I still remember those crisp autumn mornings in Groningen, sitting in a cold lecture hall as our political science professor introduced us to the Easterlin Paradox. The concept was elegantly simple yet profoundly counterintuitive: beyond a certain threshold, increasing national wealth doesn’t necessarily lead to greater happiness among a country’s population. The richer people become, he explained with a knowing smile, the more reasons they’ll find to complain.

At the time, as a student on my third cup of coffee and dreaming of big horizons, I filed this away as an interesting academic curiosity. Some twenty years later however, living and working in Bulgaria, I find myself recalling that lecture almost daily. The better our country performs economically, the louder the chorus of complaints seems to grow. It’s the Easterlin Paradox unfolding in real time; on the streets, across social media, and at lunches and dinners throughout Sofia.

The facts speak for themselves, and they tell a remarkable story of a country’s transformation. When I first moved to Bulgaria in 2011, the country’s GDP stood at $36.86 billion. Today, in 2025, that figure has risen to $115.13 billion; an impressive 212% increase in just fifteen years. This isn’t statistical noise or accounting tricks: it’s real, substantive economic growth that has fundamentally transformed the Bulgarian landscape. The average monthly salary, a modest 669 leva in 2010, has nearly quadrupled to 2,588 leva in 2025.

These aren’t marginal improvements; they represent a complete reimagining of what is economically possible for millions of Bulgarians. While our fellow citizens often grumble about traffic jams and rising restaurant prices, these complaints are, paradoxically, symptoms of success. We sit in traffic because more people can afford more cars. Restaurants are pricier because wages have risen and demand has grown. The Easterlin Paradox predicted precisely this peculiar dissonance between prosperity and perception.

Bulgaria’s economy has demonstrated remarkable resilience throughout 2025, building on a recovery that gathered momentum in 2024. After GDP growth slowed to just 1.9% in 2023 due to global economic turbulence and the effects of Russia’s war in Ukraine, the economy rebounded with 2.8% growth in 2024, driven primarily by consumer spending. Higher real wages, increased employment, and expanded social transfers put money in people’s pockets, and they were spending it. As we close out 2025, the economic forecast for 2026 projects steady growth of 2.1%, with unemployment expected to fall to a historic low of 3.8% and inflation cooling to just 1.8%.

Of course, these projections assume political stability and timely adoption of the 2026 national budget; a process that, at the time of writing, remains unfinished and creates significant political uncertainty. Nevertheless, long-term trends remain encouraging. The labor market stays exceptionally tight, with unemployment at 4.2%, which essentially means full employment by most economic standards, with businesses across sectors reporting difficulty in finding qualified workers.

The structure of Bulgaria’s economy has evolved significantly, with wholesale and retail trade now accounting for 22.7% of gross value added, followed closely by mining and manufacturing at 21.3%. Particularly encouraging is that Bulgaria’s GDP per employed person reached €29,478 in 2024, reflecting steady productivity growth even through the pandemic years. The National Recovery and Resilience Plan is expected to play a catalytic role in sustaining this momentum, channeling substantial European funding toward infrastructure, digitalization, and green transition projects that will shape the Bulgarian economic landscape for decades to come.

Among all sectors, however, one stands out above the rest in terms of growth trajectory and future potential: technology. Bulgaria’s tech sector has become a shining star of the economy, delivering growth rates that outpace virtually every other industry. Between 2020 and 2024, the sector’s gross value added jumped from €4.5 billion to €7.5 billion—a remarkable 65% increase in only four years. While the sector represents 8.3% of national gross value added, its influence resonates far beyond these numbers.

Bulgaria has cultivated one of the most dynamic startup ecosystems in Southeastern Europe, with 489 funded startups between 2020 and mid-2025 - more than double than runner-up Romania. Our country boasts an impressive 19 growth-stage funded startups per million inhabitants, nearly three times the regional average. This success is no accident; it’s the result of deliberate investments in education, infrastructure, and supportive policies. Bulgarian venture capital and private equity funds have raised over €600 million and are actively seeking investment opportunities, with online tools and business software dominating the investment landscape at 68% of total investment value in 2024.

Major success stories like Payhawk, Endurosat, and Shelly Group have emerged from the Bulgarian tech scene, achieving valuations that would have seemed impossible just a decade ago. Foreign direct investment in information and communications reached €124.9 million in 2024, and Bulgarian tech investors aren’t just staying at home; they’re increasingly investing in Romania, Greece, the United Kingdom, and even the United States, taking Bulgarian innovation capacity global. The sector’s growth is fueled by a well-educated workforce, still-competitive labor costs, and Bulgaria’s strategic position as a nearshore tech hub for Western European companies seeking quality development at reasonable prices and European standards.

If the tech sector represents Bulgaria’s future, then the adoption of the euro on January 1, 2026 represents its most significant economic step in recent years. After nearly 19 years as a European Union member, Bulgaria will become the 21st country to adopt the euro as its official currency, replacing the Bulgarian lev at a fixed exchange rate of 1.95583 leva to one euro. The benefits of this transition are substantial and multifaceted. Most immediately, Bulgarian businesses and consumers will eliminate the hurdles and risks of currency exchange when trading with eurozone partners, which is a significant advantage given that 65% of Bulgarian exports go to EU countries and 45% specifically to eurozone countries.

Lower borrowing costs are virtually guaranteed as Bulgaria gains access to the European Central Bank’s monetary policy instruments and financial backstops, reducing currency uncertainty risk and strengthening external credit ratings. For businesses, especially small and medium enterprises, this means access to euro-denominated loans on better terms, as well as elimination of conversion costs and the reputational risks of a less familiar, albeit euro-pegged, national currency. Price transparency will improve dramatically, allowing Bulgarian consumers to compare prices across the eurozone and encouraging increased competition.

Bulgaria’s already impressive credit standing - the country maintains the second-lowest public debt in the EU at just 24.6% of GDP - will likely improve further, leading to even lower government borrowing costs and, ultimately, better public services. Perhaps most importantly, eurozone membership cements Bulgaria’s position within the European Union’s core decision-making structures, giving it a seat at the ECB’s interest rate committee and providing protection against external geopolitical pressures, particularly relevant given the current volatile international environment.

The country’s existing participation in the European Banking Union since 2020 has already laid much of the groundwork, ensuring a smooth operational transition. While some public skepticism remains, fueled partly by fears of price increases and partly by disinformation campaigns, the prevailing consensus among economists is that any inflationary effect will be moderate and temporary, far outweighed by the long-term benefits of deeper European integration.

