In today’s episode, Andreas welcomes Marius Istrate, Chairman of the Board at Tech Angels Romania, the country’s largest and most successful angel investment network. Over the past 11 years, Tech Angels has invested €45M in more than 300 startups, driving the growth of Romania’s tech scene and influencing the broader CEE region.
With a focus on pre-seed and seed-stage ventures, Tech Angels operate across Romania (80%) and the wider CEE region (20%), supporting startups in Enterprise B2B, SaaS, DeepTech, and HealthTech.
Notable investments include FlowX.ai, FintechOS, Druid.AI, Creatopy, Colossyan, and Pythagora.ai. Marius and Andreas dive into how Romania’s entrepreneurial ecosystem evolved, Tech Angels’ ambitious goal of creating 10 unicorns in 10 years, and the role of healthy boldness in unlocking founder potential.
Watch it here or add it to your episodes on Apple or Spotify 🎧 chapters for easy navigation available on the Spotify/Apple episode.
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✍️ Show notes
It’s Time to Dream Big – 10 Unicorns in 10 years
After 1 year leading TechAngels Romania, I realize that we have a lot working in our favor and I am energized and enthusiastic about how much more we can achieve together.
We are the most experienced angel group in the country and arguably one of the most professional groups in the region and Europe. We boast several super angels, who are active not just in Romania, but across the region. Not only are we well connected and friendly with the venture capital firms, but many of them – especially those in CEE – are also members of ours and interested in knowing what we are up to.
However, interests can be divergent at times. The life of a Business Angel and a Venture Capitalist in general is not linear. Some of our most experienced angels – even founders and board members of this group – have traded the investor’s hat for the founder’s hat. We cheer them on and acknowledge where their focus needs to be right now. Others have founded or have joined Venture Capital firms and we count on their continued support. For foreign investors and foreign VCs in particular their perception of the Romanian tech scene oscillates on a wide spectrum between “a curious thing” and a vibrant ecosystem bustling with opportunity. As such, their relationship with us can vary from one of pure intellectual curiosity to one where they push us, early-stage investors, to do more, and act faster and more boldly.
We acknowledge the opportunities and the things that act as a “drag” on our local and regional tech scene. This is a vision statement to address these.
The best time to be at our best
There has never been a better time to build a tech start-up out of Central and Eastern Europe. Quite frankly, there has never been a better time to build anything worth something in this part of the world.
While I acknowledge there is still a war raging just beyond the Eastern frontier of the EU, we are in a period where economic prosperity is driving access to better opportunities for many people, in one of the most populous regions of the EU. Economic inclusion is working; it is generating better (not best) outcomes, and more political inclusion (albeit slowly, at times) which, in turn, generates more economic inclusion, and so on. I challenge anyone, including the “always on duty” nostalgics, to identify a better time in our history.
I will never get tired of repeating this message. But I have noticed it only catalyzes the idealists and not the pragmatists. Although it’s as pragmatic as can be. I wondered why that is.
Being afraid of a bold vision
After I left UiPath in 2020 I set an objective for myself: to take what was valuable from that experience and use it without boasting or bragging too much about what was achieved and what I achieved there. I did not want to intimidate people. And to continue building on the legacy of “being humble”. But there is a very fine line between being humble and being naive. There is a very fine line between correctly portraying the things that make up the local tech scene and underselling yourself and those around you. And I feel that at times I have erred on the wrong side of that thin line on both counts. You can consider this an “act of reparation”.
Nothing great can ever be achieved only by being humble, skeptical, and slightly (or overly for that matter) pessimistic. It’s even less likely to do so by being the cynical person in the room.
Greatness involves raising your eyes from the ground and the goals immediately ahead of you and looking to the horizon. Intermediate checkpoints are important. However, building something amazing does not start with the definition of the first intermediate checkpoint. It often involves building backward and letting some of those stepping stones sort themselves out.
For example, it is important for us angel investors that companies generate more liquidity and that money flows back faster into the pockets of investors and founders so that we can invest sooner in the next start-ups. Yes, 50 million and 100 million EUR exits to strategic buyers are important and we need more of them. But they can’t be the objective, can they?
When I joined UiPath at the beginning of 2017 I did not know what it would become. It quickly became a company valued at 100 million USD by a prestigious investor, following the Series A round, and I remember thinking how great that was. I quickly learned that in New York City if you throw a pebble randomly on the street you have a high chance of hitting somebody who works for a company worth at least 100 million USD. Do you want to know how many people were rejecting UiPath’s offers of employment outside of Romania in 2017, after our Series A round? 2 out of 3. Let that sink in. 2 out of 3 people whom we WANTED to hire and made offers to thought we were not that special after all. And they weren’t fundamentally wrong.
As investors, I believe we must explain this clearly to company builders from our region. They are not building CEE champions or category leaders. They are building global champions or category leaders out of CEE and they have to compete with the boldness and the audacity of American founders. And so do we, investors. This means dropping the overly humble “us too” mentality and developing a new mental framework: healthy boldness. This is boldness based on hard work, intellectual and emotional proximity between investors and founders, and a shared understanding of the fact that “we win together”.
At UiPath what helped us cross the chasm was that we had a CEO and a team of founders who genuinely believed they could build a generational company. And at least Daniel Dines kept repeating that message obsessively, to the point of seeming delusional. I know for a fact that he understood very well what he was doing.
