Five months after selling the RAV anti-virus technology to Microsoft, GeCAD Software, the company run by businessman Radu Georgescu is on the lookout for ideas. Not just any ideas, however, but those that are really special, GeCAD’s president says. The company has commenced the StartIT campaign, which is intended to help recruit students with software ideas. The projects will be funded by GeCAD and American investors.
The idea harvesting process will be done in two phases, November 15 – December 15, 2003 and January 15 – March 15, 2004, during which the GeCAD management expects to get approximately 3,000-4,000 applications.
The campaign will be conducted in Romania and mainly target those cities that host the major universities (Bucharest, Cluj, Timisoara, Arad, Iasi, T=rgu Mures). More details can be found at www.startit.ro, especially designed by GeCAD for this campaign. The ideas will be protected under a non-disclosure agreement. The software categories that do not qualify from the beginning are ERP-type solutions, accounting software or anti-virus programmes. The contract concluded with Microsoft prohibits GeCAD to ever develop an anti-virus technology. Web design ideas or any other project that will not be possible to apply anywhere else but in Romania are not welcome, either, as explained by the company’s representatives.
“We want to find ideas in Romania that we can also sell abroad,” Radu Georgescu, GeCAD Software president specified. The first evaluation of the submitted ideas will result in a shortlist of 10-20 contenders. The company will create several-year business plans for them and “we will see how capable their ideas are to reach as high as we want them to,” Radu Georgescu says.
The final selection stage will reduce the number of applicants from 10 or 20 to three or five. Those that did not make it in the final “round” will be allowed to develop their projects based on the business plans devised with GeCAD team’s help on their own. The “finalists” will be given the opportunity to take a job with GeCAD Software or establish a new company together with it, which will develop the project based on the selected idea.
“We expect to know what ideas we will be promoting in two months from now. In six months to no more than two years, we anticipate to already have the first commercial product released,” Radu Georgescu says.
GeCAD expects to make some money from this campaign and from the ideas selected, of course.
“We do not know how much we will invest in them, but we can say we have large financial, human and technological resources, ” the company’s president specified. Several venture capitalists from the US have shown interest in investing along with GeCAD in such projects. Georgescu hinted that even a project requiring a $50 million investment would not be something they cannot handle. The projects developed around the ideas selected during the StartIT campaign could share the fate of the RAV anti-virus technology in 3 to 5 years. That is be sold to other companies. Not necessarily to Microsoft. iuliana.susanu@zf.ro