We’re still in a pandemic, yet the 8th edition of Techsylvania brings us together, again, virtually.
That’s exactly why this years’ edition focuses on learning how to explore today, to spot and create opportunities in a not-so-favorable environment, in order to bring tomorrows’ innovations to life.
We all needed this. Techsylvania 2021 is a breath of fresh air, even if we waved at each other through our screens. The need to learn more, to find out more, and to explore more, brought together, on the first day, on Hopin, over 5,000 unique participants from 60+ countries, and 30+ speakers.
The Kickstarter of our event was the welcoming discussion between Cluj-Napoca’s Mayor, Emil Boc, and our chairman, Philipp Kandal.
The day continued with Jon Oringer, co-founder and CEO of Shutterstock & Pareto Holdings. The attendees enjoyed an insightful story on how Shutterstock turned from a side gig into the main project, and how a company can drive the passion out of you even 17 years after founding it. “A startup needs a balance between 3 key ingredients: founder, idea, and timing. Being passionate about your idea as a founder may not be enough if the timing is not right.”
Beyond borders and beyond the atmosphere, Kathryn Lueders, Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at NASA explained how ”a playground is a place where if you have the right kind of equipment, you’re pushing your boundaries, you’re creating a space where you can explore, play, grow, and have a lot of fun along the way”. On a more serious note, Kathryn showed to the audience how life support and human health, thermal management system, the robotic system, propulsion system, and many other capabilities are still on the gap list needed in order to support life on Mars.
Since we’ve been talking earlier about the journey of a company from a startup to IPO and beyond, Tim Jackson, one of Europe’s top CEO coaches, brought some insights on the hiccups that a high-growth company can go through and what can go wrong when a company expands too fast from 5 to 150 employees.
Jevgeni Kabanov, CPO and Head of New Verticals at Bolt, impressed the audience with a sharp presentation about value-led growth, while Wendy Yared, food anthropologist at Evolve.ag, came with an interesting approach on the future of food and vertical farming on Impact Stage.
We live in the era of digitalization. Aleksandra Babic, Vice President for B2B Products Marketing at Mastercard, displayed to the audience how important it is to digitize a business — together towards tomorrow. Moreover, in order to win loyalty and drive engagement from your consumers, you first need to be ethical and care about the worlds’ problems.
According to the CEO of Remote, Job van der Voort, the most crucial aspect of hiring remotely is not only having a clearly defined hiring process but also great fundamentals, a transparent job description, while aiming to build a strong company culture.
Cancer has always been one of the most serious and harsh diseases in all history. During a deliberate discussion regarding the cancer screening industry using AI technology, Emi Gal caught all the attention around EZRA, a world-changing company and also the healthcare startup he co-founded.
“Who does the work?” Individuals with their own skills and capacity, or the teams, are empowered to automate processes quickly and constantly focus on value-work. Andres Angelani, CEO of Cognizant Softvision, exposed this interesting parallel, showing how our new normal provides new answers to the old questions.
Finding inspiration these days can be a real challenge. Sometimes, all you need to do is to take a break and just stare out through the window or listen to Selena Deckermann’s (SVP of Firefox at Mozilla) beliefs: “People have to focus on themselves as individuals and find inspiration ideally building around the purpose that motivates individuals.”
Community is, perhaps, the most important element in competitive differentiation. And we just couldn’t agree more, when this statement came from Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers, with over 100 million visitors/month and 21+ million questions asked to date and one of the 50 most popular website in the world.
Proud to see successful Romanian entrepreneurs applying new strategies and winning product positioning in way too crowded markets. Alina Vandenberghe is the Co-Founder and CXO of the most advanced scheduling software for B2B revenue teams. Chili Piper is an ambitious project that raised $18 million in Series A funding and $33 million in Series B funding.
Between September 20–26th, Techsylvania partners are hosting Satellite Events created to expand even more the borders of our event so it can become a hub/network for technology and business.
This first day was a huge success! Great speakers, brilliant minds, and insightful stories soon on our stage!
• Sasha Dragic, Founder & Executive Chairman
of Superbet
• Arthur Waller, Co-founder & CEO of Pennylane
• Ryan Donovan, CTO at Hootsuite
• Donald Sumbry, Reliability Engineering @ Airbnb
• QuHarrison Terry, Growth Marketing at Mark Cuban Companies
• Cristina Scheau, Director of Engineering at Cruise
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This year’s edition of Techsylvania was possible with the help of our partners:
• Platinum Partners: Mastercard, Unicredit.
• Gold Partners: Google for Startups, Superbet, Betfair
Romania Development, Fortech Investments, Metro Digital
• Silver Partners: Halcyon Mobile, Telenav, Wolfpack Digital,
Tradeshift, Macadamian, Microsoft, Fitbit, E-on
• Bronze Partners: Cluj Business Campus, x2Mobile, Yardi,
Cicada Technologies, Freshbyte, EURid, Tapptitude
• Legal Partners: Laurentiu, Laurentiu & Associates Attorneys at Law
• With the Endorsment of: Primaria si Consiliul Local Cluj-Napoca
• Main Media Partner: DIGI