Startup Grind Vienna hosts Damian Izdebski (TechBold, DiTech)

Event Details

Damian is a well-known austro-polish entrepreneur who started very young at the age of 23 with building up a traditional trade-business in the IT area. Damian started the company together with his wife Aleksandra in the 20th district of vienna and they grew the company from 2 employees in 1999 to up to 350 employees and 120 Million revenue in 2012.

They addressed the market through a multi-channel strategy, beeing a very early adopter of combining online-shopping and local retail stores. They created their own brand of hardware called dimotion in 2005 and started beeing one of the early adopters of shop-in-shop concepts that gain more popularity right at this moment. Over the 15 years of its existence the company reached accumulated revenue of more than 1 billion Euros and had more than 500.000 registered customers in Austria.

In 2014 it became clear that DiTech was in financial troubles due to its strong expansion in recent years, which led to it closing down and part of it beeing bought out by another company.

Damian and his wife Aleksandra went from “big heros” to “persona-non-grata” in short time, but nevertheless Damian started a new company called techbold soon after and has strong support from the angel community, having a couple of high profile investors backing him. To better cope with the situation and to come to terms with his history he wrote the book “Meine besten Fehler #startupagain” (roughly translated “my best fails”)

He will tell us his learnings and fails, share interesting stories and give us advice on what to do and not to do.

We are looking forward having him with us on 21st of april