BrankoDžakula — Entrepreneur and educator in cybersecurity and AI

I grew up in Bijela, a small place on the Bay of Kotor where the schoolyard ran down to the beach and half the town - my mother included - worked in the shipyard. The first time I opened a computer case and saw a motherboard, fan spinning under a ton of dust, that was it. I “cleaned” that computer every week from then on. I broke more than I fixed. That is still, roughly, the job.

At university in Podgorica I found my way to a mentor, Slaviša, who talked about information security like he was speaking Spanish. Where I come from, not knowing was a disgrace. At some point I swallowed the shame and started saying “I don’t know” - and then I learned how to finish the sentence.

That sentence carried me for ten years. Telenor first, starting on the helpdesk. Then Air Serbia in Belgrade with a manager title, a ’95 Fiat Punto slightly younger than me, no bread left by the 20th of the month, and an airline’s information security system to build from nothing. Then Munich: HolidayCheck, one of Europe’s largest travel platforms, and Kaia Health, where I was CISO of a company moving patients’ medical data across two continents.

Then I came back. Part of me had never left the Bay anyway.

What I do, in plain words: almost everything that matters to a company now lives in software — its money, its customers’ records, its ability to open in the morning. My work is making sure the wrong people cannot reach any of it, and that when something goes wrong, somebody notices fast. Nearly every organisation knows this matters. Almost none know where to start. The companies below live in that gap.

AI changed the arithmetic on both sides of this work. The morning I gave a talk about it in Belgrade, someone had already emailed our HR — a real employee’s full name, written in Serbian Cyrillic, asking to change the account a salary lands in. That is the new baseline. But the same tools mean one defender can now build in an evening what used to take a security team a quarter, and a growing part of my job is showing people exactly that.

The other half of the work is teaching, and that half is free, it will stay free. My father is a surgeon who spent his whole career repeating one line: the beauty of living is in giving, not in taking. And I had a mentor who answered every “I don’t know” I brought him. Whenever I get the chance to be somebody’s Slavo, I take it.