The Founder Institute's four-month curriculum covers everthing you would expect from an early-stage startup program, including topics like "Startup Legal and IP” towards the beginning, to “Fundraising” near the end. What makes the curriculum special is the Mentors that teach it, whose passion, feedback and support helps our companies avoid rookie mistakes and set the foundation for a meaningful and enduring company.
The Founder Institute carefully recruits approximately 15 - 20 Mentors per Semester, who are normally the CEO or founder of a successful startup. Rather than specialists or consultants, we prefer Founders and CEOs to give our companies "the entrepreneur's perspective." The mentors share their experiences, best practices, and mistakes, while also providing specific guidance and feedback on the Founder companies.
In addition, the Founder Institute's unique Graduate Liquidity Pool allows our mentors to share in the equity of companies formed in each program - and, their share is based solely on the anonymous ratings they receive from the Founders both during, and after the program. In this way, the Founder Institute incentivizes mentors to take a special interest in our startups, and provide as much assistance as possible after the program.
We have a great lineup of Mentors confirmed for the Autumn 2012 Zagreb Founder Institute, including many from out of town. See the full list below.
Adeo Ressi
CEO, TheFunded.com
Adeo Ressi is Founding Member of TheFunded.com, an online community of 17,000 CEOs to research, rate, and review funding sources worldwide. Adeo also runs the Founder Institute, a mentoring program that helps entrepreneurs launch hundreds of world-class companies each year. The Institute is the eighth start-up that Adeo has founded or built, four of which were acquired and three of which are still operating.
Andraz Tori
Founder and CTO, Zemanta, Inc.
Andraz is a founder and CTO of Zemanta, Inc. Zemanta is a revolutionary new platform for accelerating on-line content production intended for any web user, on all major content publishing platforms and web browsers. The company is based in the USA and Slovenia. Prior to founding Zemanta, Andraz headed up the program at Kiberpipa in Ljubljana, Slovenia and was an editor at RTV Slovenija. Andraz is a software developer and architect with deep insight in natural language processing, contextual information retrieval and automatic crossmedia weaving. Bringing web 3.14 techonlogies to life today! Andraz's technical specialties include multimedia markup and search, natural language processing, computer vision, coding, journalism, open source software, NLE video under Linux. He is computer science and informatics graduate of the University of Ljubljana.
Berislav Lopac
Co-founder, CRANE
Berislav Lopac is the co-founder of the Croatian Business Angel Network, a referrer for HackFwd, Seedcamp mentor and Chairman of the virtual internet incubator Ini.hr. Berislav is a software engineer, specialized in Web application development and architecture. He has also recently founded a new startup, Backrest.
Cheryl Yeoh
CEO & Cofounder, Reclip.It
Cheryl is the Founder and CEO of Reclip.It, a personalized dashboard for the frugal shopper, recently launched in March 2012. At Reclip.It, she drives product and UX. Cheryl has raised a total of $850K from 500Startups, Great Oaks Venture Capital and other angels. Cheryl was recently announced as the Top 41 Female Founders Every Entrepreneur Should Know in 2012 on Mashable, the Top 10 Finalist of the L'Oreal Women in Digital Award 2012 and the Top 25 Women Driving NY Tech in 2011. She has been interviewed live on Fox News, ABC7, and BNET. She dedicates her spare time to mentor at The Founder Institute in NYC and Singapore, and is on the Advisory Board of The Lean Startup Machine Weekend. Prior to Reclip.It, she founded CityPockets in 2010, the very first digital wallet and secondary marketplace for daily deals. CityPockets has been featured by TechCrunch, CNN, WSJ, Forbes, GigaOm, AllThingsD, Lifehacker, CNET, Mashable, and TheNextWeb. Cheryl ranked among the top 100 students in Malaysia in her senior year of high school to earn a full scholarship to study Engineering at Cornell University. She was subsequently offered another scholarship from Cornell to study her Master’s in Engineering. She was a management consultant for a number of years before she started her first company.
Erik Sundelof
Co-Founder, Allvoices.com
Erik is currently the CTO of Spot.us, a global platform for community-funded local reporting (winner of the Knight News Challenge). Previously, Eirk co-founded Allvoices.com, where he was in charge of the company's Social Media strategy and User Interface design, growing the site's audience into millions of monthly users. Allvoices.com is a global community that shares news, videos, images and opinions. Before founding Allvoices, he was a fellow in the Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford University. As an RDVP fellow, he created the website inthefieldONLINE.net, which drew widespread recognition from major global media including PBS, CNN and BBC, and was featured on Discovery International’s Rewind 2006 as one of the 25 highlights of the Year. Erik's specialties are social software and media, advanced mathematical modeling, mobile and cellphone-to-web applications, engineering management, entrepreneurship, and team building.
