Young Romanians can launch companies worth (many) billions of dollars starting from Romania! How do we not stop them

In 2005, in Bucharest, Daniel Dines and Marius Tîrcă founded the company UiPath, which today is worth almost ten billion dollars, employs 4,000 people worldwide and is headquartered in New York. Daniel Dines is the company's president and CEO.

PHOTO Archive

In 2013, in San Francisco, Ion Stoica and Matei Zaharia were among the seven co-founders of Databricks, with an estimated market value of over $100 billion and 8,000 employees. Ion Stoica is executive president.

UiPath's 2021 IPO on the New York Stock Exchange was one of the largest in IPO history for a software company. When Databricks also takes this step, we will probably have the largest launch for a profile company, and I think it will surpass in value the famous Palantir (Alex Karp and Peter Thiel), with a capitalization, now of 440 billion dollars.

Yes, we knew since the nineties that we had talent in the field. I was hearing about how Microsoft is buying entire companies, just launched, and moving them, people and everything, to America. We were seeing how Softwin (founded by Florin Talpeș in Bucharest, after the Revolution) became BitDefender, one of the most popular antivirus programs on the planet.

What we didn't know then, was the fact that we already had this potential to generate amounts, we're talking tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, that make you dizzy just thinking about them. And I probably didn't have enough confidence. After decades of communism it was also normal.

Then we started to gain confidence. Moreover, huge companies, especially from overseas, opened offices in our country, made acquisitions, partnerships, hired thousands of people. Cluj was talked about as a Silicon Valley of Central Europe. Years of consolidation followed, until closer to us, with the explosions, we can call them that, UiPath and Databricks (although here, we must admit, it is not about Romania).

But something else essential happened. On all this basis, started in the nineties, on all these successful models, a new generation of Romanian entrepreneurs has grown up – here in Romania – who are no longer satisfied with selling services, but come up with their own growth ideas.

One example, out of many, is BibleChat, launched in 2023 by Laurentiu Bălașa and Marius Iordache. According to the media, it is the Romanian start-up with the highest growth in Europe! In just one year after its launch, BibleChat reached a number of 10 million users and annualized revenues of 15 million dollars. And earlier this year it attracted a new round of investment of 14 million dollars. It is the first time in history (say the specialized journalists) when an application from Romania achieves such a performance. And they started from Galatia.

Please don't tell me that it's not possible here, or that it's just luck! Yes, luck plays its part, but if you haven't worked for years (with no guarantee but work!) to take advantage of it when it's shown to you, it's as if you don't have it. Work on BibleChat, for example, began in 2019, and by the time it reached 2023 it had gone through pandemics, roadblocks, and a huge number of uncertainties. Only those people DID NOT stop!

None of the examples above is a get-rich-quick story. As George Iacobescu, the mind and force behind Canary Wharf in London, said, my overnight success was built over twenty years…

Each example, however, is a story of serious school, research and rigor, a story of failure and perseverance.

Together, they show us what Romanians can do when they have the freedom to create, and I think that should also give us hope.

Why? Because today Romania has a real chance to bring about profound changes. We have unprecedented access to European funds, we have openness at the EU level for investments in AI, digitization, supercomputing, robotics and industrial innovation. We have good technical universities, respected IT people, young people who can compete anywhere in the world.

And no, I'm not naive. From a certain level on, many of the larger ones will leave, as they leave England, France, or Germany. Their headquarters will probably be in America. But that is simply a reality of the market and access to global capital. You can't fight something like that. I'm talking about technology companies.

But! Even more of them will stay and continue to create value and jobs in Romania! We just have to not get in their way.

Because there is another aspect to discuss here, and in general, related to entrepreneurship. None of these companies depended or depend on the state, or contracts with the state, or even its support, for that matter.

What do today's young people, or rather young entrepreneurs, need, both in Romania and in the EU?

First of all, they don't need to be given anything! Success, especially on the scale we are talking about, is not the work of the state and does NOT come from the planned socialist economy! After all, Apple and Google also started in garages!… Only those garages were not anywhere, but in the area of ​​Stanford or Berkeley Universities and in the area of ​​research centers with military application. I mean, it wasn't an accident. The ecosystem was there.

But, both in Romania and in the EU, they need, above all, not to be hit by bureaucracy, by unclear and unstable rules, by all kinds of barriers (which in America they don't run into so often). That's what they definitely need.

I am not saying, however, that the state cannot contribute, beyond legislation and administration. Maybe! And they must do it.

Both Romania and the EU can help entrepreneurs by creating ecosystems that put their work in context and increase their chances of success. Like Silicon Valley in its day!…

This means connecting universities to the real economy, funding applied research from which businesses and jobs can be born, using their products in education or even in administration or defence, as appropriate. And it also means grants or other forms of funding.

But although we are discussing examples of success here, and how they can be repeated (in Romania and in the EU), we must be aware, in the words of Peter Thiel, that in terms of entrepreneurship, there cannot necessarily be a single formula for success! The paradox of entrepreneurship is that, although many try to copy (there were many Facebooks or Googles, or even Microsofts), each major success brought to the market something new and unique and much differentiated (qualitatively) from the competition. No government, no EU, no one can legislate innovation, success or the path to it!

In essence, successful companies find value where most of us don't expect. And I'm thinking again about the Romanians from BibleChat. The idea was there for all to see. Only two Romanians also saw a business in it…

So, how not to stop the young Romanians who launch businesses? Reducing red tape and administrative friction. Now.

How to support them? By facilitating, on the American model, the emergence of natural ecosystems, not planned or forced (that's why I say facilitation) in which they can develop their ideas, teams and businesses.

Will we succeed, at the level of the EU or Romania? I don't know. The temptation to legislate is always there.

What I know, for sure, 100%, is that in Arad and Iași and Constanța and Baia Mare, young men and women with ideas are working on them now, at this moment, and that their success will be a labored miracle, like any lasting solid success.

And I know that through a whole chain of small or big similar miracles, started in the nineties and continued by new and new generations, Romanian entrepreneurs will take this country, and its people, to regional and global markets and that we will be proud of them and we will want them to be more and more!

And I also know that there will be more and more of them provided we give them full freedom to create and do. In short, fewer but better laws. We will all gain from this.