We’re using high performance cloud services around the globe for our render farm and we’re doing this from Romania, a country traditionally associated with count Dracula and the communist regime. Allow us to update that image.
Now, the city of Cluj has been nominated the best city in Europe for air quality and Romania is among the countries with top internet speed. It’s also a software hub for big companies like Adobe, Oracle, and Microsoft. The industry is slowly making way for promising new players—ventures that make it big on the local market, as well as startups that are targeting exits within the large tech companies.
Cluj-Napoca is the European Youth Capital 2015.
There’s a growing startup industry shaping up in Romania, with a buzzing network of events, tech hubs, talks and entrepreneurial support. In our first years we earned a lot from this support, having been helped with mentoring and advice in the initial stages of launching RenderStreet. Time has come to pay it forward.
This year, we’re helping Spherik Accelerator train its first batch of startup founders. At the beginning of the year, we’ve packed our bags and drove to Cluj to do some mentoring, share knowledge and meet new people.
CTO and co-founder of RenderStreet, Sorin Vinatoru has a technical background, but also an extended experience with business development, marketing and online sales. One of his favourite learnings is realising that “we’re on the customer service industry—it just happens that we’re providing rendering hours.”
Sorin embarked BlenderMama and BlenderEva (their 6 y.o.) and cruised to Cluj to help the startup teams with one-on-one mentoring sessions. Each of the seven Spherik startups is at a different development stage and needs particular assistance. From game development to 3D printing software, from financial to photo apps, the young entrepreneurs have some great ideas and products in place. You can check out theirs stories on the Spherik Blog and get involved—they might just be the next big thing in tech.
The four months accelerator program puts together workshops, networking events, mentorship sessions and keeps track of the startups’ progress. The value invested with guiding the projects is higher than any financial aid the founders could get. Money is easily spent, but the knowledge and skills are a long term investment in these carefully selected people and their ideas. The experience of taking part in an accelerator is extremely useful both for the business, the team and for individuals. This is speaking from our own experience, as proud alumni of the Startup Sauna accelerator in Finland.
Next, it was Marius Iatan‘s turn to train the teams some kick ass pitching tricks. As an important part of his job as a a CEO is to pitch the company at various events, Marius had to become a pitch pro. His workshop on how to deliver a startup pitch and put together a great presentation deck was right before an event with Joh Shieber, Senior Editor of TechCrunch and CrunchBase focused on pitching to journalists. Marius trained Spherik startups for this public event where some of the startups stepped on stage.
We’re with our guest Marius Iatan from @RenderStreet working out the process of Pitching and getting it right. pic.twitter.com/5r35pC73zN
— Spherik Accelerator (@SPKaccelerator) February 27, 2015
Each pitch needs to have its own personality and in the same time it has to follow some important rules that can’t be broken. Pinning them down is a necessary step for the startups’ performance at the coming DemoDay event.
It has been an interesting experience giving back to the Romanian entrepreneurial community, and a wonderful way of spending time with some fresh minded people. We’re keeping an eye on these promising startups teams, as Spherik is soon wrapping up the first edition of the accelerator program.
