Originally published at zurich.impacthub.ch

At the Impact Hub we believe that the world’s greatest challenges will never be solved by one person or organization alone. We need to work to together! We are introducing our new series #MeetTheCreators with a monthly interview with a member showing his/her impact and work for reaching the sustainable development goals.

Meet the Impact Hub SDG of this month: Vladimir Mitrovic von swip.world

The Sustainable Development Goal Nr 8 wants to promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.

Meet our creator of the month: Vladimir Mitrovic from swip.world

SDG: Nr 8 – Decent Work and Economic Growth

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself & swip.world?

Well, I have a background in Sales and Marketing in the ICT Sector but despite of the good pay I wanted to do something more meaningful and am now driven by the vision for swip.world. After an amazing sabbatical I had to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life and it just felt wrong to get back into a corporate monster, no matter what they pay. So I found myself a niche where I could earn my living with consulting services and still have enough time for my family and more meaningful things. Then this vision for swip.world struck me and didn’t let go. Our vision is to use technology to empower people instead of replacing them. We connect people via an online platform to solve corporations’ challenges, help individuals realizing their visions and tackle the world’s great challenges.

How is your project contributing to the Sustainable Development Goal Nr. 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth)?

We believe that digitalization and automation will eliminate millions of jobs. We already see a trend that temporary projects are replacing full time jobs. So we urgently need to create new products and services which create work and new companies.

Imagine what Impact Hub does locally and physically. Now picture this globally and virtually, for people with no access to innovation hot spots like Zurich or the Silicon Valley. The vision is also about equal access to resources and chances. What differentiates us is that we dare something really wild, contrary to the dogma that your platform has to be specialized for one thing only in the start. We are integrating five different platform types dynamically into one social network and are enhancing that with lots of intelligent tools and features in order to create a new ecosystem for innovation, work and life.

What do you like most about working on a project that really makes a difference?

Passion. When you don’t care about money, but just do something meaningful with passion. That’s priceless. I used to have a high salary but I always used to say that a high salary only lets you have your depressions in a nicer hotel and in a more expensive car. Now I book cheaper hotels and sold one of the cars, but I am happy every day when I go to work.

What is the biggest challenge you are facing with this project (personally or professionally)?

Like most startups, we are struggling with the financing. Swiss Investors are very risk averse and prefer if startups at all, those that already have a customer base and only need Investors to grow faster. High Risk Investments in Developments of amazing visions are more for American investors, but most of them insist you move over there. But we love Switzerland.

At this stage, we don’t fit into the matrix of the typical vc and angel investor organizations. Therefore, we can only work with personal contacts who open a door to one of their personal contacts who could invest. So we just keep doing that and hope we raise more money faster than we burn until we get enough traction to attract professional investors.

How can people get engaged?

In a super simple way:

• 1. Register on swip.world
• 2. Check out the innovation challenges we already have and contribute with your ideas.
• 3. Build your own special community on swip.world and invite your friends
• 4. Forgive us that our prototype only got about 20 % of the features we planned and stay tuned for the updates that will come as soon as we get them financed.

Join swip.world

Open the original interview on impacthub.ch]