“What we asked was respect for the rule of the law and for every vote to count,” he said. “I had a chance to lead something that within three months grew from virtually nothing to more than a hundred thousand people protesting in the street every day. And that never would have happened if we didn't tap into the underlying energy that was already there.”
He learned that the best use of anyone's time is to act at the right moment to make good things happen. He said if those protests occurred six months earlier, it would’ve been impossible to achieve the same impact. His sense for timing, comradery, and shared responsibility added another crack in Milosovic’s grip on power.
“It was like when Arab Spring started, or the Orange revolution in Ukraine,” he said. “My goal was to get as many folks to walk out and say enough is enough.”
Doing business for the past 15 to 20 years has taught him to recognize patterns and be purposeful.
“I can go deep on tech but you've also got to see the trends and hopefully see it before others. You have to articulate it first for yourself, then three people around you, the bigger team, and then customers. The transition to cloud, new business models like subscriptions and making IT easier to use, are all trends that Frame has been surfing for years.”
Astrophysics and Video Magic to DaaS
Nikola studied engineering at Boston University, where he stumbled upon space physics, which somehow, combined with his experience as a revolution leader, led him to experiment with digital video. He created an application while studying for his Ph.D. and turned it into a software company in 2006 that caught good traction with customers. The app applied analytics to real-time video to improve resolution, then tracked quality.
“Post-processing took incoming video and magically made it better, cleaner, removed noise and allowed for better analytics,” he said. “All these kinds of algorithms are now helping self-driving cars recognize things.”
A few years later, he realized he could deliver full application experiences through a browser, so he created a new startup, Frame.
“With Frame, the applications are essentially video streamed to you,” he said.
The idea to start Frame came from an observation that distributing software is difficult. He knew very little about virtual desktops and applications at the time, except that they were hard to implement, clunky to operate -- and very expensive. That got him thinking about how to do it better using streaming video or by remoting applications from one place to another. These were software capabilities he studied in college and later built his first company around.
“That idea came together in the summer of 2012, and the rise of the cloud, the rise of virtual graphics and, in general, virtualized computing enabled me with a small group of people to really jumpstart Frame,” he said.
Like many technology entrepreneurs at the time, he seized on the big opportunity to build a company for the new cloud era. He knew Frame could really address the growing needs in enterprise, commercial and small business looking for the next generation solutions in IT.
Cloud and Everything as a Service
“Customers are ready for the cloud and ‘as a service,’” he said. “Just like the iPhone and apps make everything easy—like hailing a car or renting a house in a single click—people want to deploy their data centers or get ten thousand virtual desktops running with a single click.”