As we stand on the threshold of 2026, reflecting on Bulgaria’s economic journey and the political back-and-forth surrounding the ill-fated 2026 national budget, I’m reminded of a conversation I had a few weeks ago at a startup event in Sofia. A young entrepreneur was passionately complaining about the challenges of doing business in Bulgaria; the bureaucracy, the talent shortage, the difficulty of raising capital. Yet that same entrepreneur had just closed a €2 million funding round, hired their twentieth employee, and was preparing to expand into three new European markets.

Their company wouldn’t have existed fifteen years ago; the ecosystem to support it simply wasn’t there. The capital wasn’t available, the talent pool was smaller, the market connections were absent. They were complaining precisely because they had choices, opportunities, and ambitions that their predecessors could only dream of. This is the Easterlin Paradox in action once again, but it’s also something more. As Bulgaria joins the eurozone, expands its tech sector, and continues its steady economic ascent, the complaints won’t disappear: they may even grow louder.

But scratch beneath the surface of those complaints and you’ll find a country that has transformed itself from a post-communist backwater into a competitive, innovative, and increasingly prosperous member of the European mainstream. The numbers tell one story, but lived experience tells another; of a nation that has learned to expect more because it has achieved more, and that sees challenges not as obstacles but as the price of admission to even greater success.

The euro may be just a currency, but for Bulgaria in 2026, it represents something far more significant: recognition that the country has earned its place at the European table, not as a supplicant but as an equal partner. And if we complain along the way? Well, that just means we’re prosperous enough to have opinions.

By Max Gurvits, Managing Partner at Vitosha Venture Partners, and Board Member of the Bulgarian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association (BVCA)

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:

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

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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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

No pseudo-philosophical introspections from me today; I just want to invite you all to my upcoming Birthday celebration in Sofia on November 17.

I would really love to see you there, if you happen to be in Bulgaria. More dates for other cities will follow in the next months.

RSVP here for November 17 in Sofia

Today was a remarkable day for me: for the first time ever I voted in an election in a country other than the Netherlands. And for the first time ever, I voted in Bulgaria, in the municipal elections that take place every four years, where the mayors and city councils are elected. And in Sofia, where I get to vote, also the district mayors are elected today.

As EU citizens we’re entitled to participate actively (as voters) and passively (as electees) in local elections and European Parliament elections in any EU country where we are registered as residents. Yet, in the twelve years that I’ve been living in Bulgaria, I never felt the need to exercise that right. I’ve always diligently voted in the Netherlands parliamentary elections by mail-in absentee ballot, but never felt that I needed to take the effort to register as a voter in Bulgaria.

This time it’s different, for several reasons. First, I happen to personally know many mayoral and city council candidates, so there’s a personal angle for me to many of them, all across the sympathy spectrum. Secondly, and much more importantly, I care more.

I care as a regular citizen, who has opinions about street cleaning, public spaces, parking policy, safety, etc. But I also care as a European. It’s a core idea of the EU that we’re not guests in other EU countries, but are at home, especially when we live there. I’ve always believed that the key to any societal development is more diversity. First and foremost of the gender and race kind, but also international diversity is important. It’s a simple truth that the most developed societies and economies are those that have become places where people from other countries want to, and can, move to. The obvious examples are historically multicultural countries like the US, Canada, Australia, and UK, as well as the Netherlands. But some countries, which have only recently become very developed, never had multiculturalism. Look at Norway, Ireland, or the UAE. However, as they started to accelerate their growth, they have all become open to newcomers from all across Europe and the world.

In Bulgaria, for very understandable historical reasons, I still lack this vision, and I think that by voting I can make a statement on this. This country doesn’t just belong to people whose heritage is Bulgarian; it’s a European nation that can, and hopefully will, become home to any Europeans that wish to reside here.

When I look at the election discourse in Bulgaria, I definitely think we need more of that international perspective. For someone who’s used to a very participatory and fractured political environment like in the Netherlands, where the 150-seat lower house of parliament has a whopping 20 party groups represented, the idea of 4 or 5 parties who are all either very for or very against something on a very limited and politicized list of topics, seems too constrained. Modern democracy is by definition much more about dialogue and finding consensus than it is about implementing your agenda at the expense of someone else’s.

And in the end, democracy is about representation. I’m glad to know that, whatever the outcome of tonight’s vote count, my opinion is taken into account.

Unlike many of my progressive friends in Sofia, I personally care less about whether the old and presumably more corrupt party gets another 4 years to run this city, than I do about increasing participation across the political spectrum, more dialogue, and yes, more Europe, in the way that this city is managed and grown. A city that is a European capital, and the 14th largest city in the EU, that also happens to be my home.

This weekend I’m in New York, where my partner Stoyan and I are having meetings related to our fund work. We got here on Tuesday, and will be here most of the coming week as well. On Thursday, we hopped over to Boston, for two meetings with associates there, and I had the pleasure of spending a day again in one of the cities that were my home once.

It’s quite obvious now that growing up and living as an adult in different countries and cultures has been a massive privilege. I have lived in Russia (back then USSR), mainland US, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, and Bulgaria. Some of these places have been my home for decades, others for mere months. As I was showing Stoyan around the Boston suburb of Belmont, where I spent time as a kid, an interesting insight occurred to me.

Moving countries is generally appreciated in hindsight. When you tell stories of the places you have lived in, people are impressed and consider you an interesting person. However, when you make plans to move countries, most people around you don’t approve of it.

I’ve experienced this many times, both in my childhood and in my adult years. Most of my friends in the US and the Netherlands still don’t understand how and why I moved to Bulgaria twelve years ago. It’s generally seen as a less developed country, so why would you move there, they say. However, once they visit me in Sofia, they usually change their mind.

It’s much more the case when you’re a kid. I vividly remember how the announcement that we would move to another country would be met with sadness by teachers and classmates at schools I went to. Even more than sadness perhaps, with something almost like grief. Like if you’re announcing an incurable illness, a death foretold. What’s more, as parents you get a lot of negative feedback. Ripping a child away from their surroundings, changing schools, putting them in a language environment where they’ll be disadvantaged compared to local children, changing climates even. All of these are apparently considered highly irresponsible parenting. My parents got a lot of that when we were little, as they were moving us from country to country.

Looking back at my life so far, I think there’s nothing that had more positive impact on my outlook and opportunities today than growing up in different countries and cultures. I learned to adapt, to quickly make new friends and acquaintances, to learn languages naturally and playfully, to relativize many circumstances that people usually treat as intangible, to see things in a much wider context. It has provided me with a built-in ability to see life from a bird’s-eye view, and to intuitively identify which way things are developing, both on a personal and on a societal level.

