to get. But we thought we had a good set of assumptions and a good prototype of a product that, put together with our understanding of the market and our understanding of the investment market and the global technology scene, we could make something out of. This is what we did. FintechOS, when we developed it, we developed it for the big dream that we could make. The fact that this is a company that is creating opportunities and is part of the Romanian ecosystem of technology firms, I think this is a side effect, not the purpose. The purpose was indeed to create a business that would have an opportunity to grow global and shift a certain market in a significant way.

Success is something that you did and you're proud of, and something that you aspire for and didn't get. It's always something in between those two things. Ticking the boxes that you're happy about and proud because not that many people managed to tick those boxes, and the boxes unticked that you hope to tick and you're there trying to do it. Obviously, it's a matter of expectations. For the second categories, the things you aspire for, the success that you aim for, there's always ambition. I think we could get this, and sometimes you get that success and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you don't get that success because you weren't good enough or smart enough. Sometimes you don't get that success because the market circumstances have changed miserably. If you put all these things in one pot and mix them all together, what you get is that success is relative. It's whatever measure you use to validate what you have done and to help you build the next level of significance for some value creation exercise that ideally is useful not only to you but useful to a large category of people, useful to the local ecosystem, useful to a better society, useful to a better humanity. You can build that level of significance of success on so many layers. We tend to discount completely the very philosophical and betterness of humanity because it's too much of a mouthful of words to use. But the reality is we absolutely need to consider every level. We absolutely need to think when we are doing something, 'Is this making the world better or is this making the world worse? Am I just exploiting an opportunity?' Think of the examples that we have given in the past where you're actually destroying value in order to get some value for yourself. Think of the companies that you would be stripping out of their assets and killing it, just to get a small benefit out of that for yourself while the total value is destructive, versus a creative process where even if perhaps your personal reward is less, you're building something that is of global significance and creating something meaningful in terms of progress for a larger number of people on Earth. I think you have to think of all these things when you measure what success is. Bottom line, success is having a positive impact on the lives of others. How positive, who are the others, how long does it take, how big that gets, what's that in reference to your expectations, in reference to other people's expectations, that's a totally different thing. But I think that is the fundamental measure of success: if we can have a positive impact on the life of others.

Luck is part of the equation. Luck is always part of the equation, but it's a special part of luck that is more like serendipity. It so happens, but it doesn't happen for you to meet your ideal partner if you stay in your room forever and you don't go out dating. It doesn't happen for you to see the best career opportunities if you don't apply for jobs. It doesn't happen for you to see business opportunities if you don't read, meet people, try new stuff, talk about things, brainstorm new ideas. There is a big amount of luck, a big impact of luck, but you have to put yourself in the way of luck. The metaphor that I like about that is that opportunities are like trains passing through a train station. You can get on that train, but if you've not gone to the train station and you have not seen train tracks in your entire life, there's no way you're going to have access to any kind of opportunity. Luck is definitely important, but it's a lot more about what is luck. Luck is not a strategy. Luck is not something that you can rely upon. What you can rely upon at any given moment are your own resources and capabilities, including the capability of bridging to other resources in the ecosystem, of understanding other resources of other people that you can put together, that you can work with, partnerships, cooperations, joint ventures that you can help build, that you can contribute to, or get value from in building something that gets to the next level. Because we were digging into the locals, I think our ability to work with others and share not only ideas but to cooperate, to collaborate, to trust each other can still be improved. Other societies have a much higher level of mutual confidence between people that have not necessarily worked together in the past than ours. I think that facilitates the development of businesses much faster. I think this is an area that we have progressed a great deal, but there's still room for us to grow to the next level.

