February 21; The many faces of the office 👩🏽‍💼👨🏻‍💼

Working, playing, and relaxing; all in the confines of a single space... this was my week

Feb 21, 2021

Happy Sunday,

A few days ago I came across a great read by Dror Poleg, about the history of fixed-feature spaces, talking about how we’re living through the biggest revolution in our use of buildings since the 18th century. TL;DR: the pandemic only accelerated the technology-driven move away from fixed and designated places for work or rest, and Work-From-Anywhere is completely changing the way we design, build, and use our homes, offices, hotels, cars, restaurants, and any other life spaces.

The thoughts struck a particular chord with me this week, as I literally found myself in the office over 12 hours each day. But before you start worrying about me, it was not all work. Far from it.

The office for work 👨🏻‍💻

I’m fortunate that I can’t complain about a lack of work. Exactly one year ago, as the fluidity of international travel was about to grind to a halt, I was worried how I would ever combine the soon-to-launch Vitosha fund’s operations in Sofia with all the global venture projects that I’m a part of, like SummitSummit, TRACTIONCamp, EIR Tribe, and others. Thankfully, and I’m not joking, Covid-19 solved all of that for me.

This how most days look like in our beautiful Vitosha office in Sofia, at Missia23, designed by Hristo Stankushev from 7561 architects

The specifics of a fund like Vitosha are such that we run a volume of deals that is similar to a full-blown accelerator (our mandate is to invest into at least 126 companies), with the difference that a majority of our investments — at least 80 — are non-accelerator, which means tailored term sheets, negotiations with co-investors, carefully deliberated individual investment strategies, board seats, etc. Add to that the accelerator program that we run, Vitosha ACCELERATE. Add to that the fact that our team is in three different time zones on two continents. It all makes for a lot of work around the clock.

The weekly Vitosha deal review, every Thursday📈

A few months after we launched Vitosha last summer, we got lucky to be able to move into one of the best office locations in downtown Sofia, Missia23, sharing a floor with Ellie’s launchlabs Sofia headquarters.

Our entire floor is designed by the formidable Hristo Stankushev and his firm, 7561 architects, with the idea that if you’re going to be spending so much time working, it better be in an environment that is comfortable and multi-functional.

On some days, we get really lucky. Angelina and Peter, owners of Honu Hawaiian BBQ, stopped by and brought us poké for lunch 🍛

Since early childhood, I grew up with the idea that offices are cooler than homes. When I was little, I’d spend entire days in space research facilities that my dad worked at, usually with too little supervision, roaming the labs and boring the guards and janitors on duty out of their minds. In the mid 1990s, my dad’s research institute in the Netherlands moved to a new building in the middle of a forest, built in minimalistic, Scandinavian style, and in my teens I would often spend entire Sundays in their canteen or library, doing homework (or pretending to) next to state-of-the-art machines, facing endless nature outside the huge windows. It’s remarkable how those experiences helped shape my taste for physical spaces for an entire lifetime.

Hosting a Vitosha ACCELERATE workshop with my friend Monica Georgieff from Automagically

Work often continues well into the dark hours, and it’s good we have couches to move to when we feel like it 🛋

The office for play 💃🏻🕺🏿✨

I’ve always believed that business and ventures are at their best when maximally exposed to creativity and art. Ever since we started designing Vitosha, we have been thinking of ways to position our business activities in the midst of social and cultural life. Moving into Missia23, with its café, bars, and event areas was a part of that thinking, but as the pandemic has evolved, we unfortunately haven’t been able to use those much yet.

As of this weekend, there is non-scheduled, walk-in Covid-19 vaccination in Sofia and most Bulgarian cities, and I hope that very soon we can all get our shots, and start hosting public events, concerts, book presentations, exhibitions, and the like.

In the meantime, we started experimenting with inviting artists to the office, for now just for the legally compliant maximum of 15 socially distanced attendees. Last Friday we were very lucky and privileged to have the fantastic Ivo Dimchev visit us with a little private concert.

Ivo Dimchev performing at the office last Friday

Ivo is an absolutely phenomenal Bulgarian-born performance artist, who enjoys global recognition and describes himself and his work as “an extreme and colorful mixture of performance art, dance, theatre, music, drawings, and photography.” Here’s one of Ivo’s better-known pieces:

I’m looking forward to many more occasions where we can enjoy culture and art straight from our office, hopefully with large groups of friends and fellow travelers, once the situation allows it.

The office for relax 📽🍿

With Ellie, one of our most favorite ways to spend weekend evenings, when we’re not in the mountains or at a beach, is to huddle down at the office, transforming the presentation space into a personal movie theater. You can call it a major part of the fringe benefits for everyone who works at launchlabs Sofia and Vitosha 😛. Our latest favorites were Modern Love and The Last Tycoon on Prime, The Good Liar on HBO, and the Russian series Оттепель (The Thaw). We’re also looking forward to seeing News of the World on Netflix, maybe we’ll get to that tonight:

Business presentations area by day, movie theater by night

Help us design the office welcome sign

Together with launchlabs Sofia, we’ve asked the leading Sofia branding firm FourPlus to help us with signage and a few additional visual elements. One of their ideas was to put up a welcome text on the glass divider opposite our entrance:

We love the visual in this digital render, but need better words

We love the idea and the style, but the text is obviously Lorem Ipsum. What would you put up as a fitting welcome text in an office that houses a venture fund and a business redesign studio? Let me know in the comments, and the winning idea can count on a dinner invitation very soon.

How time flies (or doesn’t) 🛬

Instagram reminded me this week that it’s been an entire 12 months since I last was across the pond. I’ve been very lucky to ride out the pandemic in Bulgaria, in good health, despite a minor bout of Covid in November, and I have to admit I don’t really miss international traveling. First, Ellie and I managed to cross Bulgaria so many times in these 12 months, and we still feel there is so much we haven’t seen. We’ve clocked over 20,000 kilometers of driving since last March, not counting city commuting.

Thanks Instagram for reminding me about the last photo I took in the US, a year ago this week, as my flight departed SFO, making that famous big turn over the city and flying directly over Land’s End.

Second, I feel that if I miss anything, it is the idea of easy travel, not the traveling itself. All those endless faraway trips, stopping by for a day to see friends in London, business partners in New York, or relatives in Moscow, they’re not there right now. You can’t just go and meet people at will, and even where you can, it’s not responsible. So I’m patiently waiting for the traveling to resume at some point this year or next, marveling silently at how adaptable we are to pretty radical change. And that’s a good thing.

Beyond Sunday Max…

In what is becoming a regular feature, I want to find ways we can communicate beyond this weekly update, and outside the disappointment that is Facebook-owned media. I’ve recently gone back to Amy Ingram (remember when X.ai was a big fad in 2015?) and decided to open some times each week to talk to people who read Sunday Max. Let me know if you’d like to chat, I’d love to hear from you in person.