interview with Andraž Tori of zemanta: part 2/2

this is the second part of the interview with Andraž Tori of zemanta. the first part can be found here.

Andraž, what does seedcamp and pitching mean for your company?

pitching is a fabulous experience of explaining your idea and trying to inspire other people. pitching is one of the best things, when you have a start.up.

seedcamp was a great experience, because it gives start.ups a chance. that's very important for early stage start.ups. having the possibility to present your idea to somebody that matters can help you to move your idea forward.

seedcamp was a very fortunate event as the timing was exactly right for us. this is the part of the start.up life that you can not plan for. you need to work hard as hell, but at the end you also need to have a bit of luck.

you have already left some tracks in your personal career, informatics olympiad medal winner, co-founder, open source developer and now zemanta. what`s next?

well [laughing], i do like to do cool stuff that interests me, that helps people and has some impact on the world. that's what i am going to do for a long time. but first and foremost we have to make zemanta a big success.

bostjan spetic and your are the founders of zemanta. ales septic, the ceo of your company was not among the founders. how was it to have a non-founder becoming the ceo?
it is an interesting experience. we already worked with ales before and we rely on the good sides of everybody in the team. handing over control was not really a big topic, as we were always running the company very consensually. there is always disagreement about certain topics but it is important to find a proper consensus and then honour the decisions.

semantic technologies are hard to tackle. how do you trade between a very domain specific vs. a more generic approach for your product?
we started with a very generic approach from the beginning. it is just now that we start to add specific things that are required for special areas of application. that is not the usual thinking but that helped us.

anything else you would like to talk recommend new start.ups for the beginning?
be very clear from the beginning of what kind of value you provide and to whom.

the other thing is, just do it. it is not perfect in the first iteration ever. just put something out, see what others say and how they use it. learn on that and create a new thing. it is not a bad thing to be wrong sometimes. then go ahead and improve – you sometimes fail and you just improve again.
that is probably what we haven't still completely consumed from the silicon valley type of entrepreneurship [in Europe]. failing is just part of succeeding. failure is still a failure but it is not the end of the world. it is as good experience to learn and do it better next time.

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