Bootstrapping From Romania: Marius Hanganu, CEO of Tremend (Part 1)

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Marius has built a services company from Romania to over $5 million in revenue. Now, he is trying to bootstrap a product using the services business.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your personal journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Marius Hanganu: I’m from Romania. I was born near the seaside. At an early age, we moved to the capital city of Bucharest. My father is an Admiral in the Navy. A bit of that made a mark on myself. I got into computers around 12. I got into the Polytechnic University of Bucharest in the Computer Science Department. It’s probably the best in the country.

I’ve been working on various jobs. It wasn’t easy to get into this field like it is these days. My first job was for a company that was implementing a game engine. The team leader at that time had a particular vision of having the engine written in assembler; even the non-critical part. I used to work for a year solely on the assembler. It was quite fun.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking about?

Marius Hanganu: I joined the university in 1996. Around 1998, I started working professionally. In the first year, I was working on game engines. Then I wanted to get the feel of the enterprise environment. I worked on financial software also. That was 2002, roughly. Then at some point, a friend of mine asked for my help. He was asking for my help on building an ERP. He asked me if I’d like to start a company with him. We never really started that one.

Then I got reunited with a former colleague from university. We started doing various projects together. We had day jobs and we were doing all kinds of personal projects in the weekends. Then one friend of ours saw us and suggested that we start something. We didn’t take that very seriously back then. At some point, we got to working for a couple of months in the US. We caught the entrepreneurship bug. We got home. Then we started Tremend. That was 2005.

Sramana Mitra: What was the idea with which you decided to come together to start this company?

Marius Hanganu: We really loved what we were doing. We thought about being able to provide higher-quality. We wanted to make a difference. We worked in larger teams. We had seen the dynamics. We felt we could do better and faster.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Bootstrapping From Romania: Marius Hanganu, CEO of Tremend
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