Ziarul Financiar, 2022: a hundred times in ten years, and the slow first years

Ziarul Financiar, 10 January 2022, five days after the announcement of the sale of Tremend to Publicis. Subject: how a company founded 16 years earlier by Ioan Cocan and me became a target for the global advertising giant. Readable part: the opening. The rest is for subscribers.

§A hundred times in ten years

The founders: two former classmates from the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers at Politehnica University of Bucharest. They developed the business internationally and grew its revenue a hundred times in ten years, to a business of 30 million euros. With that growth, Tremend became an acquisition target for Publicis, which took over the entire share package after nine months of negotiations.

Elsewhere. ZF IT Generation, three days earlier, the recent part of that curve: “Tremend grew more than ten times in the last 5 years” („Tremend a crescut de peste zece ori în ultimii 5 ani”).

§Slow first years: from programmers to managers

The first years, when revenue stagnated, were the key ones. Then the two Politehnica graduates learned to evolve from programmers into managers and to build a business.

Elsewhere. Recorder, 2018: “In the beginning we stayed focused only on programming. After all, that’s what we’re good at. But at some point we realised that, to be able to grow, you also have to be a good manager.” („La început, am rămas concentraţi doar în zona de programare. Până la urmă, la asta ne pricepem. Dar, la un moment dat, ne-am dat seama că, pentru a putea creşte, trebuie să fii şi un manager bun.”)

§After UiPath, FintechOS and Bitdefender

Ziarul Financiar headline: “after UiPath, Fintech OS or Bitdefender, a new success story of entrepreneurs in IT” („După UiPath, Fintech OS sau Bitdefender, o nouă poveste de succes a unor antreprenori în IT”). Closing line, to the reader: “If you don’t work in IT, you work in the wrong industry” („Dacă nu lucraţi în IT, lucraţi în industria greşită”).