Bizpower: 1st business conference in Moldova

Recently an interesting event took place here in Moldova - our very own first business conference. As it was planned, this event was pretty big (and expensive): around 500 participants, 4 conferences and 12 workshops, 2 business networking events, different presents and stuff.

I must say the event was organized pretty good. Organizers were very responsive (when I asked them via Twitter to move the flip board because it was blocking the screen, they replied and moved it within a minute)  and they tried to be on time with everything (which is a pretty complicated task here in Moldova). All of the marketing approaches, short video interviews, branded notebooks, even a map with places to eat nearby, tons and tons of partners and some sponsors - I think guys were really dedicated.

The room was full, lots of young people - which is a good sign. I won't analyze all the speakers and speeches, I'll just cover some of them.

Carmina Vicol (Prime Capital) - talked about how we can find financial sources for our start-ups. Basically she covered all the possible ways (in general terms) - which was probably known by a good part of the people in the room, but still it was a good recap speech.

Pavel Zingan (allmoldova.com) - I actually enjoyed his speech. Right now he an IT entrepreneur, probably this is partially why I liked his speech, and partially I liked it because he was talking about his failures and mistakes that he had made earlier in his days. I liked that he was talking about specific things and giving real-life examples. 

Lorand Soares Szasz (a coach / trainer from Romania) - this guy was very inspiring and he has a good charisma. Everyone seemed to enjoy his speech. He didn't talk about specific things and cases (except those from his past-professional life and growth), but his 3 steps to success were presented in a very nice way.

Stela Mocan & Iurie Turcanu (E-government of Moldova) - this was the most interesting point for me. So these guys were talking about new things that E-government will release for local business. They talked about such webservices like: MPay (payment system), MDelivery, MNotify, etc. - You have no idea how exciting is that. Finally Moldova will have an acceptable (lets hope) online payment system. As they told us, it is predicted that accepting banking cards from Moldova will be charged by 1.5% and cards from Elsewhere - 2.2% - which is awesome. I really hope our e-gov will succeed at it.

Vitalie Esanu (IT entrepreneur / Evisoft) - at the conference he has covered same topics as on local TEDx, but if you weren't there, he has talked about his professional life, how and what did he do and how he did it. It's a pretty interesting story I must tell you. You can follow his blog posts where he describes a lot of his professional interactions. On the workshop chapter, he was talking about Bitcoins, what they are, how to mine them, how to use them, etc. This was pretty awesome, it triggered a big wave of confused thoughts in the audience and a ton of questions, so people liked it :)

Marius Ghenea (millionaire from Romania) - I don't remember clearly what exactly did he talk about but I wasn't impressed. This guy talked about transforming opportunities into success stories but I remember it blurry.

Olga Gagauz (HR but I want to name her Headhunter / HR Consulting) - she was talking about how one should motivate his workers and persuis them to stay in the company. She showed some very interesting statistics regarding local HR market, what she we be afraid of and how we can hunt / defend workers. I liked it, but she got interrupted by organizers because of the 15 minutes time-frame (I hope she'll publish her slides somewhere). UPDATE: she sent me the slides, here they are.

Nicolae Pojoga (owner of Linella - network of retail markets) - this guy was very inspired by Walmart and Robson Walton. I guess I liked his talk, I remember I expected less from him, but he did alright.

Svetlana Bodaci (HR at Moldcell) - she gave us some interesting insights of how things are managed in Moldcell. I actually liked it, she shared they HR approach, how they handle things, how they grow their employees. I've seen Moldcell with different eyes, I guess more professional than I thought they are.

Ruslan Cojocaru (Tucano, Celentano, Oliva, etc) - I missed his workshop, but his conference speech seemed to be too generic. I know he tried to be personal there, his topic was "Leader in me" which is a personal and hard topic to talk about. But still, I wanted to hear something about Tucano, about Franchising, about competition on local market, etc. I'm pretty much sure he has Tons of interesting things to talk about, but..

I will skip all the guys that talked about leadership and abstract subjects as they weren't really interesting for me.

George Teodorescu (managing attorney) - he had an interesting talk but I've lost him somewhere closer to the end. He did an interesting paralel between revolution and starting your own business. I liked some parts of his speech, he's kind of inspiring as well. 

Olga Nisenboim - she talked about myths and money. She gave some interesting statistics about the fact that money aren't really a good way to rise efficiency of your employees. As I remember, doubling ones salary will increase his efficiency by 30% for 2 weeks, up to 2 months - so called Wow! effect, and then it will get back to where it was. I liked it  ;)

Hakan Adanali (MedPark) - this guy is from Turkey and he's managing one of our private Hospitals - MedPark. This is actually his 4th hospital. He had a hard-to-follow accent but from what I understood - I liked his speech. He was very and very inspiring. He was asking us, local citizens, to actually make our country a better place, to help each other, to contribute somehow. It's actually kind of touching when a foreigner which lives here, says that he really likes this place and persuit us to work and make it even better. Thumbs up Hakan!

Nerius Jasinavicius - ok, I'll leave a line here for you. This guy actually sucked (it's just my opinion). I didn't like his workshop, neither his conference speech. I simply wanted to walk out or throw a tomato at him. He is an old school, 80's entrepreneur, and this might not be a Really bad thing but I give him (his businesses) a couple of years. Oh dude, personally, never come back :)

Serghei Kiseleov - this guy also had an aggressive and old school approach, but I did like some of his ideas. Probably he has to work a lot on his public talking skills and try to control himself, but I did like his speech. He covered his success and unsuccess stories, gave good tips and some inspiring thoughts (not all thou').

Mariana Rufa - she talked about Matchmaking and the way that she helped some companies to find partners abroad (in Netherlands). Well that's a good concept but it's too early for me or whatever I want to do, for now..

And Artur Gurau (Granat.md) was the last person I've listened to (and I got only his last 2 minutes) - an interesting talk about online marketing.

What is important for me, as a guy interested in IT & Business?

Well, lets begin:

• From BNE (business networking event) and from coffee breaks - I understood that lots of people are willing to collaborate, create projects and/or make some presence of their business in the digital world.
• Lots of people present were somehow connected to IT field, either they were beginners or already pretty much advanced in it.
• We will finally have an online payment system in Moldova, followed by a good online delivery system - this means that a huge market will emerge. This is the key thing for me.
• I found out that there are a couple of guys which are trying out businesses in different fields - this is good as they try to cover IT as well and make good partners.
• There are people which work at NGOs (started them or just work within some) and they try to make some changes on the local market (one guy was doing that in IT field) - which is a good thing.
• This event had a ton of partners that have contributed in a way or another, which creates an image of a tight collaboration.

This was fun.