Events

October Highlights At Endeavor Romania – Celebration, Fireside Chats and Business Breakfasts

October is always a full month at Endeavor – as summer ends and entrepreneurs become focused on closing the year on a positive note, the constant pursuit of gathering insights and becoming better is back at full speed.

In this context, we’ve been busy with both hosting and attending some special gatherings this month, and we are more than happy to share our retrospective.

How to build a unicorn – Fireside Chat with Endeavor Entrepreneurs Hristo Borisov from Payhawk and Melvyn Lubega from Go1

 

For this event, we gathered at Stup by Banca Transilvania to host a session focused on leveraging insights directly from two unicorns coming from emerging markets. From tackling challenges to discovering similarities that can offer a new perspective for Romanian start-ups and their business approach, here are some of the topics that came up in this informal conversation:

  • The success of new ventures depends on having a balanced team with complementary qualities, especially in the face of challenges and failures.
  • Vulnerability and the ability to admit mistakes, which can become key traits for fostering a healthy team dynamic and achieving sustainable growth and resilience. Vulnerability from founders often encourages employees to be more open, honest, and connected to the company mission, contributing to the success of the start-up.
  •  Juggling multiple responsibilities, and the importance of striking a balance between the demands of work and personal life as key factors that lead to success, along with placing value on quality rather than quantity of time spent on different processes.

We’re grateful to have brought together two leaders in their respective emerging markets, and to the power of finding commonalities in challenges and approaches to help drive business growth.

The State of the Global VC Market, with Allen Taylor – Managing Partner at Endeavor Catalyst

 

During his first visit to Bucharest, Allen held a roundtable with the local and regional community of funds – from VC to growth to PE – to discuss the State of the Global VC Market and get a perspective on whether global trends are applicable to our CEE region.

The conversation leaned towards the types of criteria businesses should meet to look interesting as future investment targets of Endeavor Catalyst. Two questions dominated this meeting – whether currently the market experiences a back-to-basics attitude, where it’s more difficult to raise money just based on simple ideas, and whether AI is creating a sense of FOMO around VCs.

One noticeable trend is the much more realistic attitude of the funding community, which levels the perception on start-up ecosystems and ideas. However, this could potentially be damaging for the region, which is only now emerging in terms of innovation, as the shrinking appetite of global VC funds is already impacting the funding markets in the CEE.

At the same time, according to speakers coming from both local and regional funds, the markets are more realistic and the founders who are raising money with the perspective of showing a path to profitability, have better chances to get funding for their ventures.

Centralized and Decentralized Finance at the Fintech Breakfast with Pietro Sella

 

After the Internet, Fintech is one of the most widely adopted consumer technologies. Innovation in this industry requires a great deal of collaboration between the different agents, so we reunited 15 of the most renowned fintech entrepreneurs for a session delivered by Pietro Sella, CEO at Sella Group.

Pietro offered the best way to describe the difference between centralized and decentralized finance (DeFi) through an analogy with traffic: the classical junction operated with traffic lights vs the roundabout junction. In the former, all drivers abide by rules imposed by the road regulators, in the latter, they cooperate.

Pietro is currently the CEO of Sella Group, one of the oldest and most important banking groups. Sellalab, Platfr.io, Fintech District and Fabrick are all part of Sella’s Open Financial Ecosystem that Pietro briefly presented, along with his vision of enabling and promoting collaboration between banks, corporates and fintech start-ups and scale-ups in order to create innovative solutions through its API platform.

The breakfast brought together some of the key founders and figures of the Romanian fintech ecosystem and evolved into a discussion about the future of finance and the Romanian fintech ecosystem.

Building for the future – Celebrating 2 years of Endeavor Romania

As the Romanian start-up ecosystem matures, our presence here grows addressing founders, entrepreneurs and builders who combine remarkable talent and ambition.

We were happy to host a series of events dedicated to celebrating success and multiplying results through the power of a like-minded community, and we were very happy to gather together our closest partners, supporters and beneficiaries to facilitate yet another evening of open dialogue and innovation spotlight.

Scaling a business takes a village – from expertise to finding the right support system and a genuinely passionate team, the former survival instinct turns into finding the means to foster growth and think long term.

This shift in priorities is a fundamental challenge in the life of every good company out there, and we believe in providing the right context to help like-minded professionals support each other in this endeavor.

Watch the full after movie below!