TechLounge Talks with Radu Georgescu

Radu Georgescu, one of the most successful Romanian serial entrepreneur and the creator of RAV antivirus, talked with students about failures and successful startups during the 5th March TechLounge Talk.

RAV, the antivirus sold to Microsoft in 2003, was one of his 4 successful startups. Other 16 were complete failures – all the startups started outside technology failed, confessed Radu in front of more than 60 students and other guests.

“You have to strongly believe in your ideas and learn from mistakes” he said, adding that the most important part of entrepreneurship is to find the right partners, in which you should appreciate complementary personality features.

Nowdays, while seeing almost 1000 startups every year, Radu Georgescu thinks that 90% of them are about “creating a product that solves a problem no one has”. But with all this, he says software is cool: you make it once, you can sell it countless times.

“The golden rule – don’t invest more than you can afford to lose.” says Radu Georgescu

Radu believes in the first life cycle of a company – where you mainly develop technology. If you want to enter the next cycle you have to change the technology, the marketing strategy, the team, the auctioneers. It’s best to sell your idea in this point, before changing the cycle, while you’re still growing, so that the buyer makes all the changes.

“The goal of every entrepreneur is to get out of his comfort zone” said Radu, and gives as example the Avantage product.

Answering lots of questions from student, Radu also added important advices for technology entrepreneurs:

  • Most of the times, an idea isn’t successful from the first time.
  • When you build a startup, you have to really know who’s buying your product and, the more you know, the better.

And the most important lessons: The sooner you become an entrepreneur, the better. You’ll start with 3 failures. One failure will help you want to build another business.

 

 

TechLounge Talks are held each Tuesday from 18:00 to 20:00, between 19.02 – 14.05, in the EC104 presentation Amphitheater of the Automatic Control and Computers Faculty inside POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest.

Find out more on our website about our public events.

 

Credits: Andrei Cristea, student, and Bogdan Țetea, shadow mentor within Innovation Labs, took notes for this article. Photos by Daniel Rosner, mentor. Translated and edited by Madalina Oprisan, communication coordinator, TechSoup Romania.