Where did you get the idea for your start-up?

Vojtech Seman. – “The first idea came from a dream that failed. As a student of economics, I wanted to identify the key drivers of the rates at which governments borrow money. My dream was to pull out a novel big data analysis approach, download data from all the statistical offices in the world and estimate the most robust econometric model ever made. But it was just impossible at that time for one person to find all the data. There were too many statistical offices, different languages, units, currencies, and data formats. Soon, I realized it would take me several years to build the data set manually and I had to give up on it.

From the idea to its realization, there is only one step… and yet. What triggered your entrepreneurial adventure?

“Feeling a problem and meeting the right people at the right time. By chance or rather by taking chances.

After university, I spent several years in financial institutions digitalizing monitoring of financial products where I realized how difficult it is in banks, funds and companies to retrieve primary data from an internal database in the desired format if one is not from the IT department.

With this problem in mind, I attended a House of Entrepreneurship workshop where I met someone who mentioned that the Founder Institute, an idea-stage accelerator program, was launching soon in Luxembourg. I had never heard about it before but made it through their admission test and was waiting for the launch.

Just before the program launched, at one of the Fintech Fridays at LHoFT, I randomly ran into my former colleague, an economist skilled in developing novel computational methods for work but also for fun. We talked and realized we both had a common interest and a struggle – working with too many spreadsheets and data sets in many different formats, from many often-inconsistent sources.

It took us one coffee meeting to decide to join forces, go through the Founder Institute’s program together and, as a result, co-found rejustify. If I had known how skilled a programmer he was, I would have bought him an extra ice cream at that meeting. Now we have a technology to find, access and merge data from multiple publicly available statistical sources in real-time, automatically. Data will rule the world and this one-stop shop technology was missing. On a freemium basis, it can make life easier for one billion students and analysts worldwide.

We often hear that it is essential to make mistakes. What do you think about this?

“Evolutionarily, trial and error enable learning, horizon widening and increase the species’ fitness to survive in an environment, assuming they adapt fast enough. So yes, mistakes and problems are an important essence of life. But we live in an uncertain world where many things are out of our control, some mistakes can be subjective, some can only be identified ex post and some mistakes stay unnoticed forever, like not buying that jackpot winning lottery ticket. Nobody has a crystal ball to make a correct judgement all the time and neither do we, but we try our best. Anytime we identify a problem, we try to mitigate the risk of making mistakes by seeking advice from a network of mentors and alumni start-ups we gained by graduating at the Founder Institute accelerator. Most of the time, we found someone who went through a similar issue somewhere in the world. This way we learn how to control what can be controlled.”