The story of our beginning…
RomanianStartups.com brings together, in one place, all Romanian technology and Internet related startups, founders, accelerators/incubators, events, co-working spaces, mentors, investors and makes it a one-stop-shop for all the information needed to get an overall view of what is happening in the Romanian tech field.
The location of these startups, accelerators/incubators, events, and established companies doesn’t matter as long as at least one of
these entities’ co-founder is Romanian. The location can be in Romania or abroad.
Romanian Startups Facebook group came to be around May 2012, being established by David Nagy – a young Romanian entrepreneur. During some discussions there the idea of a startups directory emerged.
Mircea Goia – a Romanian technologist and web developer living in United States – bought the domain name RomanianStartups.com (along others related) and started to draw the wireframe of the website which you are using today. This happened around June 2012.
After researching the platform on which the website should be built, he decided to use an open source one (which runs on LAMP), obviously.
A Romanian team was hired by Mircea to design the look and feel of the website based on the wireframe he put together. In this role, Mircea acted as a project manager and product designer (beside being an investor) making sure his vision for the site stays on course during the development time.
After several months of reiteration and bringing new developers on-board the website launched in private beta around the 1st of March 2013.
Since then, Mircea contacted Romanian startups, accelerators/incubators, events and their founders inviting them to be part of this initiative of showing the world the Romanian technology/Internet startup scene.
More than 300 entities (startups, accelerators/incubators, events, co-working spaces) and over 580 founders joined RomanianStartups.com since then and they continue to join (see the Stats page).
RomanianStartups.com is present on:
– Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/RomanianStartups (has over 26,000 followers)
– Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/romanianstartups – has over 21,000 members – one of the most active business groups in Romania)
– Twitter: https://twitter.com/rostartups
Feel free to like/follow/join us there.
If you want to use our badge/logos on your website or Facebook/Twitter profile (to help promote the community) please download the zip file containing the images (right-click and Save Link as…or just click on the link).
Any feedback you have please send it using the Contact page.
About Mircea Goia
He was born and raised in Romania (now living in United States), where he got introduced to the computers and Internet 12 years ago. Prior to this, he worked in a totally different field.
Since that time Mircea worked as a web developer for foreign companies while still living in Romania, where he was building websites and e-commerce websites. He also donated part of his time to a non-profit organization building local communities websites (he formed and led a tech team for that non-profit).
Mircea loves the startups scene in the United States and Romania and is involved in one American startup which combines technology and filmmaking named Cinely.com – the filmmaker’s platform (advisor, marketing). Another American startup where he is involved as advisor is LocalMediaGroup.com (in its various enterprises).
He also advised some other Romanian startups in the past like Golibre.co, uberVU.com, InteraktMedia.com.
In the past he wrote for TheNextWeb.com when the well-known now tech publication was just starting (2008) and ReadWrite.com.
Nowadays, he is still writing but this time for two leading Romanian newspapers as a blogger (Adevarul.ro) and a contributor (Forbes.ro).
His other passion is filmmaking – directing movies (doing some producing for now).
More details about Mircea Goia can be found on his personal website www.mirceagoia.com but also on Facebook, Twitter, Quora or using the Contact page on RomanianStartups.com.