Mircea Paşoi*

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!