I have been writing about digital technology, marketing and startups for more than 12 years; both for publications like Techcrunch, the world’s largest freelancing blog Freelance Switch, leading Croatian tech and business magazines. In 2009. at the age of 22 I founded Netokracija, now the leading digital technology and business magazine in Southeastern Europe I still write for today.

From a young age, technology was always something I loved. While discovering forums such as the late Gamer.hr as a… well, duh – gamer, I also discovered that even more than playing Warcraft 3 I loved building websites. After creating a few with basic HTML and some very basic content management systems like phpNuke… I fell asleep at my first PHP programming class. With that and always managing to make my layouts in Photoshop one pixel off, I knew I wasn’t destined to code.

Writing About Web 2.0 and the Social Web

I did however, know how to write really well. After playing around with the idea of creating a early 00s tech news websites in Croatia – tehnoblic – an interview with the editor of Croatia’s most read hardware magazine Bug led to my professional journalistic gig. While my colleagues loved writing about configurations, processors and RAM, I fell in love with web technologies right at the time of Web 2.0 and the social web when a new generation of platforms like Flickr, Facebook and Digg were creating a more social Internet. It’s the reason I joined Twitter while you still needed to SMS your tweets!

Writing at Bug and Mreža game me the change to be one of the first Croatian journalists to write about web startups, Google Analytics and blogging platforms. Because of my time in the web development community, I was very familiar with the technological and business aspects of what came next. It helped me write not just about how the new generation of internet giants was built, but also how they did business and marketed their products.

It helped me also write about the business and social aspects for magazine like Lider and Plan B, the first being the equivalent of Forbes and the latter of Wired in Croatia.

The Magazine for a Digital Generation

Unfortunately, I still didn’t have enough space in the media for all the topics about the web and startups I wanted to write about. Looking at how Michael Arrington launched Techcrunch, I knew that creating website wasn’t that hard. I already knew the geeks that would go on to create some of Croatia’s largest tech companies like Infinum. I installed WordPress and Luka wrote the first blog post about Plan B’s new website – Netokracija was born!

Today, I prefer writing longform opinion pieces and analysis about global digital trends, startup and scaleup trends, digital marketing and the tech community, as well as interviewing digital leaders. A running joke in the tech community is just how much I love to get an exclusive.

BTW, If you were wondering what I used for all the writing I do: After years of trying to find the “right” writing app, I’m a staunch believer that a tool doesn’t make a writer. Personally, I need just a decent keyboard and simple writing application (not overbloated word professing software) and prefer Ulysses both of my Mac and iPad. For publishing on the web, it’s self-hosted WordPress (I talked about how WordPress made Netokracija possible at WordCamp Zagreb).