Two Romanian friends embark on IT odyssey

Two young Romanians aged 24 conquered America last year. However, their success has not spoiled them. As they have seen plenty, they haven’t even thought about leaving Romania for good.

Bogdan Putinica and Daniel Bogdan have known each other since childhood, as they attended the same Bucharest-based IT high school. Daniel knew more about PCs than any of his high school mates.

Sometimes, Bogdan recollects, his friend went to the blackboard to explain a difficult IT lesson to his colleagues. “It was all right to do it in high school, but it became rather embarrassing to teach the lesson instead of the professor during the university courses,” Daniel says.

As they had plenty of imagination, the two youngsters had the first hacking initiative, but they found success too easy to reach and have never repeated that experience since then.

“PC floppy-disks were usually blocked so that the pupils should not play games. We broke the code with a nice programme, but haven’t done it ever since,” the two young people recollect. “I personally hate hacking and Bogdan is not interested either,” Daniel says.

When they were 16 years old, they started to work for a Romanian IT company, Aris Electronic. Their most important gain from this collaboration was the possibility to use a PC anytime and anyway they wanted. It was actually a family business run in accordance with family principles.

While they were students, Bodgan attended the Finance-Accounting Faculty within the Academy of Economic Studies and Daniel was a student in the PC department of the Polytechnics Faculty; they designed programmes for an English company, Buzz Soft, but as the owner was not very enthusiastic about it, they quit.

“I had posted my CV on a human resources site,” Bogdan says. “They had initially come to Romania and seemed interested, they had even brought us resources, but after a while, when we saw they did not keep in touch with us, we stopped working for them.”

The corporate experience came afterwards. Bogdan had decided to give up IT, so he entered marketing, while Daniel was working with Hewlett-Packard. They were both sent to the Geneva-based offices of the companies, but never met. “We came back with extensive knowledge,” they say.

At the beginning of last year, Bogdan, who was attending several forums on the Internet, heard about the US site HelloBrain.com, which had just been launched. It was a business portal for US web companies offering projects for which programmers throughout the world could bid.

After a serious selection, Bogdan and Daniel managed to win the first three projects. The programmers usually do not know a lot about the companies they are working for, in order to respect their privacy.

These companies are usually American, Canadian or European. “We won the first projects within two weeks,” Bogdan says. “We had to move fast.”