Compound Live: Novi Sad

On 23 September, 30 people who run companies, agencies and practices sat down for breakfast at Curry Souls in Novi Sad. Our host was Rodoljub Oraščanin, who runs the Curry Souls franchise in Novi Sad. Nine to noon. No stage, no slides.

Clement Senaratne, who founded Curry Souls, told how it started. He left Sri Lanka and a corporate job to backpack across Europe, and ended up staying in Zagreb. In 2016, with barely enough money to open, he started a small curry bar serving food almost nobody there had tried. It worked, so he turned it into a curry house franchise. Curry Souls opened in Belgrade in 2023 with money from 65 people who invested through crowdlending, and within six months it was number one on TripAdvisor. Today there are three restaurants, and we had breakfast in one of them.

Then Nemanja Živković and Dejan Pataki explained why we were there. In Nemanja's words:

A few words about this event. We call it Compound. It's a community we're building on behalf of Funky Enterprises. For this first event we prepared roll-up banners and everything else, and the website and the visual identity were created by Saša Dragičević.

So what's the idea? Funky Enterprises, more precisely, is something we call a small, advanced Accenture. It's where we brought together people with huge experience working with different companies in different industries, people who had their own companies and still do, and put them all into one holding called Funky Enterprises. What we do is go into companies and build commercial systems. What does that mean, roughly? We sort out their fundamentals, sort out their processes and automate everything we can, but above all we sort out positioning and messaging, how they go to market, all of that. Then we build systems where marketing gets feedback from the market and sales gets feedback from customers, and it all comes together in one system that enables the company to grow. Most companies don't have those basics. Some are at step four or five.

With this event we want to connect all of you, because there are a lot of people here who build different elements of these systems and help people in different ways. We want to bring you together so you get what you need in this circle. That's why we asked you what dilemma or problem you have, and we'll split you into four groups, sorted as best we could, where we think the best people to help you are sitting.

We're building this as a community. It will go digital and it will go global, but we wanted to start with smaller events, talk to people and build it slowly. So slowly that we've already opened a company in America and everything is ready, but we're going step by step, and we decided to start by talking with people. There will be an event in Belgrade, another one in Novi Sad, probably Sofia and Ljubljana too, so the offline events won't stay only in Serbia.

That's it for now. I want to encourage you to talk to people you've never seen before and don't know.

Everyone got one minute. In the room: software engineers, accountants, a lawyer, event organizers, designers, an eLearning founder who also runs a high school, a craft beer judge, grant consultants, lead generation and PR people.

Before the event we asked everyone for one real dilemma. At ten we split the room into four tables built around those dilemmas:

Nemanja Živković, Dejan Pataki and Marko Cvijić led the tables. The one rule: talk to someone you've never met.

We're starting small and offline on purpose, one room at a time. Next: Belgrade, then Novi Sad again.