When FintechOS was very small and we were moving from having a 10% chance of success as any startup into having a 50% chance of success like every startup that has raised a Series A, I had this theory in my mind that there are two ways this can end successfully. People will interview me for how this became a success, or fail miserably and nobody will want to see an interview with me except for some failure shows, but I may be able to write a very good book about how you can burn 100 million in order to create something that did not manage to be successful. That's probably the only scenario where I would write a book. We don't know with startups up until you get to a certain size, and even then you don't know what they are going to eventually become and how big they are going to get. But there is something particular about FintechOS that I believed in from the very beginning. Teo, my co-founder and the initiator of FintechOS, because it was him who said, 'Okay, I'm going to move away from this job as GM of Softelligence and start this job of something that is basically you and me and these two people and see how that works.' I think of all people that I have met, he has a perfect combination of a large enough vision and the ability to work relentlessly towards realizing that vision, learning along the way, and getting people to believe and to contribute towards that way. That came also with an understanding of the market. Softelligence before FintechOS was a company that has built relationships with the financial sector. Teo's understanding and the people around us of the financial industry and the technology needs of the financial sector were very broad. I'm not talking only about the financial sector in Romania because there were clients that were served abroad. Understanding a certain level of complexity of the things. Third, you're better off if you're approaching a larger market than a smaller market. The power of investment that banks have in technology is absolutely huge. If you tap into that market, that market in itself is so large that even if you take a tiny, tiny share, this can still be a success. The largest banks in the universe, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, they spend on technology more than $10 billion per year each. The overall technology market for the financial sector for banks and insurance companies is probably approaching half a trillion. This is a sizable market. How much of a half a trillion market do you want to get? Honestly, in order to build a successful company in terms of share, it's not that much. It's extremely competitive and extremely fragmented, but it's a big opportunity. FintechOS was tapping from day one into that market that is huge. That creates the premise of perhaps improving your chances of success. I realized also that for a company like this to be successful, it had to have proper financing throughout the initial stages at least in order to reach a certain magnitude where it would be able to sell into larger clients. This is something where I thought first that I would be able to contribute obviously, and I thought this would be fun for me as well. These are the things why betting on FintechOS. But there is one thing that contributed even more to this decision, which was, 'Hey, even if it fails, it doesn't matter. The amount of learning I would have got by getting to understand this market, by getting to understand the different ecosystem, getting to talk to so many investors about what they are looking for, getting to meet so many smart people that would be talking to me as a co-founder of FintechOS but wouldn't have talked to me as anything else, that in itself is a whole treasure. If materially it means nothing because the whole exercise would be in vain, this thing, like what all people always tell is what's in your head nobody can take. This is the most important benefit because I grew to a different level in the last five years with FintechOS. Whatever that growth would have been, the experience that I would get in trying and failing, in getting to learn about something, this would be something that would always stay with me. It was an act of faith and courage, we can say that. It was fun fundamentally. 'Hey, let's build something because it's fun and it's going to grow and it's going to be big, and if it's not, we would have learned something.'

It's very interesting because we have lived with a dream of unicorns. What has happened in 2021, 2022, and 2023 specifically is that the market has changed in the way technology companies are being valued. The price that you get on certain economic parameters, also on the amount of investment that you can put behind an opportunity, there's some adjustment over there in the valuation. But it's an adjustment that goes deeper because I remember two years ago it was all the quest for the unicorn, and then to get further from there it was all about growth. The most important theme that is discussed now with investors is if you want efficient growth, solid growth of a company. For us, it was very clear as well when we started to see the market becoming more steady and more solid that the ultimate success is not in what a certain milestone or a certain threshold would be in terms of valuation, but are the clients happy? Are they willing to use the technology more and pay for the technology more? Are they getting success in their business using our technology? These are the things that are important for us. Is this a technology that people love to use? Are we building a lovable company for the people that work in it? These are the things that are essential at the end of the day because the growth path can be accelerated by external factors and can be decelerated by outside factors. But fundamentally, if you're doing something that is valuable for a category of customers and brings them opportunities or solves certain problems for them, then you have something. This is what we focus on right now: making sure that we manage to understand our customers' needs better and we serve those needs better in a way that this growth that we have is sustainable and it is much more in our power to work towards goals like revenue, how much revenue can we create, versus how the external market values that revenue in terms of value of the company. That being said, obviously if you do the math and the company continues to grow, there is a chance at some point that these graphs would align.

