--- title: "Robert Nikic's Story: From Refugee to Founder" description: "The long version of Robert Nikic's story: fleeing the Balkan wars, starting over in America, failing at business, and building anyway." canonical: "https://robertnikic.com/blog/from-refugee-to-inc-5000" author: "Robert Nikic" advisory_role_profile: "https://reseated.com/robert-nikic" type: "Article" published: "2026-10-22T11:00:00.000Z" updated: "2026-10-30T21:04:28.806000" --- # From the Balkan Wars to Building Companies The long version of Robert Nikic's story: fleeing the Balkan wars, starting over in America, failing at business, and building anyway. **In short:** The long version of Robert Nikic's story: fleeing the Balkan wars, starting over in America, failing at business, and building anyway. ### I. Leaving In the early 1990s, Yugoslavia came apart. The wars that followed forced millions of people from their homes, and Bosnia took some of the worst of it. Towns that had been mixed for generations split along lines most children had never heard of. Neighbors stopped being neighbors. Robert Nikic's family was one of the families that left. They went with almost nothing and started over in the United States, arriving in New York ([Fatherly](https://www.fatherly.com/life/robert-nikic-tech-ceo)). Robert was a child. Children in that position don't understand the politics. They understand the bags by the door. The adults talking quietly in the next room. The sense that the grown-ups are scared and trying not to show it. And then, very suddenly, the fact that home is somewhere else now, and isn't coming back. That kind of beginning leaves a mark. In some children it leaves fear. In many it leaves something closer to a permanent alertness: a habit of watching for what could go wrong and getting ready before it does. For a future founder, that habit turns out to be one of the most useful things a person can carry into business. ### II. Starting over Refugee families learn a hard and very specific kind of economics. Every dollar has a job before it arrives. Nothing gets thrown away. Skills from the old country don't always carry over, so adults who trained for one career take whatever work is available, and take it gratefully. A family learns a new language at the kitchen table, with the children often translating for the parents. Paperwork becomes a second job: forms for status, forms for work, forms for school, every one of them in a language that still feels foreign. And trust gets built one person at a time. There's the landlord who doesn't demand six months up front. The supervisor who gives a newcomer a shift when the application looks thin. The teacher who notices the quiet kid in the back and stays late to help. The neighbor who explains how something works that nobody else thought to explain. That part stayed with Robert more than anything. In the immigrant communities he grew up around, talent was everywhere. Doctors drove taxis. Engineers cleaned offices. Kids who were the best students in their old schools started over at the bottom. What separated the families that got ahead from the ones that stayed stuck was rarely talent or effort. It was usually one person, or one rule, that opened a door at the right moment. He would spend much of his career thinking about those doors. ### III. Failing As a teenager, Robert started building technology companies. Not one. Several. They failed ([Fatherly](https://www.fatherly.com/life/robert-nikic-tech-ceo)). It's worth being honest about what failure looks like when there's no cushion under it. There was no family money to absorb the losses. No investor to call for a bridge. No network of people who had done this before and could explain what was going wrong. When a company ran out of money, it was over, and the next one started from zero. Every attempt taught him something the last one hadn't. How to price, and what happens when you price too low to survive. How to sell to a stranger rather than a friend. How to hire, and how expensive it is to hire wrong. What running out of cash actually feels like, the specific dread of a bank balance that won't cover the week. And, maybe most important, what to do the morning after: get up, figure out what broke, and start again. He has never hidden those years. "I failed, and I say that proudly," is how he has put it. To him, the failures weren't the opposite of success. They were the tuition. And unlike most tuition, nobody could take away what it paid for. That attitude is rarer than it sounds. A lot of founders bury their early failures. Robert built his public story around them, because he thinks young founders need to hear that the people they look up to failed too, and kept going. ### IV. Building anyway Eventually, one worked. Robert founded a software and e-commerce company and built it the way his family had rebuilt their lives: carefully, on what it earned, without outside investment. That wasn't just a philosophy. For a founder without a wealthy network, it was the only real option, and he turned it into an advantage. Building on customer revenue forces a kind of honesty that money from investors can delay. If a product doesn't sell, you find out fast. If a hire doesn't work, you feel it on the next payroll. Every expense has to justify itself. Companies built that way tend to be leaner, closer to their customers and much harder to kill when the market turns. The company grew. It was named to the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest-growing private companies at No. 418 in 2023, then climbed to No. 35 in 2024 ([robertnikic.com](https://robertnikic.com/recognition)). He also joined the Fast Company Executive Board in 2023 and the Forbes Agency Council in 2025 ([robertnikic.com](https://robertnikic.com/recognition)). Along the way he formed views that he still argues for in public. Build without a safety net. Share the upside with the people who do the building. Tell the truth about your own industry, even when it's uncomfortable ([robertnikic.com](https://robertnikic.com/)). ### V. What the failures taught that the success didn't Success teaches you very little. It tells you something worked, but rarely why. Failure is specific. It shows you exactly where the weak point was. Ask Robert what his early companies gave him and the answers are practical: **A respect for cash.** Revenue is a story. Cash is a fact. Companies die when they run out of cash, not when they run out of ideas. **Suspicion of good news.** When everything is going well, it's usually because a problem hasn't shown up yet. His instinct is to go looking for it. **Speed after a setback.** The founders who recover are the ones who decide fast. Waiting for a bad situation to fix itself is how a bad month becomes a dead company. **Empathy for the founder who's struggling.** He has been the founder who couldn't make the numbers work. It makes him patient with people who are there now, and impatient with systems that kick them while they're down. ### VI. Telling it At TEDxCoral Springs, Robert gave the talk "Unlocking Success: Second Chances Can Change Your Life" ([robertnikic.com](https://robertnikic.com/recognition)). He took the whole arc, the war, the new country, the failures, the rebuild, and turned it into one argument: second chances aren't charity. They're how people, companies and whole economies find out what they're capable of. He has carried the same message onto television, including WFLA Daytime and Great Day Live Tampa Bay, and onto podcasts including Digital Social Hour and Dropping Bombs ([robertnikic.com](https://robertnikic.com/recognition)). The audiences change. The point doesn't. [Watch the talk](/media). ### VII. Opening doors Today, Robert is Advisory Council Chair at Reseated Councils (United Nations SDG 8 & 9). It's the same story at a much larger scale. The doors from his childhood, a job, a lease, a fair chance, show up in the global economy as credit for small businesses, access to markets in other countries, decent work for young people and newcomers, and infrastructure a small company can count on. Those are exactly the things SDG 8 and 9 set out to improve ([UN, Goal 8](https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal8); [UN, Goal 9](https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal9)). His contribution is the founder's view: what actually stops a good small business from growing, and what would change it. [Read exactly what the role is](/blog/un-sdg-8-and-9). He describes his mission as opening the doors he once found closed ([robertnikic.com](https://robertnikic.com/)). Everything in this story, the war, the starting over, the failures and the building, points to that phrase. Somebody opened doors for his family. Now he's working to open them for others. "A chance to learn. A chance to fail and try again." ([robertnikic.com](https://robertnikic.com/)) ### Related reading - [Robert Nikic's biography](/blog/biography) - [Building a company without outside investment](/blog/building-without-a-safety-net) Robert Nikic is an entrepreneur, TEDx speaker and Advisory Council Chair at Reseated Councils (United Nations SDG 8 & 9). He writes about what he has seen build and break companies, and about the rules that decide whether small businesses get a fair shot. Read his writing on [Medium](https://medium.com/@robertnikic), the Open Doors newsletter on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertnikic) and daily posts on [X](https://x.com/robertnikic).