Mircea Paşoi

It has been 2 weeks since we arrived in Vancouver and I must say, these have been some really intense couple of weeks - in a good way!

This comes after the very nerve-wrecking period before departing to Canada when there was so much stuff to do:

• Pass 4 exams in my Masters Degree in Distributed Systems at University of Bucharest
• Get a Canada visa, plane ticket, medical insurance, etc.
• Find a new team for balaur.ro and handover the project (soon to be announced)
• Give the current team at infoarena.ro all the necessary rights to operate without the founding team
• Move all my stuff from the apartment in Bucharest I was renting
• Spend time with family, my girlfriend and my friends
• Do some promotional stuff for ReadFu (TV show, web show, press)
• Work on ReadFu and balaur.ro

Not a short list for only a few weeks, but I somehow squeezed everything in, or at least I tried. :) Luckily that period has passed and I am now living in the beautiful town of Vancouver and working on turning ReadFu into a very succesful web business.

The first two weeks have been an interesting mix of really cool events: meeting with all the other teams, doing a pitching workshop, meeting with Guy Kawasaki, learning about term sheets and incorporating a company, meeting quite a few Romanians, etc., mixed with a lot of practical stuff: recovering from jetlag, finding a house to live in, buying a bed from Ikea, learning how to use the public transit, finding out the good places to eat, etc.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what happened, more details will soon follow on the ReadFu blog. Regarding what’s next, it looks like it’s going to be a really challenging (and fun) journey, and that I’ll learn tons of stuff along the way (and do a lot of mistakes also). It will take total immersion for us to come out of this successfully in the end!

It goes without saying that I’m very excited about this chance we’ve been given. For all intents and purposes, this feels pretty much like hitting the reset button and stepping into a whole new life with endless opportunities!

One more thing… As part of this new life, I’m doing a trial of eating only vegetarian (no meat, not even fish) for the entire month of February. Really curious how this will turn out. :)

It seems that at the end of every year people sit down and think about what they’ve accomplished that year. All this fuss got me thinking about my own personal accomplishments in 2009, so I’m going to kick-start 2010 with a blog post on this topic:

The Good

• Exactly one year ago I was working as a Software Engineer for uberVU. I was really enjoying the job, mainly because of the task - building a highly scalable back-end infrastructure (in Python) and because the company was a Romanian start-up that won Seedcamp.
• Around the same time (December-January), I received an offer from Facebook as a full-time Software Engineer (I interviewed with them during the summer). I finally ended up rejecting the (quite generous) offer but it was a very hard decision to make. The reasoning was that my dream is to start my own company and working for Facebook for a few years wasn’t going to get me closer to achieving it. Given Facebook’s recent valuation, I still wonder sometimes if I made the right choice :)
• In March I launched Balaur.ro (“dragon” in English) together with some of my friends, a job search engine for the Romanian market. Our reasoning for the project was simple: there’s a pain point (too many job site), the market is large enough, and we wanted to “get our feet wet” in terms of business experience. I’m glad that Balaur has grown beyond our expectations - check out a list of accomplishments for the project! (in Romanian).
• During April, I went to Paris and participated in the Trust by Danone world finals - an international business game organised by Groupe Danone. Paris was beyond all my expectations, I really loved it, can’t wait to visit it again!  (check out the pics)
• In May I spoke at the Open Agile @ Eliberatica 2009 conference about Scrum & Startups together with my friend Mihnea Giurgea.  It was very interesting to meet so many people that are into Agile Development and Scrum.
• At the beginning of July I moved into a new 3-bedroom apartment with my friend and co-worker Cristian Strat. Since it was convenient, our apartment became the official HQ of Balaur.ro :) I also quit my job at uberVU to focus full-time on Balaur.ro and other projects.
• In October, I took the entrance exam for Masters Degree at University of Bucharest. I got in with 10 (out of 10) and I chose to specialize in Distributed Systems.
• Also in October, I stepped down as vice-president of infoarena. The only role I now have is as a co-founder. That means I’m no longer operational and that a brand new team of gifted and able people is in charge. This is great news, because that means the project is sustainable without its founders and that it will live on!
• In November I got a new car - a red Hyundai i30. I mean “new” as in it replaced my old Renault Scenic RX4, not “new” as in brand new (the car had traveled 12.800 KM when I bought it).
• The entire year I met a ton of people from the Romanian online startup scene by going to a lot of events (like WebClub, OpenCoffee, HowToWeb, etc.). I’ve gotten a lot of good advice from people with far more experience and insight than me (Alexandru Almajeanu, Calin Fusu, Cristian Manafu, Dragos Manac, Dragos Novac, Dragos Roua, Filip Chereches-Tosa, Vlad Stan, Vladimir Oane, Sergiu Biris just to name a few off the top of my head) and I thank them all for being so helpful!
• In December I took part in a mentorship course with Dragos Roua. Great insights about Balaur.ro, about business and life in general. I recommend it to anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur!
• A couple of months back we started working on an international project, which will later become ReadFu. We built a prototype, thought about the business potential and applied to Bootup Labs.
• In December, ReadFu got accepted into Bootup Labs! Although not in perfect chronological order, I’ve saved this for last because it is the biggest thing that happened to me this year. The year began with me dreaming about starting my own international startup and at the end of the year I feel I have been given the chance to do this. As part of the program, we’ll move to Vancouver for 8 months to continue developing the product!

The Not So Good

• I turned 22. There used to be a time when I enjoyed growing older, I think that time has passed :)
• I had my driving license suspended for 30 days because I passed an automobile while there was a continuous line on the road (it’s illegal to do that). At least, I drive more carefully now (I think).
• I had my car towed away two times because of illegal parking. I am now an “expert” of spotting legal parking places (very hard to do this in Bucharest!) :)
• A thief broke my car window and stole my GPS, radar detector and iPod. Obviously, the police hasn’t solved the case. :(
• I injured my nose because I tripped and fell on the ground. Most of the damage was because I was wearing glasses. I had to go to the emergency room (first time in my life) and they put a bandage on it. There’s a good part in this: I stopped wearing glasses and switched full-time to contact lenses.
• I really wish I had traveled more. I always enjoyed traveling, and I used to do a lot more traveling while I was participating in international programming contests (I got to see Mexico, Japan, US several times, a big chunk of Europe). Guess I’ll have to be more proactive in this regard.

The Rest

• Played a lot of laser-tag, a lot of Texas Hold’em, went to a lot of restaurants and pubs in Bucharest, and generally had a lot of fun!
• Spent way too much time on Facebook, Google Reader, email, Twitter, etc.

Phew, that was harder than I thought! Now it’s time to plan for 2010, it looks like it is going to be the most exciting year ever!

cristianstrat:

Great news, everyone! The startup I’m working on with my friends has been selected for the Jan 2010 BootupLabs program, a startup incubator based in Vancouver, BC.

This is exciting news! We’re looking forward to 8 months of hard work and mentorship from world class CEOs and tech leaders. Can’t wait to fire up some questions to Guy Kawasaki, Tim Bray, and all the others!

You can read more on this ReadWriteWeb article and on the BootupLabs portfolio page.