Vladimir Ljesevic, 31

Some entrepreneurs get it right the first time. But most go through several iterations before figuring out how to consistently succeed in the marketplace.

The first version of Vlad Ljesevic’s career path had nothing to do with starting businesses, but rather being in the starting lineup — of a professional basketball team. After a year playing college ball in Pittsburgh however, injuries caught up to him. 

Photo by Mark Wemple

Then there was law school back in his native Austria, although his heart wasn’t ever really in it. (It was mom’s idea.) After that, Ljesevic returned stateside and landed a job with the Longboat Group, a property development company based on the Gulf Coast.

Working with Bruce Weiner, the company’s CEO, “was like a hyper-accelerated MBA program,” Ljesevic explains today. The experience inspired him to try his own hand at running a business. 

While that company Ljesevic started didn’t scale the way he hoped, it did yield a valuable asset, in the form of a capable software development team based overseas. After two years, Ljesevic iterated one more time, changing his approach to the market and expanding his team.

Enter Dan Forno, who with Ljesevic co-founded a tech development firm called CMPSE (pronounced “compose”). With the new enterprise, Forno leveraged Ljesevic's development team to take on big projects for larger companies than Ljesevic was originally targeting.

Today CMPSE is a 3-year-old company with nearly two dozen employees in two offices, and business is growing.

Ljesevic remains connected to his mentor, Weiner, who he says “has inspired and supported me” since the first day of that first company. Weiner hired Ljesevic at the development company several years ago — impressed, he says, by Ljesevic's “presence and inner drive to be successful for someone in their early 20s.”

Ljesevic, in turn, says he has been inspired by how Weiner treats everyone with kindness and respect and how “he gets up every day and goes hard.” Another mentorship moment? “He tends to talk last in a room,” Ljesevic says, “which I always thought was very interesting.”