May We All Have a Vision Now and Then

Happy 2024 from me and Ellie! 💛🥂✨

Happy Sunday!

Here we all are, in the last hours of 2023, setting the dinner tables and preparing the champagne to send off the year. Ever since 2020, it’s become ever more challenging to be unabashedly optimistic and hopeful of the year to come, although I’m still very much a big optimist for the long run. And since I’ve never been one for end-of-year retrospections and new-year’s-resolutions, I’ll just leave you with two images from yesterday and today, with some thoughts and wishes related to both.

The first photo is a selfie Ellie and I took today, on our stroll around Troitsa, Ellie’s ancestral home village in Northeastern Bulgaria, not far from the Black Sea coast:

It was 17 degrees C this afternoon, the sun was shining, and behind us you can see the ascent of the Shumen plateau and the village of Troitsa, with its characteristic mosque minaret sticking out in the middle. I’ve only been coming here every winter for the last 15 years, but even in this short span of time, the extent of climate change is spectacular. Despite being about 85km from the sea, this place is pretty secluded in the Balkan (Stara Planina) mountain range, and winters were harsh here, until recently. In the last couple of years, it’s been like this, and it gives one thoughts on where things are headed. Global warming feels very real, and if anything, I’m planning to be much more conscious of it in the new, coming year.

The other photo is even less cheerful unfortunately:

Photo credit Yan Dobronosov

This photo was taken this morning from a drone, by Ukrainian photographer Yan Dobronosov. The destroyed building is the Palace Hotel in Kharkiv, Ukraine, which was hit by a Russian Iskander missile yesterday evening around 7pm. Thirty-four guest rooms were occupied during the raid, and at least five people are injured, two of them journalist colleagues of my friend Anna, who works as a stringer for major press agencies, and who messaged me about the attack this morning.

I have a special relationship with this building, as I always stayed in that hotel on my many visits to Kharkiv before 2022. My favorite restaurant in the city, called JORD, was on the ground floor. In March 2019, two days before he won the presidential elections, I stumbled into Volodymyr Zelensky in the lobby together with my friends Zhenya and Oksana, and we had a chat. It turned out the security guards hanging out in front of my room were his, because his room was next to mine.

All of that is destroyed, in another countless act of barbaric cruelty. Russia has no business bombing anything in Ukraine, not even “legitimate” military targets, let alone civilian targets like a hotel where nowadays it’s mostly only foreign journalists and diplomats who stay. For me personally, it’s the first time in this war that a facility I know very well was bombed. It marks another threshold, and the war, again, gets extra personal.

If I should have a New Year’s resolution, it would be to work towards ending Russian fascism. Inevitably, that evil empire will get consumed by internal strife and civil war, and will fall apart, not being able to exert violence outside its borders. Our aim in the West should be to quicken that moment. Every euro spent on supporting Ukraine helps, but also, every action that enables people who live in Russia helps the other side. I’ve formulated for myself a simple principle: anyone who makes or spends money from/in Russia is guilty in this war. I’ve stopped communicating with once-friends and acquaintances who chose to stay there, stopped following their media personalities and consuming any of their content, and have deleted all apps by Russian companies from my devices. What worked in the 20th century can work again; if we install and strictly enforce a complete “iron curtain” between us and the terrorist state, we’ll bankrupt them once again. Together with the heroism and sacrifice of the Ukrainians, that will deal the definitive blow to the biggest security threat in Europe since Hitler.

So with this somewhat heavy message, Ellie and I wish you a fantastic, peaceful, and victorious 2024, full of love and special moments. To echo ABBA, as I did in the title of this letter, “May we all have a vision, now and then, of a world where every neighbor is a friend”. Cheers! 🥂✨ 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣4️⃣

We're all locals everywhere now

Everything is the same everywhere nowadays, and maybe that's not a bad thing

Happy Sunday,

And just like that, we’re in December, the holiday season is in full swing, and life transforms into a double marathon of finishing up all the work stuff due by year-end, and showing your face at all the Xmas parties that matter.

Last Sunday I took a hiatus with this newsletter, as Ellie and I were spending a week in France and Switzerland, taking a combined birthday and Xmas holiday break ahead of all the craziness that’s due in December. For both of us, the last weeks of the year are bound to be very busy with work and social engagements, and our days are planned back-to-back all the way till December 22.

France was absolutely fantastic; it was so good to be back. It’s quite miraculous given how much we travel, that we haven’t been back to Paris, or anywhere in France together for that matter, since Ellie moved out of the Paris 18eme apartment she rented for two years in 2010-2012. I spent two days in Nice in the summer of 2016 on my own, mentoring at the European Innovation Academy, but other than that, neither of us set foot in France in all those years.

