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I briefly met Tudor before VentureConnect in May 2012 and I was amazed with his ambition, determination and professionalism. I encouraged Tudor to participate in our session and although he did not pitch his project (or not yet at least) he met the right kind of people to assure his business growth further on.

For some time now, Tudor is in Sofia, enjoying the life of the Eleven Accelerator startup program. And while talking to him for the interview below, I came to the conclusion that he is the best brand ambassador any program would imagine. As always, enjoy!

VC: What is KeenSkim and how did you come up with the idea? 

KeenSkim is a cool new technology which creates automatic summaries for news and web articles. It’s fast and easy to use.

It works like this:

1. you visit a webpage (article, blogpost or news item)
2. you click the “summarize” button
3. the automatically “digested” summary appears in the original webpage (take few seconds)

KeenSkim helps people get to the important bits of information a lot faster. The benefits are either:

• save a lot of time
• process a lot more information

It’s up to everyone’s needs. KeenSkim is my first startup and my second “soul project”. It’s also the most complex product I’ve worked on. The idea came after I couldn’t find any tool to fix my “too much information” problem. During college I was following a lot of tech & software industry blogs because I wanted to learn everything what was happening in my field. At some point, the problem was that I couldn’t keep up with the amount of information – which was really good quality. So I though I would build “it” myself!

I wanted to do it as my Bachelor Thesis Project but instead I joined a bigger research project, on semantic technologies. After finishing my Bachelor, I was already employed, part of the Microsoft Student Partners organization, doing two Masters – so I kinda postponed it. But the idea kept growing and the exposure to all these “directions” around the software industry helped me better understand what & how to build.

VC: Can you let us know a little about your team and how you manage to keep up the motivation level?

Well, although the company is on-track for growing, so far “the team” is”just me”. At this point usually people say that “it’s not gonna work” or that “it will be very-very hard”. I can tell you it’s not easy, but if you really want something, it BECOMES possible!

I didn’t really have motivation issues (from the product perspective because it was coming from a very personal need). Mostly, my biggest “single-founder issues” were:

- bureaucracy around the company & EU funding (which I dropped pursuing due to being too problematic to rely on).These problems were solves “easily” with help from few close great friends who always gave me great advice. That means that even though I was solo, I wasn’t alone.

- working from home (I was bootstrapping with what I could save while working before 2010) The problem was that I didn’t have a clear “division” between work-time & home-time. In the first 3 months, everything was great but after that it just didn’t work anymore. My solution was to have a trip to the mountains every second-weekend.

- “tight budget constraints“. I had even a “beer budget”: 2 beers/night, maximum 4 beers/week. This is something that leads to frustration really fast, but stopped doing it really even faster.

VC: You were selected for Eleven Accelerator. How did you find out about the program and why did you apply?

Yes, I’m proud to be part of the first batch of startups in the Eleven accelerator!

The reason I decided to pursue investment, especially accelerators is because I realised I need help in growing KeenSkim to it’s full potential. And by that I mean from the business point of view. I’m really proud that I managed to get up to this point by myself, but what’s more important is that I want to build a business around KeenSkim, because it has huge potential. Capital is important but more importantly, I need access to a wide business network. This is what accelerators offer.

I heard about Eleven at VentureConnect this spring. Although I briefly met Max (Eleven), the details stayed in my mind. I learned more about the project (through Bogdan Iordache) and jumped at the opportunity! Eleven is great for both Europe but especially for the Eastern part: it offers substantial investment (25K EUR) for a very decent percentage (8%) in equity, along with having a wide network around the world (by the way, Jon Bradford is one of the founders – the other guys are investments professionals and the mentor-network has broad business & technical spread.

VC: How’s the program — can you name a few key characteristics?

First of all, the Eleven team is very-very helpful – they help us with all the bureaucratic stuff (which saves a lot of time). They are very well connected – we were featured in GoalEurope and TechCrunch . They have a great network of mentors, covering a wide range of specialties from both business & technology perspectives. They bring world-class founders from Europe & Silicon Valley every week. The office – called “The Roof” is the former Phone Palace and is very modern. They offer trainings on things like Lean Startup (the guys from LeanCamp were here), pitching, usability & design.

VC: When did you decide that you wanted to become an entrepreneur? What motivates you today?

The thing is I always saw myself as having my own company. In college I decided to try everything and see what I like most. The experiences include working in both the industry and research, teaching, leading people, consulting – in Romania and France. So these several different experiences put together helped me decide & act.

But the most important aspect (in my opinion) is that I love building things. I built my first product in High-School and it was a great experience. And although all my professional experiences were good & offered great perspectives, I knew they won’t bring what entrepreneurship can bring: real power to build & grow great products.

VC: What’s your plan for the following months?

The big-picture plan is pretty simple: polish the product & grow it. We want to offer the best quality summaries as fast as possible. The detailed strategy includes trial & error on a lot of things, both technically but especially business-wise. I’ll keep you in the loop about news.

VC: You attended VentureConnect in May 2012. How did you find the meeting and will you join us in November ?

I knew about VentureConnect because I attended in 2011 the edition in Cluj. So in May I was happy to accept your invitation and see what & how the “big guys” are doing. I got to meet quite a bunch of quality entrepreneurs & investors, but obviously the best thing was that I got to meet Max and learn about Eleven.

VC: Although this is highly subjective, but now that you’re a part of the Bulgarian entrepreneurial community, can you give us a few insights of the general atmosphere, mentors and opportunities for startups? Is the Romanian landscape much different?

I’m sure I won’t be able to give you a fair perspective. In Cluj (my hometown) the IT outsourcing industry is booming so there are very few entrepreneurs: it’s  relatively easy to earn a good salary, so people stay away from the risk.

Regarding Sofia, I was very-nicely surprised to learn that their 15 year old IT outsourcing industry gave birth to a lot of great product companies. Besides IT, there are of course other business like media & finance that are run by great people.

I only hope that the Romania startup sector will have more accelerators and the ones today will grow even more. The signals are good!