I'm really happy. As I think all Romanians have started, at least Romanians in my generation and even younger generations, have lived with a certain amount of frustration of not being perceived as they should. I think it's the first time when we see one economic sector, one vertical, that's the vertical of technology, where Romania is definitely not at the bottom of all European rankings. This is the result of accumulated result of a number of trends: of creating professionals, of the scarcity of good quality engineers, then the scarcity of specialized engineers for certain verticals including the financial sector. This was being built. Then you had angels that jumped into the business maybe 10 to 15 years ago and started to make an impact. Then investment funds that came in like five years ago and started to contribute to the ecosystem to bring it to the next level. That has created a whole new generation of startup founders and of startups in the market. Not only startups, the complexity of labor that you have in Romania today in the field of technology is quite high. It's reflected in the price, the market price of salaries for technology people in Romania versus other markets in the surrounding or even the more developed markets. These have kind of balanced. The fact that phenomena like UiPath have emerged out of Romania, and the fact that we have already a working, still tiny and feeble ecosystem, but a working ecosystem of startups in the technology space, and a reliable technology market that is not driven by the startups but is driven by the outsourcing of software services to Romania, but in all cases, it's a part of the economy that outperforms the more traditional parts of it. It is at some mid-European level, as opposed to many other areas or the economy as a whole that is still lagging in European terms. From that point of view, I think that betting on this trend, betting on the technology, reinvesting in it, is like what they say about personal development. Rather than trying to fix the areas where you're not strong, focus on the areas that you're strong, invest in those, and become the strongest. That is something that you can rely upon. That's my take on the Romanian technology sector. This is something that has proven our ability to get somewhere in these rankings outside of the bottom into a mid-range, and we have the potential to be top in Europe in the technology space. I think this is something that if encouraged, invested, taken care of, exploited, is really something that can raise the entire economy to its next level.

From many points of view, Romania has been replicating what Poland has done with a gap of 5 to 10 years. I think in the area of technology and investment in technology, this is happening as well. I think the financial ecosystem for historical reasons that are very interesting to explore over a glass of beer, in Poland will continue to be much stronger than in Romania, much stronger than in the Czech Republic, than in Hungary, even than in Austria. I expect in not such a long time, again for historical reasons, and I don't think we're going to get there. But on the technology side, we're probably catching up with the Poland ecosystem and getting very close to that level. I see at this moment Romania as an economy as one of these what used to be the Tigers, what Malaysia used to be in the South East Asian ecosystem, and before that Singapore, but Singapore is a much smaller country so it's easier to achieve these kinds of successes. I see that we have the potential, relying upon technology development and impact on technology on real businesses in different verticals of business, to emerge as a very important contributor to the European economy. I think this is our best shot at creating a society that is significantly wealthier. By being significantly wealthier, it is more generous to the ones that are in need and to each other, and to build towards better cooperation and better trust between us. When that is improved, the power of this ecosystem would grow even more. It's not unseen, other countries have done it again through technology. South Korea has done it, Israel is doing it, there are many. Poland, as I said, is a significant example of that. Ireland has reached top in terms of wealth brought by technology and by managing the outsourcing of services into the local market. If you're looking at these right examples and try to build on the strength of the economy and of the ecosystem, there is massive room for the Romanian economy to grow without necessarily being forced to tackle extremely innovative things that have not been tried before. I realized that I have not fully answered your previous question about innovation and how you sparkle innovation and how you help innovative approaches in companies. I realized that innovation as such is not the most important thing. I'm saying that in a particular context. If you think of it, look at the major business successes that we are talking about: social media, Meta, Facebook, Instagram, Google, the entire ecosystem. Those were not the innovative companies that started something completely new. Facebook was not the first social media. Google was not the first search engine. Apple did not create the first computer. The much more successful at the time, Microsoft, did not even create a proper operating system when they managed to beat Apple everywhere with their Windows at the time. It's not innovation as such or radical innovation. It's more like a certain category of innovation that can be applied in changing a certain market and changing the way people are using that particular innovation, igniting a massive use of certain new technology, a massive shift from a minority of users to a majority of users for something that is new, and that newness is not that radical. From that point of view, perhaps it is not for us to just sparkle innovation everywhere, anywhere at all cost. It is a certain balance. In this theory of strategy, it's called ambidexterity. Each company should have exploitation and exploration. You dedicate a certain amount of resources to exploration, especially in areas that you don't really know how to do, and you dedicate a certain majority of resources to exploitation, which is doing exactly what you know how to do better, making it even easier to use, making it even cheaper, even more efficient. It is about finding the right balance for each company, for each society, for each individual in their career. How much exploitation of the things that I know how to do should I do, and how much exploration of the things that I don't know should I do in order to get to the next level? Obviously, this mantra of innovation at all cost is triggered by the fact that the larger the company, the less innovative they are because of the strong systems and the inertia. They are forced to put more resources into innovation, but that's not necessarily the case for everybody every time. It's just about striking the right balance for you as a company, for you as an individual, between how much you want to become so much better at what you do versus how much you want to explore things that you don't know much about but you can become a best only by doing something not so good at the beginning.

I am all these. Being a co-founder means that I was there when the company has started, I carried with it for a while. I'll probably be that even if I'm no longer at some point in the history of FintechOS with FintechOS. But yes, I will continue to lecture.