Ah, Paris. Strictly the touristy perspective. We’re not sure there are any other ones left:)

This time around we spent our days visiting Xmas markets in Paris and the Alsace, enjoying a weekend in Basel with our friend Andreas, and reliving our Paris life from 12 years ago in the very apartment that we once lived in, on the 20th floor of the iconic Boucry tower, overlooking all of Paris from a bird’s-eye view.

One big takeaway that stood out for me on this trip is how completely commoditized all the countries and cities have become. I’ve been experiencing Paris for almost 30 years, and when comparing my first ever visit with my parents in 1995 with last week’s trip, it’s incredible how much smaller the differences are between home and abroad.

Back in the summer of 1995, France was still effectively outside of NATO, the euro was still seven years away, most of the cars on the roads were French, and the majority of those French cars still had the particular yellow headlights that have been standardized away in favor of the European white lights since. I remember how we had to wait in a line of cars on the border between Kortrijk and Lille (Schengen was only implemented three months earlier, and France was delaying the removal of border checkpoints due to the ongoing multiple bombings in the Paris metro that summer). I also remember how in the supermarket, all the products were different from back home in the Netherlands, and how it was a constant effort to calculate prices from French francs to Dutch guldens. And of course, absolutely nobody spoke English.

How different everything is today. You land at CDG airport, whizz through the automatic passport control gate with your EU id, open up Uber, and a a few minutes later you’re headed towards the city on the back seat of a hybrid Toyota SUV, chatting with the driver in English. Prices are in euros, everything is paid by tapping your phone, most of the eateries you see are burger joints and everybody is clad in Zara and H&M. Or in Louis Vuitton, which might be local, but is as common in any other city in Europe. I actually looked it up, and in 1995, Louis Vuitton had only one store in Paris, obviously its flagship one. Today there are 12. And of course, everybody’s wearing AirPods, listening to Spotify, and there’s a Starbucks on every corner.

On a positive note, this is all a huge testament to technology, to European integration, to globalization, and to how far we’ve come. But I can’t help thinking, as I often do, of how much more difficult things have become for the younger generation. Thirty years ago, all you had to do if you wanted to experience new things, was to drive south for five hours. It was a completely different world. Just going there meant you’d learn the basics of a new language, taste new flavors, and in a fundamental way for your life experience skills, see that things could be done differently. Today it is much harder to do that.

As Ellie and I strolled along Champs-Élysées one day last week, I also thought about something else. Big cities have completed the cycle of turning into tourist traps. The iconic Paris boulevard is no longer a place where a youthful Joe Dassin would stumble upon a fellow young Parisian and fall in love at first sight, as he did in the song. The romance of the Eiffel Tower is only in photos, and only if you’re visiting from outside Paris. Living in a big global city means being competed away by tens of millions of annual visitors, who all want a piece of your street, your food, your museum, and your shopping. As time goes by, all those things become made for them, not for you. Adding to that, modern technology allows you to do anything from anywhere. You don’t actually have to live in Paris to have a great Paris-based job, and hundreds of thousands of people with those jobs don’t live there anymore.

And maybe that’s the very reason Ellie and I hadn’t been back for 11 years. Maybe big cities are places where you’re more local when you’re visiting, not when you live there. As the well-known New York saying goes, “a New Yorker is anyone who feels they’re a New Yorker”. Maybe we’re all Parisians, Londoners, Tokyoites, and New Yorkers, much more than the people who actually reside there.

What a time to be alive! See you next Sunday!

Living in interesting times

How the fear-of-missing-out made place for different and event opposite feelings through the years

Happy Sunday!

I was about 12 or so, when at school our Latin teacher explained to us the meaning of the ancient Chinese saying “May you live in interesting times”, and that rather than a good wish, it is a curse. Despite this early knowledge, I have spent a big part of my younger years yearning for more meaning from my surroundings. An early believer of Woody Allen’s famous quote that “Eighty percent of success is showing up”, I often thought that the most important thing in life is to be in the right place at the right time when important things are happening.

Perhaps this is a function of growing up reading lots of history books and autobiographies in an attic room in suburban, rural Netherlands, where seemingly nothing of global significance happened in a wide radius. Perhaps also, this explains why I decided to move to Bulgaria, where I get to play a modest yet utterly fulfilling role in shaping a new and modern European society.

