Zagreb, March 4th, 2020

With offices in New York, Croatia and Slovenia, Infinum is a full-service digital agency, founded by two partners in 2005 and now with over 200 people and 22 teams.

The agency has received over 150 awards over the years thanks to its groundbreaking work in designing and developing software for companies.

Tomislav Car is one of the co-founders of Infinum and the agency’s CEO. We talked to him to find more how was the process of starting a company from scratch and the growth experienced by the agency so far. At the same time, he described the company’s philosophy and the challenges ahead.

What does a typical day look like for you at Infinum?

I hate waking up early and try to get up without an alarm clock every morning. My day usually starts with checking Slack messages, productive notifications and emails for a couple of hours.

I try not to have any meetings scheduled before 10am and my schedule usually revolves around pushing new initiatives, discussing various issues with people and trying to make fast decisions.

One interesting thing is that my day completely changes depending on if I’m in Europe, US, or somewhere else because of the various time zone differences.

When thinking of your role, what’s the biggest misconception people have about it?

That I know about or solve all the problems in the company and make decisions on everything. Where in reality I manage a certain number of things and rely on other people to run the specific areas or projects they’re responsible for.

Please describe the process of starting your company

My friend Matej Špoler and I started the company during our freshman year at university. We were 19 years old and just sold our first piece of software for $5000. We discussed briefly what we should do with all that money and instead of spending it on fun and games we decided to start a company.

Knowing that the advertising industry is a very-crowded sector, what makes Infinum stand out?

I wouldn’t say that Infinum is part of the advertising industry, our niche is design and development of digital products. We have close to 250 people at the moment and have been in the game for 15 years. I would say that our size, experience and longevity are the main factors why clients have confidence in us and why we stand out.

Having that much experience and people on board means we can push through some very large and complicated projects from start to finish. We’re also a stable and mature company and plan on being here for years to come. These are things our clients value the most and further recommend our services.

How do you maintain the company’s philosophy and values across the three offices?

This is very hard to achieve. Due to the distributed nature of our company, it’s like trying to make a long-distance relationship work. It’s hard, but not impossible.

For us, the key is to go above and beyond to make people happy and satisfied in their workplace. Being honest and transparent with people and our intentions as management has also proven the way to go.

We have various processes in place that helps us achieve cohesion across the offices. From very detailed handbooks on how to work remotely and collaborate with people in different places to flexible remote work policies.

We also travel fairly often between our locations. We have an apartment near our HQ that team members can stay in when they’re visiting Zagreb. We call it The Infinum Crib.

What differences do you find most interesting in cultural and working terms?

The biggest difference I see is between the US and Europe. Europeans are much more oriented towards work-life balance, for example they take more time off (whether it’s vacation or holidays).

People in the US are much more oriented to success and tend to work long hours, often putting the work-life balance behind. We see this both with clients and our own team members.

In your opinion, what would be the key difference between leading an agency and a product company?

When running an agency, you deal with “execution risk”, meaning – the risk is if you can do the thing that you need to do. You probably need to be exceptional otherwise the client won’t be satisfied, and you won’t get recommended for future work. Word of mouth recommendations have proven to be one of the key elements to our success.

A product company deals with all of that execution risk, but also with market risk, meaning – is the company selling the right thing? Will people buy it, and does it have a proper product market fit?

Are there any new services that we can find at the agency?

We’re seeing more and more products that have some level of hardware integration, for example IoT or connected appliances. A few years ago, building software meant operating purely in the “virtual space”, but now it’s becoming more and more integrated into the “physical space”.

What are the next steps and projects for Infinum that you are looking forward to?

There’s a bunch of very exciting projects we’re working on. What often frustrates me is that the bigger we become, the bigger our clients and projects are – the less we can talk about it due to various NDA’s we have to be compliant with. We love taking on projects across different industries, especially if there’s a lot of room for innovation. We see a lot of movement in the retail space, and there are amazing new opportunities in the automotive industry as well. I would love to brag and be able to talk openly about some great projects we’ve got down the pipeline, but unfortunately, I can’t share any of it. It’s just a part of growing as a business, I guess.

If you have to name something that people would be surprised to learn about you, what would it be?

I never had a “real” job meaning I never worked for someone other than myself.

Please share some of your highlight moments in your career-path so far

The highlight of my career would be the fact that we managed to grow Infinum to 250 people without any external funding. The other thing I’m very proud of is Productive, a software tool for running agencies that we managed to spin-off out of Infinum into a separate successful business.

What piece of career advice would you give to your younger self?

Don’t worry too much. It’s all going to be OK in the end if you’re smart, hardworking and fearless. Take more risks.

Thanks Tomislav!

Learn more about Infinum

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Co-FounderCroatiadesign agencyTomislav Car