Here’s what I believe we should do as investors moving forward.
Create 10 unicorns in the next 10 years
Crazy, right? I probably seem the delusional one to you right now. Why 10 unicorns? Why not 5? Or why not 20? And why over the next 10 years?
First of all, say what you will, but there is something beautiful about communicating a vision simply and elegantly. Nobody can remember “create 11 companies worth at least 874 million over the next 7.8 years”. Think France’s “25 unicorns until 2025”. (They boast more than 30 unicorns, by the way. Who would have bet in 2010-2011 that France would become one of continental Europe’s most entrepreneurial states?)
Secondly, at least we, Romanians, now have the proof that one success story alone does not immediately and automatically generate enough momentum or the “flywheel” effect in terms of valuable companies creation. To get to escape velocity you need size and you need large numbers. Not 1. Not 2. Not 3. You need several “tech mafias” to spread knowledge, leveraging their connections and supporting the next wave of founders. Why? Because not everyone will be able to or want to get involved with the same intensity and at the same time. Romania is a VERY large country, part of an even larger region. We are not Estonia. (Bucharest alone has a much larger population than all of Estonia.)
Thirdly, 10 years is not such a random number as you might think. It’s 2 investment periods for VCs. Or a full VC cycle if you count their investment period, then follow-on period, then exit period. 10 years is long enough for a couple of IPO windows to happen. 10 years is long enough for Europe to resuscitate its stock exchanges and make IPOs desirable here.
Where were you 10 years ago? What did you think was achievable back then? Did you underestimate or overestimate what the future had in store for you? If I were to bet I would say you underestimated it. Lowballed it. Behaved like the “skeptical person on duty” so that you wouldn’t be disappointed or proven wrong, no matter the outcome. Culturally, this is something that frustrates me about Eastern Europeans: we care more about being right than we care about being rich. It’s time to change that.
One last thing about this 10-10 thesis, something that is probably a bit more specific to Romania than other countries in the region. We have a very high density of technical talent per 100,000 habitants – the highest or second highest in the EU, according to which sources you are consulting. Tech is in some years the second and in some years the third largest contributor to Romania’s economic growth. Good enough, but not great. Romania is an engineering country by excellence. We can be THE tech country in Europe. Forget about Dracula and medieval castles in the Carpathian mountains. Tech is our national brand. Even if it started with my parents’ generation going to engineering schools to avoid political indoctrination during communism. Or maybe because of it. It doesn’t matter. We already are what we are.
What can you do about this?
Now that I’ve gone through the vision, the reasoning, and the sentiment behind it, I’d like to share some things that you can do to support this.
As existing investors, the best thing you can do is continue doing what you’re doing as a TechAngels member or supporter: talk about this, talk about success stories, talk about lessons learned. Talk respectfully, but not too humbly about what we’re trying to do here. It’s no small thing. And you are already part of it.
If you’re a successful executive in Tech or any other field and you’ve been sitting on the sidelines, start educating yourself about why this is important. Read “The Power Law” by Sebastian Mallaby and “Secrets of Sand Hill Road” by Scott Kupor to understand this asset class. And then join the game, either as a Business Angel if you want to contribute more than just money or as a Limited Partner in a Venture Capital fund if you don’t have the time for more.
If you have nothing to do with technology, you still have to educate yourself. As you might have realized by now, technology is pervasive. It is here to stay. And the people building it are not some weirdos. They are also here to stay. Include us in your conversations. I promise you that most technologists are at the same intellectual level as you. It’s just their vocabulary that’s different.
A special note for the diaspora
As I was preparing to write this I talked to other investors and founders from the region and several of them highlighted the important role that the diaspora could play in this.
Fortunately for TechAngels, we have members from the diaspora and we do have foreign members. Unfortunately, the relationship between the broader Romanian diaspora and the home country is more complicated than a first glance would suggest. It has nothing to do with tech investments and I won’t get into all the historical reasons. But I will say that we have a responsibility to build back trust. If people from abroad are to open up subsidiaries of their tech businesses in Romania or simply set up their tech start-up in Romania, we have to show them that it is desirable to do so and it makes sense. If founders or investors with Romanian roots are to look back at their country of origin, we have to give them not one, but several reasons to do so: the availability and density of tech talent, a country that is part of a prosperous and rich single market, evolving platforms of opportunity such as TechAngels or VC funds. They should be able to confidently invest and become part of the story if they wish to do so.
Closing remarks
I admit that I do not have a precise roadmap for how to produce these 10 miraculous tech creatures in the next 10 years. (But a famous author said that MLK did not win over people’s hearts with his famous “I Have a Plan” speech.)
I will say this, though, since I am leading an investor group, not a political movement or a civic platform: put your money where your mouth is. If you believe the same things we do and if you believe there’s even a remote chance of accomplishing this, then put money into it.
When we succeed, we will have created unprecedented opportunity and yes, wealth, for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for the founders we back and their teams. More importantly, though, we will have determined a generation to think twice before leaving their home country.
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🗓️ The VC Conferences You Can’t Miss
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GoWest | 📆 28 - 30 January 2025 | 🇸🇪 Gothenburg, Sweden
Investors Summit Bilbao 2025 | 📆 11 - 12 February 2025 | 🇪🇸 Bilbao, Spain
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