I got reminded of this feeling, of wanting to be where things are happening, earlier this week, when many of my Ukrainian friends reminisced about the Euromaidan protests of 2013, which lasted for two months and ended with the Revolution of Dignity in February 2014, culminating in the overthrow of the pro-Russian Yanukovych government, followed immediately by Russia’s occupation of Crimea and the start of the war in the Donbass region of Eastern Ukraine.

Those protests started exactly 10 years ago this week, and on that occasion, absolutely coincidentally, I happened to be around when history was being made. On December 3, 2013, I landed in Kyiv to take part in a venture conference, and during the next several days, I’d spend my evenings in the company of all the other conference speakers, local and foreign, on Kyiv’s main square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, walking around the tent settlements and barricades, talking to protesters, drinking tea with them, and chanting “Україна - це Європа”, meaning “Ukraine is Europe” with thousands of others gathered there.

A Facebook post of mine from the Maidan protests in December 2013, ten years ago.

It was a foundational moment for me, as it kicked off my personal relationship with Ukraine, and made me an ardent supporter of Ukraine’s national cause. Looking back now, ten years later, the feelings are bittersweet. What started on the streets of Kyiv ten years ago has grown into the defining civilizational conflict of our generation. On the one hand, Ukraine has developed tremendously towards the European future it aspires to. In other European countries, we have regained our awareness about the security risks that surround us, and have become much more prepared and resilient. On the other hand, the price paid, especially by Ukraine and Ukrainians, is devastating.

I wonder now, had I known back then in December 2013, when I walked around the barricaded main square of Kyiv, looking at the thousands of happy faces, where this will end up ten years later, how I would have felt. For sure, today the memories of those days feel conflicting, painful, and even tragic.

As I grow older, I realize I care less about being where the action happens. Whether it’s a night out with my colleagues or friends or a revolution happening in a country’s main square, I much more prefer to hear the stories of “you’ll never believe what went down there” at a later point from others than witnessing them myself.

And when it comes to countries, the ability to lounge on the attic in some boring suburb reading history books seems much more advanced and sophisticated than being on a main square that the riot police was getting ready to shoot at, as it did six weeks after the cheerful nights I spent there in December 2013. On February 20 2014, 108 protesters lost their lives in a police attempt to crush the protest, the first victims in a conflict that by now has claimed over 200,000 Ukrainian lives.

I know that one day Ukraine will be free and peaceful, and that the lives lost will continue to be honored as heroes who paid the ultimate price for their country’s prosperous future. But as long as I live I will carry a burden with me for being there when their fates were being decided.

And so today I wish less for interesting times than I do for peaceful, prosperous and happy ones. Even if they’re more mundane. As Vladimir Nabokov famously quipped, the best places are where nobody knows the name of the local head of government. Instead of living in interesting times, may we live in such where we can be that negligent.

Saying cheers to luck

A realization on how lucky I've been to be lucky

Happy Sunday!

I have a confession to make; for almost two years now, I’ve been starting my days with a cup of coffee and solving the day’s Wordle. I’ve only skipped two or so plays, and it’s become, together with a few other New York Times puzzles, my go-to-way for kickstarting my brain every day. At some point, I got Ellie hooked on it too, although she only solves them on the weekends. This morning, as we were having coffee, she gleefully came to me to show that she solved today’s puzzle in three tries (it took me four). “It’s luck of course!”, she said.

Wordle is about guessing words, so that’s definitely luck, supported by a good vocabulary. But as I turned 40 last Friday, with a wonderful celebration at DOM Concept Space in Sofia, attended by so many of you, I realized once more that luck is also the most important asset in life.

The luck to be healthy, to be living in a peaceful country, to do work that is meaningful and rewarding, and to be surrounded by good people. Some will say that it’s more about the effort that you put into it, quoting Picasso’s famous words that “Inspiration exists but it has to find you working”. I disagree. I think there are very few people that don’t try or work very hard. But there are so many circumstances that are beyond our ability to work on them, or our power to prevent them.

I have friends who have survived cancer. I have friends who have lost loved ones too early. I have friends who have been scammed out of their business or savings. I have friends who had to flee from war. That’s all things that have absolutely nothing to do with how hard they tried for them not to happen.

On Friday, when I celebrated my birthday, and raised a glass with a toast to my assembled friends, I urged for optimism, quoting my beloved Leonard Cohen: “I’ve studied deeply in the philosophies and the religions, but cheerfulness kept breaking through”. Looking back at my life, I do believe that optimism has been my most important trait. But what has enabled me to be an optimist, my biggest blessing in the grander scheme of things, is that I have been consistently lucky.