I am of course forever grateful to my parents for this. And as I get older and witness how my generation is raising their offspring, I again often see how disincentivized parents of young children are to move countries and expose their kids to these opportunities. My advice: don’t listen to the naysayers. Especially in this ever more globalizing world, the skills our kids will get from a multi-local upbringing are invaluable and absolutely an advantage in their later lives. Even if they end up never moving countries again.

And finally, in the early 1990s, we obviously had no idea how modern technology would change everything just a few years ahead. Who would’ve known that social networks would allow us to stay in close touch with all these old teachers, classmates, neighbors. Or that open skies agreements would make long-distance travel to keep seeing them so much easier and more affordable.

Go out and explore this world. And if you have kids, take them with you, they’ll be forever grateful one day.

Last week, as so many other people in my line of work in this region, I spent a few days in Bucharest, where the annual flagship venture conference How To Web takes place every year at around this time. As always, there were too many things going on, both at the conference and at a myriad of meetups and side events. On one of the evenings, I ended up at a wonderful restaurant with a group of Romanian founders and investors, brought together by an American-Romanian entrepreneur who, after several successful ventures in the US, decided to spend more time in his ancestral country and work on some new company ideas there.

At some point, the conversation turned to the topic of business success and how it’s measured. One of the guests said something that brought back thoughts that I have very often had myself: “It’s all rinse-and-repeat, really. You gotta fail a lot before you inevitably become great at something”.

It’s such a simple thought. And it’s called out a lot in the startup and venture world: failing fast, failing often. However, I’ve always felt that most people don’t understand what it really means. It’s not about spectacular failure, which you then carry as a badge of honor. Neither is it about spectacular success. It’s rather much more about small iterations, redoing things nonstop, and not giving up till you reach some kind of reward. Which in business is usually breakeven or profitability. Rinse-and-repeat is really a great metaphor for this.

I don’t know if it’s just the venture industry, but it seems like everywhere and all the time we celebrate success. In business media, all talk is about the size of M&A transactions and funding rounds, or market shares and capitalizations of companies. Looking around, it seems like there’s an award for almost anything. I have always felt uneasy when I’m called out to share my “success story”. You know, I just kept chipping away at it, until we got where we are now. But we’ll keep chipping away even more after this, and hopefully it will get us to new heights in the future.

Success is never definitive, just like failure isn’t. It’s just steps in the process. Rinsing and repeating is a great way to think about it, because the original wording of Wash, Rinse, Repeat comes from old American shampoo packaging. The idea was that if your hair is too greasy, you just wash it a second time with the same shampoo to get it clean.

Imagine if in business, when someone shares the story of a failed product or company, it would just figuratively mean that their hair was too greasy for only one wash. Rinse and repeat. Same for success stories: you just rinsed and repeated until you got your head clean. Now continue rinsing and repeating to get it even cleaner, i.e. bigger and better business results :)

Thinking back at my 15 years in business, there were a lot of moments that at the time felt like huge breakthroughs, or huge, shattering disappointments. But through the mist of time, however, they don’t look so dramatic. They were just intermediate results of just another wash. What’s really important, and very obvious from where I am today, is that I just kept washing, whatever the result was.

I guess my hope is I’ll continue washing, whatever the result of each wash. Life works in a funny and beautiful way like that: sometimes, you need to drive all the way from Sofia to Bucharest, to go to a dinner with someone you’ve never met before, just to realize that.

The usual “Happy Sunday” doesn’t seem to cut it this weekend, after the horrors that happened in Israel yesterday. Ellie and I were with friends in Gabrovo all day, to celebrate the opening of the brilliant Christo and Jeanne-Claude Center project, and we weren’t following the news at all. When I saw posts with Israeli flags on my social feeds, I thought it’s probably just another missile attack, and I’ll read more about it in the evening or tomorrow.

The attack on Israel is brutal, heartbreaking, and it will affect the balance in the Middle East for a very long time. When I finally got to scrolling the news last night, I experienced the same gut-wrenching feeling that I felt twice before: on 9/11 in 2001, and on February 24 of last year, as well as in the days that followed. War has come to yet another country that I know well and where I have many friends and family.

This realization, that the suffering you just watched isn’t the end, but only the beginning, is truly terrifying. I have no doubt that Israel will get its act together and will deal an unprecedented blow to the terrorist organizations, but I also know that many innocent people will suffer greatly, on both sides.

As we were driving back to Sofia this morning with Ellie, through the gorgeous foliage of the Balkan mountain range basking in the sun, we talked about the situation and called our relatives in Israel. Thankfully, everyone we know is ok. Maybe it was this contrast, between the horrible news from Israel, and the sunny and happy Bulgarian mountain landscape, that made me realize once again, how fragile peace and happiness are. And how fortunate all of us are that weren’t in New York on 9/11, in Ukraine in February of 2022, or in Israel this weekend. Ours is a very feeble, fragile luck. May it remain with us as long as we are here.

Am Yisrael Chai 🇮🇱🙏🏼

Where are you from? It’s a question that’s easy to answer for most people, but throughout my whole life I’ve always had to pause and think, before giving an answer that fit the context of where I am and who I’m talking to.

I was born in the Soviet Union, and lived in Moscow during the first eight years of my life. Then my parents moved to the US, because of my dad’s work, and we lived there for several years, mostly in Puerto Rico, which is a very specific kind of America. After that, we moved to the Netherlands, where I grew up and spent most of my time until I decided to move to Bulgaria twelve years ago.

Throughout the years, my where-I’m-from took different shapes and forms. At home, we spoke Russian, but I grew up with a very clear understanding that we left that country for a reason and will never be going back to live there. Coming of age in the Netherlands, Dutch became my primary identity and proficient language, and it remains so to this day. Having spent two years in Puerto Rico and Boston as a kid, followed by an academic exchange year in Madison, Wisconsin during my studies, together with almost two years in aggregate in California over the past decade, has led to a home feeling about the US as well. And finally, ever since I met Ellie, and then relocated to Bulgaria a few years later, the country I today call home has very much become a place I identify with.

Today, I can simply say that there are three countries that feel like home: Netherlands, US, and Bulgaria. It’s where I know how things work, where I can speak jargon, where I get all the cultural references. Where, if you put me in the middle of a street, or in a group of people, I’d know how to navigate without anyone thinking I’m not from here.

