From the early morning, the Weekend began to radiate inspiring stories from the world of digital technology and the IT industry. In the Produženi Weekend dvorana (Long Weekend Hall), the first one-on-one panel “Span: from IT startup to publicly listed”—moderated by Aron Paulić—the CEO of Span, Nikola Dujmović,revealed his beginnings in the always challenging IT industry, plus interesting anecdotes and the secrets to his success.
“When we started selling software in 1993, no one bought it because back then software was copied. However, we knew we wanted to have the first software shop [in Croatia] and we persevered. We wanted the company to have longevity and added value, so we did not look for investors, but instead went public on the Zagreb Stock Exchange,” said experienced entrepreneur Nikola Dujmović.
In addition, the well-known IT expert spoke about education and the importance of motivating students.
“Of course, FER [the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing] is always the most attractive, but many other studies such as the University of Applied Sciences, Algebra and others create great people too. Unfortunately, a certain elitism is still present and it is necessary to further motivate students to enrol in technical colleges because, in the end, developers do not come from just one program. Fortunately, we have plenty of them in Croatia,” said Dujmović.
Was it harder for Dujmović to sell software licenses during the Homeland War or to expand his business to the West and the East in the last few years? He concluded that the most important thing was to stay persistent in your vision and ideas—that is the key to success!