Ivo Spigel
Co-Founder & Board Member, Perpetuum Mobile
Ivo Spigel is a co-founder and Board Member of Perpetuum Mobile (www.perpetuum.hr), an IT software and services company based in Zagreb, Croatia. He was the long time CEO of the company until his partner Mr Blerim Sela became CEO in 2008. Mr Spigel is also a writer for Mreza (Croatian IT monthly), the Croatian edition of Forbes, the online technology publication The Kernel (www.KernelMag.com), and is writing a forthcoming book of interviews with European high tech founders „EuroGeeks“. He is active within the Croatian startup community as a founder of the ZIP coworking space in Zagreb, long time Seedcamp mentor and has been recognized as one of the top 5 European startup mentors by The Europas awards in London.
Josko Bobanovic
Partner, Safinnova Partners
Josko Bobanovic is a senior investment professional with strong transactional and board experience across multiple industries. He presently focused on early stage cleantech opportunities across Europe with particular focus on bio-based chemicals. His career spans investments in materials, enterprise software, hardware and internet, as well as entrepreneurial activities. Leveraging his international background and global network of contacts, he helps build strong companies by assisting them in strategic planning, sales and marketing, strategy and communication.
Kristijan Galić
Kristijan Galić, Law Office Galić
Kristijan Galić is a Zagreb, Croatia based attorney at law specialized in corporate law, with 15 years of professional experience. Areas of practice: commercial law with emphasis on banking and finance, corporate and real-estate law, international commercial litigation and arbitration, real-estate development projects, insolvency restructurings etc. He has been educated on a graduate and post-graduate level in Zagreb, Croatia and London, UK, and is listed for the past 10 years as a recommended lawyer in main international legal directories.
Ozzy Papic
Serial Entrepreneur
Ozzy Papic, was the Founder and CEO of Toronto-based Net Integration Technologies (NITIX), which was acquired by IBM. NITIX is today at the core of IBM’s Small Business initiative under the Lotus Foundations brand. Ozzy was voted one of the Top 50 Inventors by VAR Business, and he also received a US patent for NITIX IDB backup technology. Prior to NITIX, he co-founded HighwayOne in the UK where, as Technology Director, he designed and implemented what was then the UK’s first distributed wireless high-speed data network. Highway One was subsequently acquired by Telefonica. Prior to Highway One, Ozzy was an executive for Canada’s largest computer manufacturer and system integrator where he built one of the country’s first business internet service provider businesses.
Srdjan Loncar
President and CEO, CareSpeak Communications
Srdjan is a repeat entrepreneur with over 15 years of domestic and international general management, marketing, new product & business development, strategy and turn around experience with Pepsi Cola International, Johnson & Johnson, Bertelsmann eCommerce, and Songbird Hearing. Srdjan is currently founder and CEO of CareSpeak Communications, a US startup with a development team in Croatia, that provides mobile communications technology solutions to health care professionals, patients, and caregivers for better medication and clinical compliance, resulting in improved outcomes. Srdjan was also a founder and partner of Tesla Labs, a first startup, seed fund in Belgrade, Serbia. Srdjan holds an MBA from New York University, Stern School of Business.
Tyler Crowley
Founder & CEO, Skweal
Tyler is currently the Founder & CEO of Skweal, Producer of the Open Angel Forum/Launch Conference, and Director of Corporate Development and Strategy at Mahalo. Some of his past experience includes working as a producer for Open Angel Forum/Launch Conference, TechCrunch50, and ThisWeekIn. He is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego in Interdisciplinary Studies in Computers and the Arts, and graduated Summa Cum Laude.
Vibor Cipan
CEO, UX Passion
Vibor is founder and CEO of Croatian startup UX Passion, creator of the Wall of Tweets. Vibor's background is in UX design, service design and usability, especially for mobile applications, as well as analytics and SEO. Vibor's passion for all things user experience, usability, rapid and hi-fi prototyping and information architecture led him and his team to build and launch the Wall of Tweets, a simple and engaging "twitter wall" solution that enables people attending events to share their tweets on a big wall in a real-time. The Wall of Tweets, enables a branded, advanced twitter wall that has been used at conferences ranging from the Davos World Economic Forum to Ignite. Along with heading UX Passion, Vibor is an active blogger and presenter on tech topics as well as an author, having published in 2010 his first book about building great UI and UX. Vibor was previously at Microsoft where he his final role was as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, joining a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community's best and brightest, and shares a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others. After Physics study at the University of Zagreb Vibor is now working on his MA from York St. John University in Leadership, Innovation and Change. Vibor has won a number of programming and design and startup awards.
