I’m happy that we finally started with activities of Startup.hr Association. I’ve been thinking about this idea for a long time and I’ve been talking about it for even longer, long enough that sometimes I feel like I’m 90 years old.

Over the past 87 OpenCoffee meetups, we’ve seen a lot our community members getting to know each other and a number of positive effects achieved. In the meantime, some key elements that are vital for quality startup ecosystem have appeared in Split: coworking spaces, regular meetups, Student Entrepreneur Incubator on the Faculty of Economics, Youth club, Info zone, Shift Split conference, Technology Transfer Office as a part of University of Split, UPIT (Association of Information Technology Students), DUMP (Association of Young Developers), #3P program of encouraging entrepreneurship…

Split has a specific value that isn’t clearly shown anywhere and that’s why we decided to establish an association that will change it by its actions. We will create proactive news on this portal that will encourage the community to create better versions of itself, better employees and better employers. That will result in students that will earlier start adapting to market needs and stay in Split. Professionals will return to Split, a number of entrepreneurs will rise, resulting in more opportunities for all of us. For a start we’ve created three news categories: entrepreneurship, technology and design. Here you can also find a calendar of events, so you can clearly see all the events in Split regarding IT and entrepreneurship (soon you’ll be able to submit your event as well).

Sharing is the most important aspect that affects the level of community’s progress. If you have a faster flow of information inside a community, you’ll have a more advanced community. Silicon Valley mindset has been evolving for the past 50 years, but we tend to bring Split closer to it because it has a lot of potential and talent.

Antonio Šerić, Romana Caktaš, Diana Šperanda and I are active volunteers in association and we hope that a lot of newcomers who believe that Split can do better will join us (hint: info@startup.hr).

Great initiative on the level of whole Croatia has been started by our colleagues from CISEX (Association of Croatian Independent Software Exporters) that share similar values. A good example of the local community that has recently awaken from sleep is definitely Osijek, where our colleagues established Osijek Software City and already created positive atmosphere and great results. We want to learn from them and from many other communities, as well as point out Split as a valued community on the IT map. There has been a dispersion of Silicon Valley on the global scale – companies and clients don’t care anymore where the talent is situated.

Kudos to everyone who were supporting us via OpenCoffee. Thanks to Tomislav Mamić who solved the problem of finding journalists. Thanks to Ivan Blagdan for keeping our domain safe for a couple of years even though he got some redemption offers. Thanks to Ivica Karleto for giving me a lot of freedom and motivation as a high school professor. Thanks to guys at my company for being independent and giving me enough space to work on this initiative!

Today this is a small event, but it will grow bigger with each day passing! #StartupSplit