April 17; The times of reckoning and hope 💔🐣
Learning that life goes on, despite everything... this was my month
Happy Easter to everyone who’s celebrating today!
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.
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:
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:
