written by Adam Tanner
“Welcome to IT Disneyland,” Edin Saracevic tells as we meet in front of a tall office building.
He has a mischievous grin as he speaks. Buildings along the street leading to the tower where he rents out two floors still bear the scars of Europe’s deadliest fighting since World War Two. But Sarajevo, two decades after it suffered three years under siege during the Bosnian war, is a vibrant city on the mend.
I first met Saracevic while researching my new book “What Stays in Vegas.” One chapter tells how he left Sarajevo during the war, became a successful entrepreneur and was one of the founders of Personal.com, an Internet startup based in Washington D.C.
This year Saracevic has embarked on his most challenging startup effort to date. He has taken two floors of a Sarajevo office tower that has been vacant for a dozen years and has turned them into what he hopes will become the center of an IT hub.
As we wander into different tech businesses that have set up across the wood paneled and modern glass enclosed space he calls HUB 387 (named after Bosnia’s international area code), we stop first at software development firm Mistral Technologies. It is close to lunch time, and four of the staff of 50 are taking a break, playing table soccer.
Later we drop by eMediaPatch, where CEO Maša Čampana speaks impressively fluent English after living in New York State for ten years and Kuwait for four years. Her firm helps arrange publicity and web campaigns for TV shows, movies and other products, and her clients include AMC and SundanceTV.
Moving into cheap space in the tech hub was a big step up for her company of nine people and one intern. Until recently they worked out of her living room. She charges about a third of what a U.S. firm might for the same services, but convincing outsiders to outsource a campaign to Bosnia still takes considerable effort.
“It is challenging, but I think we’ve done okay,” she says, adding that her firm is profitable.
Another part of Saracevic’s tech hub is a large open space called Nest 71 where individual entrepreneurs can set up shop as they try to invent the next big thing. “My productivity when I am here is much bigger than when I would work at home,” says Jasmin Mehić, a digital marketer who worked for five from his apartment.
If Saracevic was purely motivated by money, he surely would have kept his focus on the United States. Individuals such as Mehić and companies pay remarkably low rent at present, starting at less than 150 euros a month for a desk (Saracevic himself got a good deal on his rent since the building had long been vacant). And Bosnia remains a country where ethnic divisions between the Moslem Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats continue to create obstacles for businesses. “To do everything here takes 10 times more effort than other places,” he says. “You can’t just take concepts from the United States and cut and paste. There are huge cultural differences.”
To start with, he had to convince IT workers that they could all inhabit the same space without cannibalizing jobs from each other. He pointed out that many jewelry stores do a brisk business in the historic center of Sarajevo, even though they are competitors. Heavy bureaucratic regulation is another obstacle.
But Saracevic is going full speed ahead anyway. After becoming a millionaire in the United States, he wants to give back something to his native country. “Bosnia is still producing things like professors of geography and you have 300 of them and no jobs,” he says. “I wanted to create a spot that would stop the brain drain.”
If the tech hub idea takes off in Sarajevo, he may export the idea to other countries that once were part of prewar Yugoslavia. One possibility would be a 385 Hub in Zagreb, named after Croatia’s international area code. And if that works, there are still a lot of other international area codes in the Balkans to go.
Taken from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamtanner/2014/09/18/building-it-disneyland-in-a-former-war-zone/
