The team
Meet The team
Ciprian Morar
Ciprian is the CEO of Lateral, a Technology Incubator with 5 offices around the world. An Engineer turned Designer turned Founder and Entrepreneur.
Originally from Transylvania, Ciprian was one of the first employees at Expedia Europe. After Expedia, he built Flame, a company acquired by TotalStayGroup after only 2 years. Shortly after, he moved to Silicon Valley. Over the past 20 years, Ciprian has worked on over 100 digital products and startups in the field of design and tech. He has consulted for many companies, including: Virgin, Kuoni, Travelzoo, Rubicon Global. Ciprian is an award winning designer (D&AD) and creative partner at *The Power of Storytelling* (www.thepowerofstorytelling.org) an international storytelling conference.
Ciprian founded Lateral Institute of Technology in order to experiment with the impact of unconventional education, based on a view that real-life projects bring more than ‘theory’.
Mircea Dragoi
Mircea is a Creative Partner at Lateral Institute.
A father of three wonderful children, Mircea is a self-taught artist, designer, illustrator, engineer.
A firm believer that anyone can learn through curiosity and hard work, Mircea is the spiritual soul of the Lateral Insistute of Technology, focused on design. When he’s not challenging his kids with powerful debates about the value of love, the (hidden) meaning of life and how to cope with failures, Mircea is chasing his golden retriever through the forests of Transylvania.
Mircea loves tinkering and crafting, modern design, Japan, gardening. He has mastered the incredible skill of building anything out of clay or paper and also holds a black belt in Photoshop.
A very accomplished professional, Mircea has been working with world-famous clients around the world bringing emotion and delight through design.
Cristina Ilinca
Thanks to her 15+ years experience in building startups and corporations, Cristina can easily approach any challenge and make things happen. As law graduate from Cluj, Cristina started her career in Bucharest: Rompetrol, Intersport, ISDC/Endava and Samsung are some of the companies where she build successful teams of over 400 people. After a solid corporate stint, and a career in HR, Cristina took the entrepreneurial route to her own IT company, building it up from nothing to a successful firm.
Today she is the leader of the European Operations of Lateral, a team of 300+ dreamers, inventors and engineers who think different in order to create, build and grow businesses.
Cristina is a wonderwoman: the mother of a beautiful girl.
When she’s not riding her motorcycle she’s probably traveling the world. She does not take herself too seriously and she is 99.99% of the time smiling.