April 4; Hello Easter no.1 and hello rooftop 😎

Kicking off the hedonistic 2021 summer in style... this was my week

Happy Sunday,

It’s Easter today according to the Gregorian calendar, so Happy Easter if you’re celebrating 🐣🐰. Here in Bulgaria we adhere to the old Julian calendar when it comes to Christian holidays (with the exception of Xmas for some reason), and this year the Julian-Gregorian Easter gap is a whole four weeks, so we don’t get to celebrate until May 2.

But that’s not a big deal, especially if you have friends that bring you such presents:

This beautiful Italian Colomba di Pasqua came as an office present over the weekend from one of our portfolio companies, and we can’t wait to savor it this week. It’s an original Italian Easter bread, made by the legendary Fiasconaro bakery in Castelbuono in Sicily, with the tin box and packaging designed by Dolce&Gabbana.

Summer of friends and wine 🥂

It’s no secret, Ellie and I love ourselves a good party. A huge perk we have at our Missia23 office is the multiple areas where we can host gatherings, including a bar, patio, and two rooftops. Last Friday we kicked off this summer tradition, with a try-out Friday afterwork team drink on the upper rooftop, and it wasn’t bad at all:

Rooftop Fridays at Vitosha and launchlabs Sofia, the first of many this year

We’re looking forward to many more such occasions until the peaks of Vitosha start getting new snow again, hopefully not earlier than November. In addition to our regular favorite, the Midelidare Blanc de Blancs, which has been rated as one of the world’s top 5 blanc-de-blancs sparkling wines, we’ve been excited to follow the latest sparkling wine trend, that’s also taking over Bulgaria now: Pét-nat, short for Pétillant Naturel, or “naturally sparkling” in French. It’s a semi-sparkling wine, that doesn’t get the second fermentation that champagne-style wines receive, making it easier to produce. It has been a traditional table wine in parts of France and Switzerland, much like Lambrusco in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.

In Bulgaria, three wine makers have started experimenting with small batches of Pét-nat as of last year, and through our friends at Sofia’s no.1 wine bar Grape Central, we got our hands on a few cases to try out.

Savoring Bulgarian Pét-nat variants from Bottled Opinions, Georgiev&Milkov, and Tsarev Brod winery, which is in the Shumen region where Ellie grew up ♥️

First batch for the first rooftop parties of 2021 🥂

Tasting the Bottled Opinions Pinot Pét-nat at Grape Central in Sofia with Ellie: get in touch with Grape Central if you want to oder some, they have a good stock 🍾

Going Dutch in Sofia 🧡

It’s been almost ten years since I made Sofia my home base, and in this decade the face and size of the Netherlands community in Bulgaria has changed profoundly. We had an official count of around 200-300 Dutchies in Bulgaria in 2011, and the active community was never more than a couple of dozen, consisting mostly of Dutch expat managers of Netherlands-owned corporations with assets in Bulgaria, like Heineken and ING, and their families, the (back then sizable) embassy staff and their families, and a few independent entrepreneurs and adventurers, like myself. That group evolved largely around Queen’s/King’s Day parties and watching football matches where the Orange team were playing, led by the always-cheerful head of the Dutch association in Bulgaria, the late Koos-Jan Schouten. Koos was a wonderful guy, who very sadly passed away at the end of 2019, and since then nothing much happened, not in the last place due to Covid-19 and its restrictions.

Dutch parties in Sofia in the good old pre-Covid19 days, of course with plates full of bitterballen 🧆🇳🇱

Since those days, our community has expanded significantly, and counts anywhere between 6,000 and 10,000 people as of today. And so it was great to hear a few weeks back, that two other longtime Sofia Dutchies, Henk Overbeek and Jolanda van den Broek, decided to reinvigorate the Dutch Bulgarian togetherness, by setting up a more formal organization, called the Dutch Bulgarian Chamber of Commerce. It was my pleasure to join with and on behalf of our fund, and I’m really looking forward to not only events and parties, but to actually building links between the growing venture scene in Bulgaria that we’re part of with Vitosha, and the booming industry back home in the Netherlands.

Happy to join the DBCC with Vitosha, and can’t wait to build bridges with the Netherlands venture industry for Bulgaria-based entrepreneurs 🌷🌹

Beyond Sunday Max 🎙

A few weeks ago I had the fun of chatting for an hour with my friend Dominique Piotet, in his Mayak Innovatsiy podcast. Dominique, a US-French businessman, has been running the UNIT.city organization in Kyiv, Ukraine for the past two years as its CEO. UNIT.city is a massive USD 200m project in Kyiv, to rebuild what’s left of an old Soviet motorcycle factory into a high-tech campus for startups, IT businesses, and the people who work in them. I’ve enjoyed visiting UNIT.city many times on my trips to Ukraine, and it was great to chat with Dominique about tech and venture in Ukraine and beyond:

You can listen to our conversation with Dominique here:

Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Simplecast

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

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