February 14; Hello World ☀️
Skiing, startups, electric driving... this was my week
Happy Sunday,
As I’m writing this inaugural Sunday Max weekly, outside my window is a real winter magic fairytale; on Friday we got blessed with some proper winter weather, with snow seemingly covering all of Bulgaria.
This means that Ellie and I will be doing a lot more of what we’ve already been doing lots in the past few weeks…
Skiing workations ⛷
It was Ellie’s idea, and it works incredibly well: every second week, for as long as conditions last, we spend remote-working from one of the four major skiing areas in Bulgaria. Instead of being 12+ hours in the office each day, here we keep working time up to 8 hours maximum 😂🤦🏻♂️. The rest of the time: we ski! If there’s plenty of snow like now, we can do our favorite winter pastime — classic cross-country skiing:
But it’s not always super-snowy and super-cold, and when it isn’t, we spend the -ation part of our workation doing what most people in Sofia are crazy about: downhill Alpine skiing:
Vitosha ACCELERATE; how it’s going
It’s not all skiing of course; there’s a lot of cool stuff happening at work too. In January, at Vitosha Venture Partners, we kicked off our ACCELERATE program, where we’re aiming for a fresh take on the entire business of accelerating startups. We accept teams into the program, offer EUR 25k or 50k for equity or convertible debt, and as much as possible we run a tailored approach, where we host group mentoring sessions with people in our network who could be of help to everyone, and then we set up 1-on-1s with specific experts who could be of help with a given team’s tasks.
All of that is happening remotely over Zoom and the like, which I can’t say I love, but people seem to be enjoying it. We have seven wonderful teams in the program currently, here are a few snapshots of how it looks like from our office in Sofia:
Honoring the EV pledge 🚙 ⚡️
Last year, as more and more of my friends got Teslas and Konas, and I found myself using Sofia’s fantastic EV shared cars from Spark Bulgaria all the more often, I kind-of jokingly told myself my next car should be a BEV (i.e. full electric car). As someone who’s only owned Volvos my whole life, I kept looking at the XC40 Recharge EV and the Polestar 2, but as the first is too small for my taste, and the latter not (yet) available in Bulgaria, I decided I’ll wait till they come up with a model I can replace my aging, ancient 2006 diesel XC70 with, not compromising on endless luggage space, off-road capabilities, and the general rugged Volvo feel. In the meantime, I’d keep the oldie parked at home, using it only for mountain and beach trips, and use Spark for everything else.
And that’s when my attention was caught by a barely-used VW e-Golf that turned up on the secondary market here in Sofia last month, and a friend forwarded to me. Built in October 2018, with just over 10,000km of mileage, featuring 200km of range on a full charge and nicely priced, it seemed like a great choice of entry vehicle, to start getting used to owning an EV. I mean, it’s a Golf after all, right? What would be so exciting about it?
The moment I got the key I instantly fell in love with it. This little car has all the benefits of a really well-designed, simple city car, with the upside of being fully EV. Also, unlike the usual Golf Mk7, it has this incredible Audi-like trim, with fully electronic dash displays, and all the extra bells and whistles like CarPlay, adaptive cruise-control, heated leather seats and steering wheel, etc etc.
The coolest thing about it though, is how it’s literally a phone on wheels. Unlike an ICE car, that only works when an engine is running, this car can be almost fully (except for driving, obviously), controlled from your phone. And the stats you can pull up anytime and anywhere, are like website or app performance stats:
And so I’m unexpectedly very fond of this new toy of ours. Ellie also likes it a lot, and now we plan to keep both the XC70 and the e-Golf until Volvo actually comes up with a big 4x4 EV station wagon, that we can then replace these two with.
Vitosha Venture Stories 👨🏻💻
One of the more important personal goals I had, as our team and I were launching Vitosha Venture Partners last year, is to share deep and personal insights about the companies we invest in: what we see in the founders, why we believe in their business model, and what inspires us about the team and their mission. I started penning these stories, that I like to call Vitosha (Venture) Stories recently, and I hope they make for a nice and insightful read:
Beyond Sunday Max…
If you got this far, it means this whole idea of me penning a weekly newsletter with photos actually works… 🥳
Next to experimenting here with Sunday Max, I’m also carefully trying out Clubhouse. The inability to do anything else while you listen and talk to others is for me personally a severely hampering circumstance, but with the wonderful Recursive founder and CEO Irina Obushtarova we’re now hosting a weekly Thursday night chat with and for innovators, techies, entrepreneurs, VCs, etc, all who are either part of or interested in Bulgaria’s venture community. We call it Banitsa Thursday 🥧🇧🇬
Come check out Banitsa Thursday, each Thursday 18:00 EET, and let’s chat in person. Follow me @mxgur and Irina @irinissima on Clubhouse for more.
