From the early days of EU consulting to navigating the VR craze of 2016, career of Vlad Gozman, a Romanian serial entrepreneur and ecosystem builder, serves as a lesson in when to double down and when to walk away.
His journey began in Romania, helping firms navigate EU bureaucracy, before he moved to Austria to immerse himself in the startup scene. A natural ecosystem builder, most recently he became co‑founder & co‑host of the TEDAI Vienna, while he also co-founded TEDx Vienna, and the Austrian Startups organization.
He navigated mature markets with Adverity, and totally new ones with VR startup StereoSense. All the experience he gained converged to involve.me, a no-code platform for interactive funnels that now serves over 4,500 customers with a lean team of just 14.
Today, Vlad is a vocal proponent of “Service as a Software,” integrating AI agents to handle the grunt work of building and analyzing customer data. As a true pragmatic, he favors sustainable growth over the VC gamble, proving that a well-timed pivot and a world-class team are the ultimate keys to scaling.
I sat down with Gozman to discuss his journey, lessons learned, and the realities of startup growth.
From Bucharest to Vienna
You won’t find Gozman’s entrepreneurial roots in a garage in Palo Alto, but in the bureaucracy of 2007 Bucharest. Just as Romania joined the EU, a twenty-something Gozman saw an opportunity: helping traditional businesses navigate the labyrinthine process of applying for European funding.
“It was my first touch with the business world, basically. Completely different to what I’m doing now,” Gozman recalls.
Despite his success with it, Vlad was haunted by the internet boom bug. Between 2007 and 2009, he lived a double life: a successful consultant by day and a struggling tech founder by night. He attempted to launch several digital products, but the Romanian ecosystem was too nascent, devoid of the mentorship and capital needed to sustain them. Realizing he had outgrown his environment, Vlad sold his stake in the consulting firm to his partner.
With a modest financial cushion and a one-way vision of reaching Berlin, the beating heart of European startups, he packed his bags. But the original plan changed, and he decided to stay in Vienna as the Austrian startup scene began to emerge.
The “accidental” ecosystem builder
Unlike Bucharest, Vienna already had a “second generation” of founders: people who had exited, made money, and were reinvesting in the next wave. This pitstop in Vienna turned into a 16-year residency, and counting, where he eventually co-founded Austrian Startups, the NGO that gave the local ecosystem its voice.
In his first year at Vienna though, using volunteering as a tactic to network, Vlad discovered the city lacked a TEDx chapter. He reached out to main TED organizers, received a license, and founded the local nonprofit community “by accident.” More importantly, the success of the first TEDx conference in 2010 introduced Vlad to key figures in the Austrian startup scene, including the future founders of Speedinvest and i5 Invest.
“If the community you need doesn’t exist, build it yourself.”
While Vlad was busy sketching out his next startup and growing TEDx, Markus Wagner from i5invest saw something more valuable than a single idea: he saw a founder with the grit of a consultant and the vision of a community builder, and so he invited Vlad to join i5invest as an associate. Entering their shared offices with Speedinvest in 2011 felt, to Vlad, like stepping into the future.
“I joined that office as part of scouting new ideas, trying my own and trying to build online businesses, basically,” Vlad recalls. “It felt like a milieu where I could thrive… having the infrastructure to make something happen.”
It was this culture of trying and joining forces with others that eventually led him to the founding team of what would become one of Austria’s biggest SaaS success stories.
When to kill your darlings
Out of the research and collaborations at i5invest, Adverity was born. While Vlad notes the company underwent several shifts in its early days, the core mission remained centered on the burgeoning need for better data integration and analytics for marketers. Adverity eventually grew into a powerhouse, helping brands make sense of complex data silos. For Vlad, it was a masterclass in scaling a technical product within a mature market.
Though he eventually transitioned out of an operational role to pursue his next venture, the experience was foundational. “I’m still a minority shareholder at Adverity, but I’ve divested over time,” Vlad explains. Reflecting on those years, he identifies them as his formative ones, a period where he moved from being an opportunistic consultant to a structured, platform-thinking entrepreneur.
So, in 2016, Vlad took a sharp turn into the “bleeding edge” of technology. Swept up in the excitement of Oculus and HTC Vive, he founded StereoSense, a no-code tool for building VR applications.
The goal was ambitious: allow non-developers to build immersive 3D experiences. “The bet was that if VR becomes the next platform, businesses would like to have at least a certain presence,” Vlad says. He landed prestigious clients like the Art History Museum in Vienna, but the mass market adoption simply wasn’t there.
“Our aim was always to have a scalable solution that we can market internationally and grow. So, I think we had a moment of reckoning when we saw we couldn’t monetize it past a certain threshold, and we couldn’t validate it being a subscription model. Few of these things, paired with the external signals that market isn’t really adopting it, helped us draw a line…”
And so came the most difficult moment for any founder: turning down money. Despite inbound interest from VCs eager to ride the VR wave, Gozman and his team declined. “We decided to not take an investment and also stop the project altogether. Which was a tough thing to do.”
Instead, they looked at what was actually working.
One of Gozman’s co-founders ran a digital agency that built campaign landing pages for clients like Universal Pictures. Whether it was for a horror movie or a rom-com, the backend requirements were identical: a secure page, a form, and data collection. They realized they were manually building the same thing over and over. They automated it, kept the software “shell” from their failed VR project, and pivoted to what would become involve.me.
Disrupting mature markets
At some point talking about coming of InolveMe, Gozman makes a counter-intuitive point about competition. While many founders are terrified of entering an ocean full of sharks, he ran toward it. When they pivoted to building surveys and funnels, players like Typeform already existed.
“It’s a market that is already mature,” Gozman notes. But that was the point. They verified that customers were frustrated with existing tools due to lack of customization. By carving out a niche in a proven market, they believed they could monetize from day one rather than waiting for a technological revolution that might never come.
“For every successful breakout, there are so many failures in that market. But in terms of existing markets, where you don’t need to create the market from scratch… there are a lot of more success stories than we hear about.”
“Service as a Software”
Today, involve.me is a lean machine. With a team of just 14 people, they serve over 4,500 customers. This efficiency is driven by a very specific, non-glamorous application of AI. They are using AI to handle 60% of his company’s first-level support and speed up his developers’ output.
When asked if we are currently in an AI bubble similar to the VR craze, Gozman’s take is nuanced. He admits the “inflated expectations” are real, but he distinguishes the current AI wave from the dot-com bubble or the VR hype by one factor: utility.
“The big difference now is that in a very short time… there is a lot of immediate usefulness to it. Now, I know there are immediate applications that have spawned from the first iterations… which is very different from VR.”
On that accord, Gozman sees the interface of software changing fundamentally. We went from command lines to pointing and clicking (GUIs). Now, he believes we are moving to “Service as a Software.”
“Nobody wants to learn a tool. You don’t want to learn involve.me. You don’t want to learn Salesforce… People don’t want to learn where to turn that knob. They just want to tell it ‘I want to build something’ and then just jump in to fine-tune it.”
As InvolveMe continues to scale into a multi-seven-figure business, the lesson from Gozman’s 16-year journey is clear: innovation doesn’t always require a cutting-edge hardware or inventing a new physics for the internet. Sometimes, it’s just about listening to a movie studio or a museum tell you what they actually need to get their work done, and then building the automation that lets them do it.
In a world of hype-fueled unicorns, Gozman seems perfectly happy running a profitable workhorse. And righteously so. Many early-stage founders might benefit looking from that perspective…