So as I wrap up this celebratory weekend, I’ll do another toast here, as a continuation of Friday’s: May We Always Be Lucky in Life.

With Ellie, getting ready to celebrate my Birthday last Friday

And finally, while we’re still on the Birthday note; a very big thank you to everyone who attended my party and donated to the Stoyan Kambarev Foundation, to support extraordinary young Bulgarian artistic talent. Our donation will go towards the “Tress of Talent” Xmas tree park in Sofia, that will be unveiled in a central location on December 1, with all proceeds going to the Kambarev Foundation stipend fund. Somewhere early December, I will announce a time where we can come together at a Xmas market close to the tree park, and celebrate once more with a cup of mulled wine at “our” Xmas tree!

With Ellie at the Kambarev Foundation Xmas tree we sponsored with your help in 2021. Coming soon again this Xmas season!

Reconciling with being a generalist

The pros and cons of never really being very good at anything

Happy Sunday!

Well, it’s actually Monday in most places where you’ll read this, but I’m just sending my letter to you now because I spent the entire day driving around the Netherlands, visiting family and friends.

As I often do when I drive long-distance, I listened to podcasts. I never follow any particular podcasts, but I do enjoy listening to people I know, and occasionally, to conversations on topics I find interesting. In my daily routine in Sofia, I can’t find moments for that, so I save those episodes up for when I do long drives.

Yesterday, one of the episodes I listened to was a Dutch podcast on criminal law, De Staat van het Strafrecht, which is co-hosted by my old university friend Margje van Weerden, a former attorney and currently a leading expert on law enforcement and criminal proceedings in the Netherlands. With her co-presenter, Margje discusses complicated cases and Dutch criminal justice reform, in a light-hearted tone, making the rather difficult and often dull topic accessible, digestible, and relatable to the general audience.

As I listened, somewhat marveling that I still remember and understand a bunch from my law school days about the way criminal justice works in the Netherlands, I realized again how much I always admire and respect people who are true specialists at something, like Margje.

I am not one of them, I am an absolute generalist. Whether it comes from a rich childhood of overexposure to different cultures, or my short attention span and tendency to procrastinate, I have always consistently made choices that steered me away from becoming a real professional specialist on any topic.

When I decided to study law, I did it because many successful people in arts, media, journalism, and politics studied law. When it was time to specialize, I chose international law, because it’s the least legal of all specialities. When the time came to apply for jobs, I went for the easiest and nicest-looking ones. And today, many of my friends and coworkers joke that my next VC fund should be called “Shallow Ventures”. I love you all for that ❤️😂

Truth is, as you get older, it’s easier to be a generalist. Life expects of you to be able to see the bigger picture and to steer things in certain directions, whether personally, professionally, or publicly. As one of my first bosses used to say, “in your twenties you learn, in your thirties you practice, and in your forties, you actually do things”. He was very much a generalist, and 45 at the time, so I’m still waiting to hear what happens in your fifties, sixties, and seventies:)

But being a generalist also comes with drawbacks. Because we lack expertise, we’re less independent. Because of our vague job descriptions, we’re easily replaceable. And because we work across topics, teams, and projects, we burn out much faster than specialists. I don’t think I have ever had a burnout, but I know a few times when I came close, and I’ve watched so many industry colleagues and friends go through bad ones, that I’m always aware of the risk, prioritizing idle times and off-work routines consistently.

When I was younger I did have many moments when I doubted if opting for hopping jobs and high-level projects was the right choice, over detail, specialization, and dedication. In my twenties, I often envied friends who landed better positions, or got awards and recognition for their work. I’ve also seen many fellow generalists trying to pretend to specialize in something, and it was usually a sorry sight. Around my 30th I decided I’ll just continue on the generalist path, bring it what may.

And it’s been good, I have to admit. I guess whatever we chose twenty years ago, as time goes by we settle into it and make it our own. Of course, landing in startups and VC helped as well, as there are few areas of work as skewed towards generalists as being a founder or an investor.

The time went I irreversibly went down the generalist path. With Charlotte and Maarten, my first cofounders in my first startup, in Amsterdam in 2010. Photo courtesy of Bas van der Horst, our then-designer and to this day great friend.

Let’s see what the next decade brings. The good thing about getting older is that I feel less need to care or worry about things, or about what people think. But I do wonder if I can still do what I do when I inevitably become even less flexible that I am today. Will I miss out on some trend? Will a skill be needed that I so gleefully chose to ignore when I still could’ve mastered it?

Time will tell, but so far so good, and it feels good to be comfortable with the choices I have made and where they have taken me thus far, as I turn 40.

On to the next decade!