But if you ask me in any given situation where I’m from, the answer will depend on the context. When I’m with Dutch people, or with Bulgarians, I’ll usually say the corresponding city that I’m from in that country. In the US, it usually depends on the specific context: if I’m over on business from Europe, it’ll be Bulgaria, if people ask about my roots, it will be Netherlands. And if I’m outside the Bay Area in a casual chat at a coffee counter, I’ll just say I’m from San Francisco.

A lot of stuff has been said and written about the phenomenon of not being from just one place only. There’s a great TED talk on multi-local identities. There’s the theory of the third-culture kids. I personally like to think about it as swappable masks that you put on. Much like when you attend a business gathering on behalf of different organizations. You have two stacks of business cards, and depending on the person you’re talking to, you give them one or the other. Or like in my case, when you’re traveling between two countries in which you hold citizenship. You show one passport when you leave one country, and another when you enter the other.

Recently, when I was thinking about this whole multi-local identity of mine, I realized one pretty important thing that I never thought about before. All of the places where I have lived in my life were experiencing positive social and economic dynamics when I was there.

The Soviet Union went through unprecedented liberalization, optimism, and convergence with the civilized world during the Perestroika. Clinton’s America in the 1990s is probably when the US peaked in terms of everybody having a good time and not hating each other. The Netherlands in the 1990s and 2000s entered the top-5 of the world’s best places to live, and luckily remains there to this day. And Bulgaria, since it joined the EU in 2007, has witnessed the fastest growth and accumulation of wealth ever in its near-1,350-year history as a country.

There is a popular metaphor we use often in the startup and venture world: “a rising tide raises all the boats”. It alludes to the idea that the best place to build an innovative solution is in an industry or vertical that is already on the rise. Looking back at my life through the prism of the progress, I guess I was very lucky to have always ended up in places that were going up on the tide of history. Today, I think this very much defined my personality, my general optimism about life, and the assurance that tomorrow will always be better than today, no matter how good today was. My personal boat has been raised well by the tides of history in the past 40 years.

On the downside, it makes you think about what happens in the opposite scenario. Will I stay in Bulgaria if the country stops developing? Will I have the energy and mental prowess to embed myself in yet another society, if the need appears? Do I want to keep moving like I did, in the next and more mature decades of my life?

I don’t have answers to these questions. What I do know is that I’ve firmly come to believe that our capabilities and achievements are at least as much the result of our surroundings as they are the result of our efforts. The Canadian ice hockey champion Wayne Gretzky famously quipped that to score in hockey, you shouldn’t skate to where the puck is, but to where it’s going. I hope I’ll be able to continue skating to where my puck is going, in the years and decades ahead.

You probably have heard those lines a million times: Real friends are the ones you can count on no matter what. A friend in need is a friend indeed. True friends are always there for you.

I vividly remember how in my high school days, I was often struggling with the pressure to define which friends are real and which aren’t. Sometimes that pressure came from the friends themselves, but a lot of the time it just seeped in from conversations with adults, the books we were reading, or from popular culture. I even remember a conversation with our German teacher, who asked me whether I have any friends at school, and when I said I have many, she kept pressing me to define which friends are real, i.e. the ones I can rely on if I need help. I remember how I just stared at her, and said that I don’t know. Either all, or none, or something in between.

Twenty-five years later, I still have no better answer than that. Are friends not in need not friends indeed? Is someone only a real friend if you can count on them? Do I have to think less of friends that I simply never needed anything from?

I got reminded of this earlier this week, when our friend Lane visited us in Sofia. Based in Austin, Texas, he had to be in Vienna for work, and hopped over to Sofia for a few days to hang out with Ellie and me and see Bulgaria for the first time.

Lane is one of the people I consider a close friend. We’ve known each other for about a decade, travelled together and with our families, had great conversations from which I learned a lot, and I’ve met many other fantastic people through him, some of whom have become friends as well. We rarely see each other more than once a year, and sometimes even less often, but when we do, it’s really good times.

Would someone like Lane pass my German teacher’s friendship test? I don’t know, maybe not. I actually hope I’ll never have to find out.

I realize now that I don’t relate to the whole idea of qualifying friends into real friends and casual friends. To me, friends are people I have feelings for, and whose company I immensely enjoy. Looking back at the 30+ years of my conscious life, there are several dozen people who have become close friends, usually as a result of mutually and intensely sharing a specific experience. It was either school, or university, or working together, or a trip. And some of the friends I spend the most time with are people I once randomly met in a bar. When the experience passes, to me the friendship doesn’t get less strong. It has happened that I’d see someone again after 10 or more years, and it would feel as if we continued where we left off all those years ago.

Of course, there are challenges to friendship. Falling out is one of them. It happened to me a few times. Someone I thought highly of turned out to be a jerk. Some of the times it wasn’t even towards me, but towards someone else. Unpleasant as it is in the moment, the next day you move on. And maybe one day you’ll even forgive them. Another, more common challenge, is distance. I’ve noticed how I used to dislike when people wouldn’t stay in touch. That’s not what friends do, I’d think to myself.

But in the past decade, I’ve had so many beautiful and heart-warming encounters with people I’d been close with once, and then hadn’t seen for ten years or more. Childhood friends, fellow exchange students from my times in Madison and Bologna, people I got close with during my first several jobs. Some of these friendships return to regular contact, some don’t and will probably be updated again after another decade or more. Everybody is busy, has a family or business to attend to 24/7. I’ve learned that it’s up to me to check in with someone, and I shouldn’t expect it from the other person. And, most of the time, it turns out you don’t actually lose the intensity and emotion of the friendship if you haven’t seen each other for years.

Finally, as I’m heading towards forty, I’ve realized that relying on friends in times of need just isn’t my thing. It’s pretty cool if a friend can help with something, but it has to be their initiative. Maybe I’m too idealistic, but the whole point of living in civilized and meritocratic societies is that when you need real help, there will be professionals whose job it is to help you. Friends are indispensable for mental and emotional support in tough times, but real support is what’s given rather than asked for. Otherwise it becomes a dependent relationship that I wouldn’t qualify as friendship.

Of course, maybe I’m just lucky, both with the friends I have, as well as for never having been in the situation where I needed a friend to save me from trouble. If that’s the case, I’d gladly wish that my next forty years won’t be any different.

Today is September 17th, which means it’s exactly two months till I turn 40 on the same day of the month in November!

It’s been way too long since I shared anything here on Sunday Max. As mentioned before, I’ve been uneasy all this time about regular weekly updates (yikes, my last Sunday Max letter is from February!), as my usual happy-go-lucky stories didn’t match my ongoing concern for Ukraine and the horrific russian invasion going on there.

