01/11/2019
I am very happy and honored to present to you a short story of my journey with LotusFlare.
If you would like to hear more about it lets talk at JobFair19 - Kreiraj svoju budućnost!
One of the first members in our Belgrade office, Aleksandar Ivanović wrote about his journey in LotusFlare in an interesting testimonial shared below. It will give you an insight into what kind of people you can meet if you come through our doors!
If you happen to come by JobFair19 - Kreiraj svoju budućnost! stop by our booth on the Faculty of Architecture and meet him in person!
Longest 3 months of my life
Like all good stories, my journey with LotusFlare starts with a sudden call from an old friend and a few simple words - “Let’s grab a beer”. That day I went to meet with Slavko Fodor, founder of the LotusFlare Belgrade office, and after hearing the vision and mission of the company I was hooked instantly.
I was fortunate in life to have done internships at a couple of the best companies in the world for software engineers. One of them is Facebook, where I met Slavko and had offers to join them full-time after I had finished my Bachelor’s degree. To be honest, that was a dream come true scenario, but I decided to join LotusFlare despite many people thinking I was crazy for turning down offers from top global tech companies.
Why? Because I strongly believed in the founding team and their passion to change the world for the better and because I believed that together we could make working at LotusFlare a dream come true for the upcoming generation of engineers.
At that point, I had 3 months of free time before school starts and my plan was to work at LotusFlare for 3 months, then go back and finish my degree since I only had to finish my final year and then return back to LotusFlare.
From day one I was working directly with people who among other things have done the following:
- being in charge of which instructions become part of the hardware for GPU and CPU for Xbox 360
- leading teams of a few hundred people responsible for the security of the Microsoft Azure platform
- scaling Facebook to more than 1 billion users on mobile platforms and have been teaching Mark Zuckerberg to speak Mandarin during his year 2010 challenge in their spare time
And I saw that in fact, they were not Gods, but mere mortals willing to teach some random 22-year-old college kid from Serbia everything that they knew and help him grow.
The projects that I worked on involved working with the biggest telecom operators in emerging markets and making an impact in the lives of millions of people who used our platform to gain access to mobile internet. One of the things that I am most proud of is the fact that at that point 10% of our users never used mobile data before because they couldn’t afford it due to the legacy platforms that operators used before LotusFlare came into the picture. These legacy platforms were much more bloated and expensive and that made the end product of mobile data much more expensive as well for consumers.
Pretty quickly it was clear to me that I would have to put my plan on finishing my degree as soon as possible on hold and be part of the team with a very bold vision “to make affordable mobile communications available to every human on earth”
I would really like to tell you that the journey we took was without hardships, but it resembled the journey that The Fellowship Of The Ring took in Lord Of The Rings. Just take this ring and drop it in this mountain, how hard can it be, am I right?
The team that originally started as 3 little Hobbits in Belgrade who had very little idea what they were doing grew into a team of more than 60 world-class engineers, product managers, business development managers, UI/UX designers, HR specialists. And they are now working with not just the largest telecom operators in emerging markets, but largest telecom operators in North America and other Tier 1 telecom operators in the World in defining how the next generation telecom operator should look.
We are working with industry leaders to make sure we understand all of the cutting edge breakthroughs that have happened over the past few years and incorporate them in the world of mobile operators, cable operators, and media & entertainment providers.
This is how my 3-month plan very quickly became 3 years, 3 months and counting...
In the end, I would like to quote one of my favorite movie scenes which comes from the movie Rounders.
“If you had to do it all over again, would you make the same choices?”
“What choice? … we can’t run from who we are, our destiny chooses us.”
Thank you for reading,
Acko
