Some months ago, a friend asked me what did i think about setting up a small office in Brasov, the city i currently live. He was an online company manager wanting to escape the large costs of having to pay large salaries and rents to employees. And i remembered how Sergiu Biris, the CEO of Trilulilu (local YouTube), did not want to move to Bucharest, where the big money is, choosing instead to rent an apartment and went there 2 or 3 times a month. He ended up hiring 3 sales people there and kept headquarters in Cluj, Romania’s second biggest city.

Brasov is a great city for a small company not needing  every employee present in Bucharest. It has only 10% of the Bucharest population, cool summers, cheap rents (i am paying 200€ less for a 1 bedroom house with 300 sq. of yard), short distances (the city can be crossed from one end to another in 15-20 minutes).

But the most attractive part of the city is the short distance from work to home. People from Bucharest spend at least one hour in traffic, be that public transport or personal car. In Brasov i spend one tank of gas per month doing that, while the average Bucharest worker spends at least two.

And did i mention it has a pretty big university?

It’s not the first time I’ve heard these words. I used to get out in the morning in the winter when i was young and clean the snow from the sidewalk for the flat i was living with my parents. I did that after i moved to another flat and i do it now, not because the law says so, but because it’s the right and logical thing to do.

One thing i do remember from 10 or 15 years ago: grown men watching me from behind their windows. Some were glad someone else is cleaning the sidewalk, so they could use it, others did no understand why i was doing it.

So what is wrong with Romania?

45 years of communism made us ugly on the inside. We forget how to be human. We forgot how to help others. We are suspicious, mean, hateful and we do it for no reason (the proverb is “să moară şi capra vecinului”, which translates into “make others suffer if you are suffering”).

A girl from a orphan shelter i used to volunteer 14 years ago called me today to wish me happy birthday. She always cries on the phone and talks about us, the volunteers, helping her wake up and do something with her life. She lives in a small village near Bucharest in a two-room shed, works hard and wants to have a family.

Some of us would throw her under a bus for no reason. Some of us do nothing, but expect everything in return.

The problem with respect is that 90% of them got where they are by just having a blog, without having something to say.

So, my question is simple: respect for what? What have you done? Do you have something important/relevant to say?

The reason we continue to run campaigns is the idea we were honest to each other and were open about the fees each blogger was getting. As I was saying on my Romanian blog, rather than be jealous on each other making money, we should try to make money together. And we ran campaigns with other bloggers and promoted other bloggers that are not part of Blog20.

Making money always attracts enemies, in our case, many enemies. And they attack me and my online friends, because we keep them down and scare visitors from their blogs (don’t ask how i do it, it’s a mystery to me, too). Yes. Bad bad Zoso.

What they didn’t get yet and probably will not realize in the near future is that Blog20 does not exist (link1, link2). It’s just an inside joke, there is no headmaster, there is no strategy, there is no team. Each “member” does what he wants, but he will call upon his friends when he needs to run a campaign, because there is nobody else! If there is, he will not hesitate to include other people in the project and nobody cares if they get people outside “the group”!

To sum things up, their attacks are not working because they attack something that does not exist. And Blog20 will continue to make money despite their hate and attacks.

Dragos Roua used to be the owner of few sites in Romania: masini.ro, a car directory site, culinar.ro, cooking site (infamous because Roua threatened competitor sites he will trademark the recipes on the site, without owning them) and a few others nobody remembers. He sold them in 2008 and moved to New Zeeland.

Now he is back in Romania, doing conferences about success and personal development, because nowadays everybody has a success story. Meanwhile, his wife writes hard to believe things about him. For those of you who don’t speak Romanian, a few things from that now deleted topic on a moms forum: he forbidden her to leave the house, he spend time on erotic massages while she was at home, he forbid her to use the bathroom in their house on occasions, ordered her to leave the car 200 km from home with no money and so on. I am still trying to deny the idea that what the wife wrote is actually true, but having a few telephone conversations with the guy I tend to believe her.

I hate people that talk about a success that does not exist in the real world and I hate the people who call them to conferences, ignoring the fact they are charlatans.