But life goes on, and in this special year that I turn 40, I thought a great way to celebrate with all of you would be to share weekly thoughts on a selection of forty of my favorite insights that I’ve gained through the years.

Today’s insight and topic is celebrations, and speaking of which, I’ve been thinking hard all summer about how exactly to celebrate my birthday this year. The downside of having led a multi-local life is that I have concentrations of people that I like very much in several different places. I have lots of friends in Sofia, but also in the Netherlands, in London, on the US West Coast, and a few other places here and there. Doing one big party in one place means missing out on most of the people from most of the other places. And so I thought that the best way is to have many occasions; I will be in Sofia on November 17, and I’d love to have everyone who’d like to join here with me, but I’ll also announce dates in other places in the course of a year from this November till my 41st birthday in November of next year. Stay tuned for dates and locations near you here on Sunday Max:)

Celebrations are important. They’re also ephemeral; they appear as opportunities and if not consumed, they whither away. It’s a lesson I first learned during the early days of my very first startup, back in Amsterdam in late 2009. We had reached product-market fit with my co-founder Maarten, and spent two months negotiating an angel investment with a group of investors. Throughout this time, I was still on leave notice at my old job, so I had to keep showing up there as well. Needless to say, it was all work, without weekends and much sleep. Somehow, as we progressed from meeting to meeting with the investors, then to marking up and signing the term sheet, then to various closing formalities with the notary, lawyers, and the bank, we couldn’t find a moment to celebrate our achievements. Maarten always sternly said that we should wait till the money is in the bank, so the bottle of Moët Chandon that I’d bought for the occasion (an outrageous luxury for me at the time), stayed in the fridge of our shared apartment next to Oosterpark. Then one day the money did arrive in the bank, and we suddenly had so many other things to take care of that we postponed till the weekend. Needless to say, that weekend was spent on putting out all kinds of new fires, so by the time we finally did open the bottle, months later, it didn’t feel like a celebration of the investment at all anymore. Water under the bridge, or in this case, pretty fancy champagne for us at the time.

In the fourteen years since, I’ve been reminding myself of that feeling of lost festivity every time a possible cause for a party comes up, and if you know me, you now also know why it is that our fridges at home and in the office always have bottles of bubbly in them. Just so I don’t miss out on making an occasion memorable ever again.

And this weekend was no exception to that rule; yesterday was the 16th anniversary of our first date with Ellie, and it also happens to be Rosh Hashanah and the annual Sofia Day festival here in Bulgaria’s capital.

That’s more than enough reasons to have a little bash, and I’m really grateful to everyone who showed up yesterday, depleting our fish preserves, apples, honey, and of course, bubbly, and having a really wonderful time.

Now that I’m approaching forty, I realize I often don’t remember what it was we were celebrating on this occasion or that, but the memories of the fun remain, as well as the countless friendships, acquaintances, and ideas that first took shape at these gatherings.

Here’s to remembering to celebrate as often as we can, and not letting the hectics and worries of everyday life steal those fleeting moments from us!

More than 10 months have passed since you last heard from me here. Truth is, throughout this whole time, I wasn’t able to find a meaningful way to share my usual and cheerful day-to-day stories and adventures, in the light of the ongoing Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Two days ago we commemorated the first anniversary of the day Ukraine was comprehensively attacked. Here in Bulgaria, we held a cozy little event with BG4UA, the pop-up ad-hoc relief organization that we cofounded with Ellie together with the leaders of several business organizations on the first day of the war. In my last update, 10 months ago, I shared some of the things we had managed to accomplish by that time. In the 10 months since, we finalized the funding campaign at approx. BGN 630,000, roughly equal to EUR 315,000, which allowed us to fund 18 NGOs that have collectively helped tens of thousands of Ukrainians in Bulgaria.

This has been a very difficult year. And yet, I’m glad and grateful we were able to come together on Friday with the team, partners, donors, NGOs, volunteers, and several Ukrainians who now live in Bulgaria, to celebrate life. I hope that going forward, February 24th will always be one of the two days every year in which we remember the horrors, but also celebrate the good that we have in common. The other day obviously being the day of Ukraine’s final, unconditional, and so much anticipated Victory over evil, which I’m convinced is upon us in a hopefully near future.

According to the Bulgarian government, approximately 200,000 Ukrainian nationals came to Bulgaria after 24.02.2022 and stayed for at least some time in our country. Approximately 50,000 remain today, and are likely to stay long-term. As far as BG4UA is concerned, now that our job is done and these 50,000 are documented, housed, and mostly in a good place when it comes to jobs, healthcare, and education, we have decided to continue our project by documenting and sharing the stories of everyone who was involved during 2022. We teamed up with the tremendously talented and creative team of The Recursive, to produce a number of video, audio, and textual stories, that we will be sharing in the coming months online at BG4UA.com. We hope that at some point, the -UA part of what we did will be behind us, but that BG4- will remain a lasting reminder of what we can be as a modern European society in Bulgaria; coming together and doing the right thing when it matters.

To lift the veil of this new BG4UA storytelling project, check out the trailer of our content series:

Also, make sure to hit the subscribe button in YouTube, as we’ll be adding much more to the BG4UA channel in the next weeks.

Now is the time for me to say thanks to all the incredible people that Ellie and I had the opportunity to work with. The board, consisting of BESCO chairman Dobromir Ivanov, MOVE.BG founder Sasha Bezuhanova, AIBEST representatives Milena Halacheva and Ilia Krustev, BVCA chairman Evgeny Angelov, BCause Foundation director Elitsa Barakova, and Zornitsa Mitkova from Teenovator who was our guiding light in communications. More than anything, I can never forget the original core team of volunteers, before there was ever a board, with whom we drank from the firehose of spreadsheets with thousands of lines, each one representing a person or family in need. Vessy Deyanova, Olya Nikol, Karina Khristich, Slaveya Nedelcheva, Antonia Tzenova, Val Ivanov, Milena Halacheva and Emilia Krusteva; you guys were an example to us, and I can never thank you enough for everything you accomplished.

Of course, a separate thanks to the hundreds of donors who so unsparingly donated funds to the BG4UA campaign. Many of you wish to remain anonymous, but we will never forget your generosity. Big gratitude also to America for Bulgaria foundation and Nancy Schiller personally, for their unwavering support, and the donation towards operational needs of BG4UA.

