While many young specialists choose to go abroad in order to pursue a career, Monica Maurer, 27, decided to come back to Romania and start an IT business.
A year ago, she became one of the founders and managers of Advantage Software Factory (ASF), together with other execs such as Michael Mogosanu (a former Oracle employee, who left London for Bucharest) and US-born Robert Luke, general manager of the Romanian Post-Privatisation Fund.
ASF is an investment concept comprising an IT nest and a production unit developing software applications and services mostly aimed at foreign markets.
Maurer says that ASF tried to bring in Romania a “very outlandish” methodology for the software companies, which focuses on procedures able to make the projects in this field more efficient. ASF employees learn these procedures through an intensive 3-month training process.
The ASF manager used to work in the US as a programmer, entrepreneur, employee for biotechnology companies and Wall Street analyst.
She established her first company while attending a Master of Science course and joined the first important project with Johnson&Johnson when she was 22, also in the US.
She considers herself a dynamic person with a dislike for confinements, seeking to draw her own projects and opportunities and fiercely fighting to make them come true.
After its establishment, ASF got involved in a large project – Hanover 2000 and six months later it managed to attract the first strategic investors “who believed in ASF methods and understood the actual situation of the Romanian IT market.”
The first capital increase occurred last November allowing the company to re-launch “with a new strength and a different strategy.” According to Maurer, the results on the first months this year point out that this is a “quite well positioned company working as scheduled,” waiting for more “impressive” projects in Romania.
ASF activity focuses on foreign operations for the time being. “We finalised a rather nice project for a Dutch ad company. It was so successful that it’s being demanded over and over again. We are planning to enter the Danish and English markets.”
The company in January moved in a new head-office, with appropriate communication, infrastructure and hardware facilities.
The most difficult moments in this “quite young” company are “difficulties among people.” Maurer says that the fast development of the company has had an impact on the connection with the employees, but the new human resource manager is in charge with solving this problem.
The 25 ASF employees have different profiles: some of them are junior programmers or developers, graduates of technical faculties with two years experience in this field, others are senior developers, with five years experience and project managers, which are highly skilled at managing the projects in particular technologies.
According to Maurer, “people from ASF should be both aggressive and communicative with the clients, as .”