Hi, I’m Nika. 
Physicist. 
Board-game-publishing start-up co-founder. 
Climber.
Since 2022, I have been balancing my professional life between physics and entrepreneurship, and passionately protecting my free time (climbing, exploring the outdoors, board games and reading) so it doesn’t get consumed by my career.
The physics part:
- I have an MSc in physics.
- I worked in the aviation industry developing VR flight simulators.
- In 2019, I was honoured as one of 10 nominees for the national Woman Engineer of the Year award, a role model initiative for girls in STEM.
- I am currently working and doing my PhD at the Jozef Stefan Institute. My focus is on energetics, specifically numerical simulations in the field of electric transmission.
The start-up part:
- I co-founded SnowBoardGames, an independent board game publishing studio.
- Our Hike! Kickstarter campaign was the 6th biggest Slovene campaign by the number of backers (3451 backers raised almost 120,000€).
- I have been involved in all aspects, from board game development, to sales, shipping, business development etc.
Why am I doing both?
Physics is my passion, and I aspire to be on the cutting edge of tech, solving burning real-life problems. The PhD is an amazing opportunity to dig deep into numerical simulations and upgrade my skills in the field.
SnowBoardGames is the joker card. I realised during covid that just physics won’t be enough. I wanted to try Kickstarter, learn about business, and have more control over my time. Board games are an amazing field to do it in – they take you on adventures, and we are using the gained knowledge to build a platform that will help others publish their games too.
I believe in the long run, both skill sets will converge, providing a strong foundation for the next story. But I admit balancing both is hard. I have to be very efficient if I am to succeed and still have my free time, which I passionately defend.
Optimising for efficiency
Mom says I have been doing it since I was a kid. Physics gave me the framework to look at things analytically and understand the underlying relations, and aviation taught me how to distil a process to a checklist. My PhD is about efficiency in energetics.
This is why I feel uniquely armed to optimise for efficiency. I am currently focused on finding an efficient way to balance a demanding job and running a start-up.
If you are interested in the insights, I invite you to follow my blog. My goal is to publish weekly, but I know that there will be times when the posts will be a bit less frequent. I have 17 posts ready from the time we were just starting and launching the Kickstarter, and I am working on some new ones about the lessons I’ve learned in the past 3 years, and the adventures we’ve had in the process.
If you wish to be notified when I post, enter your email below. And if you wish to connect, find me on Linkedin (Nika Mlinarič Hribar) & shoot me a message.
Looking forward to meeting you 🙂
Nika