Finally, below are some photos of our event last Friday. Big kudos to DOM for hosting us, Baker Brothers and Orbelus for the delicious food and wine, Benjamissimo for the heavenly blue-and-yellow vegan chocolate desserts, the fantastic Kyiv couple Violetta and Nikita for the dance performance and DJing, and to Elbi Gatsov for the sound masterpiece he composed especially for the occasion. Daniel Nenchev, probably the finest voice in Bulgarian journalism; we couldn’t wish for a better MC and host than you. Olena Voloshyna is without doubt the best photographer I’ve ever worked with in Bulgaria, and we are so glad she could capture the event in pictures. And to all the NGO partners, like ZaDobroto foundation; words can’t describe the privilege we feel to have been able to be part of your work and journey. The reality is that we just mostly talked on the phone and went to lunches and dinners with people to secure funding and support, while you did all the literally physical heavy lifting of helping Ukrainians 24/7.

And now what?

I hope that after giving you this update, I can go back to my regular Sunday Max updates, with travel stories, and tales of the wondrous exploits of our ever-growing portfolio companies at Vitosha Venture Partners. Guess what, that portfolio got almost twice as big while I was away from Sunday Max, and now looks like this:

Lots of stories to share there, all in the next updates.

Oh and well, speaking of travel, despite the unbearably warm winter, Ellie and I did manage to ski for a couple of days last week, and it’s still fantastic as ever at 2700m altitude:

Be well and talk soon, happy Sunday! 😇

Thanks for checking in today and do share with a friend if you think they’d enjoy Sunday Max:

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Ellie and I are in Portugal this weekend, where it’s Semana Santa, complete with Easter processions and all the shops and restaurants being shut. Our own Easter celebration will be next week, back in Bulgaria according to the Julian calendar, and we’re really looking forward to spending next weekend with the family in Troitsa near Shumen, eating and celebrating.

This year there’s a lot of meaning to Easter. Much like me, one doesn’t need to be religious to appreciate the message of redemption and forgiveness that this holiday brings us every year. In the face of devastating non-stop suffering we get streamed 24/7 from Ukraine, a message of hope, and ultimately one of everything turning out well in the end, is a message we all need so much right now.

It’s been over a month since my last Sunday Max update, and not for a lack of things happening or stories to tell. It’s just been hard to find any words at all. As much as I’m empathetic and sympathetic with the Ukrainian cause, and devastated by the level of cruelty and disrepair that Russia has fallen into, life goes on, and it feels tone-deaf and disingenuous to carry on attending parties, flying around the world, closing venture investments, and generally living a very nice life while right here, right now, in a European country I know so well, nothing short of a destructive war, targeting civilians, and quite possibly with genocidal intent, is being waged.

Yet, here we are, and as hard as it is, I’ll start giving it a try. Bit by bit, week by week, I’m sure the words will somehow come back. If anything, we owe it to Ukraine to keep on helping, keep on giving. And to do that, we need to continue living our lives to the best extent possible, for else, how are we going to help? Not only is our way of life the very thing they’re fighting so hard to defend, but also, in the words of a famous philanthropist, “To do good, you have to do well.” So doing well I will continue, to my best abilities, and Sunday Max will resume with weekly updates on that.

But first, about doing good. I’m tremendously proud of our entire BG4UA team and the progress we’ve made together in the past month. In the first weeks since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we focused all our efforts on facilitating and coordinating transport, and on accommodating newly arrived Ukrainian families in Bulgaria, while working alongside the government to help them take over and scale these processes. I’m happy and relieved that, overall, that went very well. Since then, we’ve shifted focus to fundraising, to help other organizations that provide medium- and long-term services to Ukrainians, and to fund any ad-hoc shortcomings in the process of welcoming and hosting the displaced families.

Donate now to BG4UA

Thanks to your generous support, we have now raised over BGN 500,000 (EUR 250,000), and I can’t be grateful enough to the close to 280 individuals and businesses who donated this amount. Our next stretch goal is BGN 750,000, and we’ve already started disbursing the funds to, among others, set up and scale daycare centers for Ukrainian kids, and to provide humanitarian support at the border crossings with Romania, where the loads are sometimes so high that incoming Ukrainians have to wait for many hours before being admitted.

Part of this amazing support came from two fundraiser events Ellie and I co-organized in California, one with the Bulgarian diaspora in Hollywood, and one with the Bulgarian tech community in San Francisco.

A huge thanks from me and Ellie, to our friends in LA and SF for their compassion, generosity, and hospitality.

While stateside, Ellie and I managed to grab a little bit of downtime, as we had originally planned months ago, when we decided to spend a few weeks in March in California, before life turned upside down on February 24. We skied for a few days in Mammoth and in Tahoe, and had the opportunity to reconnect with friends we hadn’t seen for way too long because of Covid.

Back home in Bulgaria, the annual springtime awakening is full on, both in terms of social activities and work occasions that now, after almost all Covid measures have been lifted, can finally be concluded and celebrated properly in person.

At Vitosha, we closed some more investments, two of which I had the pleasure to write a few words about in my beloved Vitosha Stories:

Also, Ellie and her Launchlabs Sofia colleague Kristina had their much-beloved and traditionally delayed joint birthday party, Le Party Sur La Rooftop, on one of the first warm evenings in Sofia, much to everyone’s delight. The topic this year was Pink, and it was good to see most everyone took the dress-code seriously:

All in all, as we get used to this new wartime reality, life goes on, and almost two months in, it’s still some consolation to realize that we are versatile enough to keep calm and carry on, while not letting our ability to do the right thing for Ukraine and Ukrainians fall out of sight.

On that note, wishing you a very Happy (Easter) Sunday, with some breathtaking views from Cabo de São Vicente in Portugal, Europe’s Southwestern-most point, where Ellie and I sent off the sun as it set on Europe for the day last night. Tomorrow and all days, it will be back to shine bright above us. ☀️💛

Thanks for checking in today and talk to you next Sunday! 😇

If you enjoyed this Sunday Max update, feel free to subscribe to get it weekly in your inbox, if you haven’t yet:

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Also, please keep giving to BG4UA, and spreading the word. Any amount helps us to make life better for the 75,000 (and counting) mostly women and children who found refuge from the war, in Bulgaria:

Donate to BG4UA 🇧🇬🇺🇦

Another week has gone by, and we’re on Day 18 of Russia’s senseless and heartless war on Ukraine. What started as a trickle of people in the first hours of the attack on February 24, has today reached the number of 2.7 million people at the time I’m writing this. That’s the number of displaced persons from Ukraine, fleeing to safety from the destruction and terror inflicted by the Russian armed forces.

Here in Bulgaria I’m getting various numbers from people in our government, roughly based on the count from the Bulgarian border police; approx. 60,000 Ukrainian citizens entered Bulgaria since the 24th, and approx. 20,000 have exited, most likely on their way to other refuge destinations. This leaves us with 40-50k people, almost exclusively women and children, whom we’re trying to host and accommodate in Bulgaria.

