Radu Rosu is a Romanian business owner in the US who founded the EloquentiX company ten years ago. He wrote for Romania-Insider.com about his business' inception, rooted in the tragic events of 2001 in the US.

“I had a strange feeling as I woke up on 9/11/11. Outside there was that perfect North Carolina autumn morning. Blue sky, dry air, cool, everything still green, bright. The same peaceful morning as ten years ago, when siting in my new job at Duke Corporate Education I saw the news from NY on the computer screen.

This morning as I saw the pictures from NY, with all the commemorations, I was thunderstruck. It was not the emotions from NY, it was that I suddenly realized that actually everything I have done professionally in the last ten years, was sparked by 9/11. I never met someone physically affected by 9/11, yet I then I realized my life changed radically due to 9/11.

On 9/11/01, having gone through the .com bubble and bust, I was in my first week at Duke Corporate Education, the number one executive education program in the world. For me it was a perfect job, innovative, secure, calm, the right thing for the first year of marriage.

Yet on 9/12 nothing was secure anymore, and as Duke CE was dependent on on-site education and therefore travel, their business tanked, and layoffs came. Last one in, first one out. And so in the fall of '01, in the darkness of 9/11 and the .com bust, I decided that next time I get laid off, I would do it myself. I founded EloquentiX.

My vision was a company working with the lingua franca of the internet - XML. XML projects were easy to break into pieces and therefore could be outsourced to Romania. In time that changed, as the company grew, we evolved from the original idea and became experts in back end development writing software that has performance on par with industry leaders such as Twitter. We moved with the times too, originally we where proud that we where IBM partners, now we are Amazon partners and manage some of the more complex Amazon cloud implementations.

Eloquentix today has some of the brightest minds and the best projects that anyone in Romania is working on. Reverb Nation for example,  where bands to manage their fans and promote their concerts. Our Bucharest team is responsible for the front end and we have a developer/user ration that is on par with Facebook (Facebook is 1 developer/300,000 users).

At Transloc we track buses with second by second accuracy, at Shoeboxed we automate receipt management, at Nextlot we drive some of the biggest private auctions in the world, and we are now working on medicine projects that will be huge.

Throughout all of this, we have kept the flexibility and enthusiasm and passion from 10 years ago: there 24/7 for the partners, there for each other, making sure we enjoy what we do. Eloquentix now has 25 people, all but one Romanian, spread around the world, Timisoara, Cluj, Bucharest, Iasi, Nice, Toronto, and North Carolina.

We survived 2008, were affected by Fukusima, and the current IT boom is both an opportunity and a threat, yet all of this cannot hide one fact: We are a product of 9/11. Without it, we would have never started.

How should one feel when tragedy gave birth to success?

Radu Rosu,

Chapel Hill, NC

September 12, 2011”

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