In the business world, success is often measured by innovations, bold decisions, and a consistent vision. At the heart of the Croatian entrepreneurial scene, the owner of Šmit Electronic Stjepan Šmit has created an impressive journey from a small software company to a leading gaming brand in both the domestic and regional markets, driven by his passion for video games and a visionary approach. While stories of entrepreneurs raising capital through business angels, various platforms, and funds investing in anything that starts with IT or ends with hub are common these days, Šmit’s story resembles the American dream, but in Croatia.
– I have been connected to entrepreneurship in one way or another my whole life, considering that my father was also a private entrepreneur and had his own butcher shop for 25 years. I helped him every day as a kid. My parents were older, and my mother lost a leg, so I had to step in whenever necessary. My father told me from a young age that if I wanted to have something, I had to earn it – said Šmit.
Versatile Expansion Path
As a teenager, he says he never thought about working for someone else because he knew he could be his own boss. He finished electrical engineering school, after which he enrolled in computer science, thinking that one day he would simply open a TV service, but in the end, he chose something completely different. At that time, he lived with his parents in Vojvodina and, alongside his studies, sold amplifiers, CDs, and speakers, which he at one point also produced with a friend who turned it into a business. Towards the end of his studies, he opened a craft business focused on creating applications for commodity-material financial operations and realized that software development was not a difficult task for him. And then the war started.
– We moved to Croatia, and I wanted to open a company right away, but my mother and wife were against it, so I got a job at Intereuropa and gained experience there. After a year, I opened my own business and started developing software again, and by September 1994, I had already sold three commodity accounting systems priced at 1500 marks. For comparison, a primary school teacher’s salary was 200 marks. I have been an entrepreneur my whole life, and I am glad that I managed to pass that passion on to my three sons – added Šmit, whose sons Davorin, Ivan, and Antonio run their own successful companies focused on influencer marketing and video content production.
– When I was at the service with the old Hyundai I was driving at the time, I saw a new van and thought: ‘Maybe one day you will earn enough to buy a new van.’ A few years later, we had three such vans in the company – recalled Šmit, whose company dealt exclusively with software for ten years, and in 2001 and 2002, their software was used in over two hundred Croatian companies.
