Ladies and Gentlemen, Start(up) Your Engines

It's not exactly an office that would feature in most firms' brochures, but, for a startup software company, it suits the purpose more than sufficiently. Four tables pushed together, a notebook, and scattered papers from a printed presentation suggesting that there's not a person in the world who can do without ca certain software to code private data. Twenty-four-year-old programmer Jakub Mahdal is racking his brain trying to figure out how to promote and put into wide-scale use the security program that he has been developing with friends from his dormitory. From the technical point of view, everything is functioning well, the program is user-friendly and features an attractive design, but Jan now has to solve the most difficult task: how to address customers that work with large volumes of sensitive data and are concerned that someone unauthorized may get to them.

In contrast to other startups, Mahdal's has one essential advantage. His office is located in the South Moravian Innovation Centre, that famous Brno incubator of enterprises. Besides low office rent and telephone fees, there is a consultant at his disposal who advises him how to make good financial plans or how to do target marketing. Jakub Mahdal does not have to pay anything for services that cost several thousand crowns. The same goes for 30 of his colleagues also trying to transform their ideas into big…