CONFERENCE
AGENDA

Nick’s early startups failed hard. Customers ghosted. He heard “no” countless times. But those failures were his MBA. Everyone said LinkedIn automation was saturated, competition fierce, his approach risky. He ignored them. Now, with $10M+ ARR and one of Europe’s fastest-growing startups, he shares the counterintuitive lessons from failing and getting back up smarter.

Gaming occupies a unique space where software engineering, psychology, and fine art must collide perfectly to succeed at scale. In this session, Sanja Žugić and Vanja Knežević peel back the layers to show how game studios function as hyper-interdisciplinary organizations. They explore how production pipelines and live operations force technical and creative teams to collaborate in ways that few other industries require. By framing games as complex systems rather than just entertainment, the conversation will reveal how this high-pressure convergence creates a unique blueprint for innovation. You will discover why the gaming industry has become the primary talent engine for the future of cross-disciplinary work.

Dino is known for relentless execution and calm decision-making under pressure, which helped scale FishingBooker into a profitable, bootstrapped global business. In this talk, he connects performance habits with real-life consequences: how focus and systems create unfair advantages, why doing the right things early in your career matters far more than most people realize, and how consistency creates the surface area for opportunity. We often hear that discipline is about working harder. In reality, it’s about what we repeat long enough for it to shape our outcomes. Over time, those repetitions compound, sometimes quietly, sometimes decisively. Drawing from real experience, Dino shares a grounded, practical framework for focus, decision-making, and sustainable ambition in a world of shrinking attention spans.

From selling tadpoles and hamsters as a kid to launching her first real venture at just 16, Nikolina has always been drawn to building, experimenting, and testing new ideas. Over the years, she navigated multiple entrepreneurial ventures, faced 300 investor rejections, and yet raised $8M in biotech, developing solutions to measure biological age – all while learning through trial and error, facing setbacks and discovering that persistence, creativity, and a little audacity help move ideas forward. In this session, Nikolina will share the lessons she picked up from her early ventures, the mistakes that taught her the most, and how every “no” along the way became a stepping stone toward the ultimate “yes.” We promise this is the kind of story that will make you laugh, think, and even rethink what’s possible for your own ventures. And yes, selling frogs was only the beginning – the rest is just persistence in disguise.

Drawing on more than a decade at McKinsey & Company working closely with insurance giants, and his experience building Ominimo – the fastest-growing insurtech in Europe – Dušan shares how first-hand exposure to the insurance industry shaped the idea behind Ominimo, and what had to change once advice met execution. He reflects on which parts of his previous modus operandi carried over, which had to be unlearned, and what it really takes to build and scale a global tech company in a crowded, highly regulated market.

What if some of the most important skills for growing startups don’t come from business schools, but from DJ booths? While growing Native Teams from a small team with limited resources into a global organisation of 300+ people, Aleksandra noticed something unexpected: some of the people who had the biggest impact on the product and the team had backgrounds as DJs. And not by accident! In her talk, Alex shares her unconventional perspective on the skills necessary to build good products and how they correlate with DJing skills:
– Building and scaling teams without big budgets.
– The art of empathy and deep listening for better products and healthier teams.
– Why unusual backgrounds can become a strategic advantage.

Every successful startup doesn’t just capture market share – it reshapes how society functions. But are founders thinking critically enough about the future they’re building? This panel will explore what it really means to build ventures where impact isn’t a marketing add-on, but embedded in how you think, decide, and scale. Through concrete examples and open founder-level perspectives, Jonas Dinger and Adam Mitchell-Heggs will unpack how social impact entrepreneurship shows up in real life: from the theoretical frameworks and on-the-ground realities across 20+ countries, to why some well-intentioned ventures create unintended harm at scale.

In this reverse-pitch session, Antler, which has backed nearly 1,900 startups globally, reveals what separates companies that get funded from those that don’t. Antler is searching for outlier founders: the most driven and committed individuals who’ve gone all-in to build category-defining companies that solve the world’s biggest challenges. The discussion will cover why founder velocity matters more than the “perfect” idea, what “exceptional” actually looks like in practice, and how founders from emerging ecosystems like CEE can turn their backgrounds into competitive advantages.

Join Daniil Liberman for a thought-provoking fireside chat on the radical vision behind their next-generation AI infrastructure, built in deliberate contrast to today’s hyper-centralized models dominated by hyperscalers like OpenAI, Google, and Meta. Daniil will explain how their approach, rooted in decentralized compute and permissionless access, aims to break the emerging ‘generative monopolies’ and distribute AI power more equitably across developers, nations, and ecosystems. He’ll share who should be the most excited about this shift, the political and strategic implications of decentralization, and how companies should evaluate whether to adopt such infrastructure or stick with traditional cloud-centric models.