Building teams and cultures is my passion. After getting a CS degree, I joined a team of four engineers in 2002, that would become Vast and pave the way for the Silicon Valley modeled Serbian startup scene. We prototyped a search engine that scraped listings across the web for categories like cars, real estate, vacation rentals, jobs, pets, etc, and organised them in searchable verticals. The idea caught the attention of a venture capital fund, and the first round of financing was raised in 2005, with offices being opened in San Francisco and Belgrade. I took over the director duties and grew the team to more than 150 people, while Vast became the AI-powered autos and real estate marketplace leader. Fast forward to 2021, Vroom acquired Vast, and I started building Vroom’s engineering team in Belgrade. I worked through the insides of a public company and learned a lot, but I also felt that my mission was accomplished. At the beginning of 2022, a mutual friend put me in touch with Foursquare’s CEO, Gary Little. I was impressed by FSQ’s technology, drawn to the team’s culture, decided to join the company and start building a world class engineering team in Serbia, which is helping Foursquare become a global leader in geospatial technologies.