At BG4UA, the volunteering platform and network we launched together with Ellie on the first day of the war, we’ve so far been able to assist but a small fraction of these people. We’ve arranged or coordinated transport for approx. 500 and have managed to accommodate approx. 1,000. These are both individuals as well as mothers with children, so the total count is somewhat higher, probably double. All of this would have never been possible without the fantastic BG4UA team of hundreds of volunteers, and the hundreds of people and organizations that have donated over 6,000 accommodation units, out of which we’ve been able to match suitable rooms, apartments, and houses to house our incoming guests from Ukraine.

Today, more than two weeks since the start of the war, we’re moving on. From the beginning, we have been collaborating closely with the National Crisis Center of the Bulgarian Prime Minister’s Office, with the aim of transferring our assets and processes to them, once they’re ready to take over. We are now testing the new accommodation booking system, provided by technology partners from FlatManager, and the professional call center for displaced persons, set up by our partners at AIBEST, the association of Bulgarian BPO businesses. In the coming days, we’ll also migrate our evacuation efforts to the National Crisis Center, as the Bulgarian government is launching regular train and bus services from locations in neighboring countries, where large numbers of Ukrainians have come together, waiting for a shelter destination.

One of the shifts we’re witnessing as the entire national effort scales up is the rapidly increasing need for funding. As the volume of people we’re processing and accommodating rises, specific needs come up, like certain foods for people with dietary restrictions, medications that aren’t easily available, transport needs to reunite families, and much, much more.

To this end, I’m incredibly grateful that we’ve joined forces with BCause Foundation and our friends from America for Bulgaria Foundation, launching BG4UA donations, where any contribution is welcome and will be used to assist in the process of accommodating Ukrainians in Bulgaria. You can contribute any amount, and whatever you can help with will be deeply appreciated:

All we should hope for at this point is for the insanity of the attack on Ukraine to end. All the displaced Ukrainians I’ve spoken to in the past weeks keep telling me the same thing, especially when I talk to them about long-term plans, like finding a job here or signing their kids up for school in Bulgaria: oh thanks, but no need for that, we’re going back soon, this will be over quickly.

The biggest thing I hope for is that they’re right about that last bit. 🙏🏼🇺🇦

Thanks for checking in today and talk to you next Sunday!

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My apologies for not sharing anything last weekend. For me, like for most people I know, time has stopped since the morning of Thursday, February 24.

There won’t be Happy Sundays here for the time being. Since the start of the unspeakable act of aggression perpetrated on Ukraine by the government of Russia, I have been scrambling to do what I can to help people in Ukraine survive this horror.

Ellie and I are lucky and privileged. We have visibility and following in Bulgaria and elsewhere, and have been to Ukraine countless dozens of times, and this has helped us launch BG4UA.com. What started as simply a list to collect names and phone numbers of people who want to leave Ukraine, has snowballed into a massive volunteering effort, with hundreds of people working around the clock to help evacuation, accommodation, and support for Ukrainian refugees in Bulgaria.

Since that fateful Thursday, days merged into nights, and we have been drinking from the firehose every minute of every day. Most of us on the BG4UA platform don’t have any emergency volunteering experience, so we’re learning fast by making lots of mistakes and being very inefficient. It comforts me that we’ve been able to facilitate the evacuation of 100+ people and offer accommodation to about 600 Ukrainians in Bulgaria. It’s a drop in the bucket, but it gives me a sense of purpose, and a sense of confidence that good will win over evil, eventually.

Being involved in helping refugees means you’re dealing with heartbreak many times each day. Part of it is seeing the faces of people you pick up from the bus station or airport, and hearing their stories. I try to be cheerful and have lighthearted, joking conversations with them when I drive them to their accommodation addresses. It helps if there are kids or dogs with them, you can always be silly and funny with a kid or a dog. Another part, much harder for me, is to say no. Some of the hardest things I had to do is to send declining emails to the dozens of students and foreign workers from India and African countries, who found themselves trapped in Ukraine after the invasion. Somehow, many of them found our website, and all I could tell them was that we can only help Ukrainian citizens, and that they need to go to the closest EU border checkpoint and contact their country’s representatives from there.

Despite the unprecedented gloom that has descended upon us, I am positive and hopeful. For one, I’m seeing a fantastic side of human resilience and kindness in those that are helping. Bulgaria in particular has never dealt with such a humanitarian challenge in its entire history, and it is heartwarming to see the massive amounts of people trying to help, offering their homes and savings to help the incoming Ukrainians. On another side, I deeply believe that this too shall pass, and that we’ll be living in a much safer and more positive world once the war is over and the regime in Russia is dismantled. It’s too early to speculate on how that will happen, and the price is already clearly tragically unacceptable, but we’ll get through this somehow, and it will leave us stronger and better.

For now, all we can do is to help those in need. In the next couple of days, we’ll be shifting BG4UA from direct humanitarian efforts to a more sustainable organization that coordinates funding and different support channels, and each one of us, wherever we are around the world will be able to help. I will e-mail you again when we launch public, online donations at BG4UA.com in the next days, and will be incredibly grateful for your support.

I wouldn’t be able to wrap up this update without a huge, heartfelt thanks to the dozens of new friends Ellie and I made over the past ten days. Our core team at BG4UA consists mostly of people we’d never met before, and now we’re like family, calling each other without second thought in the middle of the night, if someone needs help or something isn’t working.

We’ll get through this, together. Stay positive and support Ukraine 🙏🏼🇺🇦

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I once heard a good joke: Imagine you could travel back in time sixty years, and show your phone to the people you meet in 1962, telling them “This little box of glass and metal, the size and weight of a chocolate bar, is in my pocket all the time, and gives me access to any information known to humans since the beginning of time. Images, text, sounds, or video. Plus I can talk to anyone anywhere in the world. What would you do with it?”

Without doubt, 1962 folks would be awed, and would say things like “read all the books”, “listen to any music”, “talk to friends and relatives in faraway places”. And you’d tell them “Yes, you could. But most of the time we just argue with strangers and watch funny videos of cats”.

I had to think of this again today, when yet another friend of mine, the tenth already over the course of the past 12 months, sent me a message warning me of an impostor using my Facebook name and avatar, befriending them and trying to sell them cryptocurrency, pretending to be me, over Facebook Messenger.

For one, I’m completely uninterested in crypto, have never bought or sold it, and will never offer you to buy it.

