The last instruction is the interesting one. To join Serbian Entrepreneurs, you attend an event, find two members willing to endorse you, and interview with a chapter leader. Then comes the requirement that gives the whole arrangement its shape: help another member in your first month. Before the network has had much time to do anything for you, you owe it something useful.
- The offer: experienced founders and investors who can help with the next market, pitch or introduction.
- The distinction: a Serbian diaspora network with a contribution requirement.
- The proof: a role in the effort that opened Google Play merchant access in Serbia.
That small rule supplies a useful starting point for understanding an organization whose name could otherwise sound like a category in a business directory. Serbian Entrepreneurs connects people who have built careers abroad with people building companies in Serbia. Its raw material is experience scattered across countries. Its practical question is how to make that experience available to somebody who needs it.
A trip with a return ticket
The network began in Silicon Valley in September 2016. Public accounts identify founders including Tihomir Bajić, Brano Perkovich and Lazar Stojković. Their connections were personal, but the problems arriving in their inboxes were familiar: finding customers, understanding investors, figuring out how another market worked.
In a 2017 interview, Stojković described a change he had noticed. Serbian startup founders were visiting San Francisco to find clients, investors or accelerator places. Often they stayed three or four weeks, made the necessary connections, then returned to Serbia. The journey did not have to end in emigration. Someone who already understood the destination could make a short visit considerably more productive.
There is a lesson in that return ticket. A company can need access to another country without needing to move everyone there. Advice becomes particularly useful when it comes from someone who recognizes both the place you started and the place you are trying to reach.
By July 2017, the group had introduced a form through which Serbian entrepreneurs could describe their companies and ask for help. Members would decide where they could contribute. Startit’s account described support with market analysis, business plans, fundraising and potential Silicon Valley partners. The form gave an otherwise vague appeal a destination and a way to find a relevant person.
The checkout was the problem
Sometimes the obstacle was larger than any individual founder. Serbian developers faced a particularly awkward restriction: selling software through Google Play could require a company in another country. You could write an application at home and still face a geographical problem when it was time to collect the money.
Serbian Entrepreneurs helped bring a Google delegation to Serbia in November 2017. The discussions covered support for local startups and the Google Play issue. Here the network’s work moved beyond connecting one founder to one helpful person. A shared commercial barrier required people inside a platform company and people inside public institutions to work on the same problem.
One shared barrier. A benefit beyond the membership list.
On October 3, 2019, the Serbian government announced Google Merchant Account availability for Serbia. Its statement credited the government, the National Bank of Serbia and Serbian Entrepreneurs. Developers could charge for products and services through Google Play. The chapter’s own account also described receiving payments into local bank accounts.
The important distinction is between getting a meeting and changing what a business can do afterward. This effort produced a change in access. It also benefited developers who had never joined the organization. A favor between professionals had become work on a market’s plumbing.
Forty people. Three pitches. An embassy.
Expansion took a more sociable form in London. On September 20, 2018, forty people attended the new chapter’s inaugural event at Serbia’s embassy. Petar Savic opened proceedings; founding San Francisco chapter member Philip Thomas introduced the organization’s history and aims. London became its seventh chapter city.
The pitches were pleasingly concrete. Catalyzer presented a social app. Vimma described a business connecting advertising with social media influencers. Strawberry Energy showed its smart benches, already installed around London. The embassy provided the venue and drinks; Tadinka Nougats supplied snacks. A global network still needed somebody to organize the room.
The currency is somebody’s time
This is a nonprofit membership organization operating alongside startup hubs, accelerators and investment firms. Its distinctive territory is the relationship between Serbian founders across borders. Investors participate, but a conversation about funding should be understood as access to people with judgment and contacts, rather than a commitment to write a check.
The same connection reaches beyond the United States. In September 2024, Toronto representatives met Serbia’s science minister, Jelena Begović, to discuss cooperation between the Canadian startup community and innovation initiatives in Serbia. Participants included people working in technology, law and real estate. That mix matters: taking a company into another country involves more than finding another engineer. People who understand commercial property, contracts or a local institution can be useful alongside people who understand software.
The financial terms deserve precision. A 2017 interview described membership dues as symbolic. The more visible cost in the model is participation: securing endorsements, showing up and being useful. For the experienced member, that means lending time and reputation. For the founder asking for help, it means arriving with a problem specific enough for another person to act on.
“Help another member in the first month”The membership instruction that explains the model
The approach has limits. A founder without existing connections must first find a route into a referral-based community. An introduction cannot establish customer demand or make an unsuitable investment attractive. Reading the model as a shortcut to guaranteed funding would miss the exchange at its center.
What another community can copy is the sequence: create a way to ask for relevant help, find the person equipped to give it, and make contribution an early expectation. Serbian Entrepreneurs gives those steps a structure. The useful question for a newcomer becomes wonderfully specific: whose problem can you help solve this month?