Six FLEX exchange alumni came home from a year in the US and turned what they'd learned into a free afternoon for other young people in Niš.
Saša, Mia, Aleksa, Sofija, Elena and Mihajlo all spent a year in the United States through the FLEX exchange program — living with a host family, finishing a year of American high school, and, alongside that, watching up close how casually Americans talk about starting things. Not every conversation was about a unicorn startup; plenty of it was a neighbor who ran a small shop, or a classmate whose parent had started a business twice and failed once. What struck the group wasn't ambition, it was how normal the conversation was.
Coming back to Niš, they noticed the conversation isn't as normal here. A young person curious about starting something usually has to go looking for it — a program, a competition, a cold email to someone their parents know. There wasn't an easy, low-stakes room where that curiosity could just sit across the table from someone who'd already done it.
So instead of writing a report about the experience, the six of them built that room. Upoznaj Biznis's first event, on 24 September 2026 in Niš, is built around one constraint: no lectures. It has to feel like a conversation you'd want to be part of, not a talk you're being given.
"The point isn't that everyone leaves wanting to start a company," says Aleksa Zdravković, one of the organizers. "It's that the distance between 'I have an idea' and 'I know someone who'd tell me the truth about it' gets a lot shorter in one afternoon."