Secondly, I hereby stop using Facebook Messenger, which I have very rarely been doing anyways, so please disregard and excuse me if you receive any such message from someone who looks like me.

Thirdly, I’m sadly reminded of the above joke, and the general notion of how hard it is to adopt new technologies and make optimal use of them.

Facebook was once a wonderful place where you connected with people you’ve known long, or met recently, and had a first-row view to how they were living their life, enjoying their happy moments together with them, and connecting over moments less happy on occasion. That all ended in the past several years, as a result of the ad-driven business model, and today it’s little more than an internet analogy of a 24/7 gossip news and tell-sell channel.

Such is likely the fate of other social networks as well, unless some big shift occurs in the near future. A shame really, as the original setup was excellent.

Henry Kissinger wrote in his seminal 1994 book Diplomacy, how the real human tragedy behind World War I was about 19th-century ideas clashing with 20th-century technological advances. Young men went to fight like their fathers and grandfathers before them, trained for shotguns on horses, and instead had to face bomber aircraft, tanks, nerve gas, landmines, and machine guns.

Today’s internet is eerily similar to that historical metaphor. We crave for technologically augmented authentic human connection, but all we get is algorithmically optimized content, aimed at influencing our buying and spending decisions, making us miserable.

I believe that a way out of this is to work towards a technological world where less of our information is centrally managed by huge, profit-focused corporations. Part of this is the current trend for decentralization, part will be stricter regulation of data, already underway, especially in the EU. I think as venture capitalists, we can also play a crucial role in this, incentivizing entrepreneurs to build products that deliver long-term value to clients and communities, rather than aiming to exit big to Silicon Valley.

A year ago, I started Sunday Max as my way of focusing less on social media and more on meaningful and non-intrusive contact with people I care about. It thrills me that there’s about a hundred of you who actively read and respond to these weekly updates, and I’m looking forward to slowly and steadily growing our relationships here and in real life.

Until then, stay sane, and whatever you do, don’t buy crypto from someone called Max Gurvits on Facebook Messenger:)

Thanks for checking in today and talk to you next Sunday! 😇

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This time I admit to breaking my promise to not email outside Sundays, but in the last few days I simply wasn’t able to find a spare moment to share my thoughts with you.

It’s not because of Valentine’s Day of course, although Ellie and I did have a wonderful evening at home last night, breaking open a bottle of Ginish 0% alcohol gin, brewed by Danish distiller Ish Sprits, which was gathering dust in the cupboard for a few months:

Other than this, I enjoyed a fantastic time back home in the Netherlands last week, reconnecting with family and friends, and eating copious amounts of Filet Americain, my all-time favorite uber-Dutch equivalent of steak tartare.

It’s probably the best time ever to visit the Netherlands right now, before summer 2022. Despite over a million new Covid-19 cases registered in the past three weeks, the new government has decided on a policy to structurally reopen society. With cases growth now flattening and the intensive-care wards of the hospitals relatively unloaded, it seems like by summer things will be back to pre-2020 state, pending of course the absence of a new, more dangerous Covid-19 variant.

This all means that most public venues are open in the country, with the last shut-down category, nightclubs and large entertainment venues, supposed to reopen this week. Yet, tourist crowds are totally absent. What you get in Amsterdam, for instance, is an experience that we’ve never had in our lifetime: a pleasantly empty city. You can walk around, meet people, go to restaurants and museums, without waiting in crazy lines or having to book tables two weeks in advance.

Apart from this general upbeat feeling about the Netherlands, I noticed two interesting things when there:

Despite the crazy Covid-19 numbers, there is a broadly-accepted culture of (self) testing now. Most of my friends, if they have a feeling they’re getting symptoms, or if they know that someone they recently met has them, simply book an appointment for a (free) PCR test or pick up a box of antigen self-test kits from the supermarket (sold in boxes of five for EUR 10). Also when it comes to meeting in person, many say “I’ll do a quick self-test in advance, just for your comfort”, nudging you obviously to do the same. I never quite understood this before, but very frequent and easily available testing is a really important part of keeping a tab on the virus spread, and making normal social life possible in a sustained way.

The other, quite fascinating spectacle, is to see the Netherlands fast-forward adopt a process of gender- and racial-bias awareness, education, and prevention. Against a backdrop of weekly revelations of sexual-harassment and -assault allegations against leading entertainment, sports, and political figures, an entire national discussion has come up, about male and white privilege, in ways unthinkable in the country just a year ago.

What I like most about this, is how in distinctly Dutch fashion, there is a plethora of opinions voiced every day in the press, media, and in discussions, public and private. Some people think the awakening isn’t nearly fast or deep enough, some find it all nonsense, and many people, like me, are somewhere in between, sympathizing with the idea, but concerned about possible negative effects, like widening societal gaps and witch hunts.

Against this backdrop, award-winning Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk published a book, called “The Seven Check Marks: How Men like Me Play Boss”, which explores the idea that if you’re male (1), white (2), straight (3), higher-educated (4), with higher-educated parents (5), native in Dutch (6), and living in the urban part of the country (7), you’re basically part of an elite club that is fast-tracked for career and societal success, reaching any significant achievement with considerably less friction than those that don’t tick the boxes. According to Luyendijk, each check-mark takes about two years to catch up on if you’re born or raised without it.

I personally completely subscribe to the idea, and am aware that where I am in life is fully thanks to comfortably ticking six of the boxes, and as someone who wasn’t born Dutch, having my natural language skills and white-highly-skilled-migrant-parents background help me to easily tick the seventh (native in Dutch).

While I haven’t finished reading the book yet, the part I’m most interested about in is how to best engage with people who see that privilege not as a problem, but as a natural barrier that is there for a reason. Especially the older and more socially conservative people tend to think this way, acknowledging the privilege bias, but also holding the opinion that it’s something that makes society work, and shouldn’t be touched. I personally strongly disagree with this, but then I recognize that it’s easy for me to think that way, having been exposed to much more diversity than they have.

I clocked a neat 900 kilometers criss-crossing the Netherlands last week, this time not only in a UFODrive Tesla Model 3, but also with a Polestar 2, that a guy called Jop from Dordrecht peer-rented to me via the SnappCar rental platform. It is now absolutely the most wonderful car I’ve ever driven. It’s like the best of Volvo combined with the best of Tesla. You get a powerful 78 kWh battery, good for up to 400km of range, and a self-driving mode that is considerably smoother than Tesla’s, but also all of Volvo’s sturdiness, comfort, and space. If they ever start selling them (and offering maintenance) in Bulgaria, I’ll very probably get one.

Thanks for checking in today and talk to you next Sunday! 😇

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