Some financial incentives to help university students get started in the world of business.
Counselling Centre for Career Management of the University of Split organized yesterday an event called “From University to Entrepreneurship”. Maja Bakotin, Frane Cvitanić, Iris Ban, Nikola Bilić-Antičević and Marin Cokarić presented their business experiences. The audience mostly included students of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture (FESB), reports Slobodna Dalmacija on December 4, 2015.
“For starting your own business, you can get grants of up to 80,000 kuna from Croatian Employment Service, Croatian Chamber of Economy, County, etc. Lots of information and help can be obtained from the Business Centre in Solin. Also, starting this Friday, students can apply to the Student Entrepreneurial Incubator at the Faculty of Economics”, said Marin Cokarić, a FESB student whose Cro Bit company works with the Internet search engine Bing in advertising on foreign markets.
As a chief technology officer of InAtomic, a company founded by his colleague in Canada, which works on development of mobile and web applications, he has called all developers who have a game or an application which has at least a thousand users to contact them because they can turn that into money. For their service, they takes 25 percent of the profits, while developers take 75 percent.
“At home, I was under pressure to finish my studies first, to become an entrepreneur only after I get a diploma, and that first I need to work for someone for a few years. The beginnings were very difficult. The money we got from the Employment Service and what we had borrowed from family and friends was enough to cover salaries for the first 16 months. The first and the second year we finished in the red, even though the turnover was a couple of hundred thousand kuna. We finally started making money in the third year by working with partners who have a direct partnership with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo. Only a few companies in the world have such direct partnership and our goal is to become one of them”, the young entrepreneur said.
However, he has encountered additional problems. “Although I would like to leave my profits in Croatia and pay taxes here in order to stimulate the economy, because of the tax laws which hinder me and the problems which are impossible to solve, I have received advice to open a company in America”, Cokarić revealed.
