Introducing Eurogeeks by Ivo Spigel

Over the next few months, The Kernel will publish extracts from a new book by Ivo Spigel, our Eastern European correspondent. Spigel’s upcoming book, Eurogeeks, profiles some of the leading thinkers and entrepreneurs in technology, in Europe and beyond.

Over the next few months, The Kernel will be publishing excerpts from Ivo Spigel’s forthcoming book, Eurogeeks.

Spigel, who is also The Kernel’s Central and Eastern European correspondent, has spent the last few years researching and interviewing some of the biggest names in technology, in Europe and beyond.

“This project started out as a single article, not even the series which it later turned into, least of all a book,” he says. “I met Boštjan Špetič and Andraž Tori, the founders of Zemanta, at Mini Seedcamp Ljubljana in 2009. It occured to me that writing an article about them for the Croatian edition of Forbes might be interesting. We got together on a Skype chat a few weeks later, and that led to the first profile. The editor and I were both happy so I went on to talk to other European founders and enterpreneurs, starting a series that continues today, almost three years after that first piece.”

“My motivation for the book is the same as it was for that first profile of Zemanta’s founders,” continues Spigel. “Europe has many amazing tech companies, many successful enterpreneurs and fantastic success stories. By and large, these are not very well known outside the small, often insular world that is the European start-up community. You could argue, in fact, that there is no such thing as a “European” community but rather a series of communities centered around the great tech and start-up hubs that are London, Berlin, Paris and other European cities… but that’s another story altogether.”

As the interview project grew, Spigel came to the idea of developing the original interviews into a book. And an edited selection of interviews from that project will appear here, in The Kernel, alongside Spigel’s regular columns from Zagreb.

“I felt a need to bring this story out, or at least help in doing so,” he says. “The start-up scene is blossoming all over Europe, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe where I live and work. These kids, this new generation of fanatical enterpreneurs, need to know that Jobs and Zuckerberg and Page and Gates are not the only ones who have built great companies, and that there are people who can be role models for them much, much closer to home.”

Spigel’s Eurogeeks interviews will appear in The Kernel on the second Wednesday of the month, starting with Seedcamp founder, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Saul Klein.