Loading...Holidays are coming and it’s time to celebrate! We are thrilled to congratulate our fellow Moldovan IT community on starting a new tradition in November: Chisinau Startup Week. During a five-day marathon, local entrepreneurs, startup founders and potential partners enjoyed this Techstars initiative in a relaxed atmosphere where they exchanged with local and international speakers on how to create, promote and make their startup a success.
Of course Pentalog couldn’t have missed this amazing opportunity to contribute to the training of the Moldovan IT community by sharing some of our experience with startups from all over the world. Because we, at Pentalog, strongly believe in the professional growth of both our employees and the growth of the IT sector as a whole. This is why we are actively involved in organizing IT courses in various partner universities and thematic events (Meetups, Open Days, Hackathons, Workshops, etc.) as part of a continuous learning process.
Knowing how passionate and “geeky” developers are in this part of the world, the Pentalog speakers focused on what they thought would be most valuable for them and came up with the idea of showing the audience the flipside of the “engineering culture” and “engineering approach”. How did they do that?
Marius Istrate, CEO of SkillValue, started with a presentation (Life In A Startup: Mistakes You Should Make) on the joy and craziness of some failures experienced in his 8 years of business development and digital marketing. The talk involved minions, dragons, walking a thin wire and Darth Vader – so you can image how entertaining and educative it was 🙂
His second presentation (Before You Code : Digital Growth Strategies Using Social Networks) concerned social networks, but not only, and the focus laid rather on practical tools used to build an initial audience and the types of Social Media campaigns that can be created for this purpose. Together with Ciprian Ailenei, Digital Marketing Strategist at SkillValue, Marius engaged the audience in creating some campaigns on the fly and shared the insights gained while growing the Pentalog and SkillValue businesses via digital tools.
These heartfelt life stories were then followed by more technical questions: What should I choose for my startup? Lean Startup or an Agile method? Can I combine both? Can my company grow if I don’t create a product? Is it useful to create a product if my company doesn’t grow as well? Thanks to his personal experience as a startup co-founder, coordinator of Pentalog’s agility program (#LeGuépard) and Agile Coach for different clients (startups in particular), Vasile Putina had all the answers to these questions. Yes, combining Agile practices with Lean Startup methodology is proven to be the key to obtaining better results. Vasile’s presentation, How to Increase Your Chances to Succeed by Combining Lean Startup with Agile Methods, underlined the need to continuously keep an eye on both product growth and company growth.
His feedback on this event? “I was happy to note the community’s growing interest in startups, agility, and IT consulting. It is an evidence that our community needs a boost of new information and everyday life experiences. Events like Chisinau Startup Week can greatly help to create an environment favorable to growth and we are more than happy to be a part of this adventure.”
All tech enthusiasts out there, see you next year! 🙂
