February 28; winter breaks and networking reimagined ⛷🏔👨🏻💻
The great outdoors and the great digital indoors... this was my week
Happy Sunday,
It might have taken me nearly a year to get here, but I have started to deeply appreciate and enjoy the opportunities and freedoms associated with the “remote” lifestyle and work-from-anywhere.
As mentioned last week, I acknowledge my enormous privilege: my life and work aren’t negatively impacted by lockdowns or restrictions. At our Sofia base we’ve found a great middle-of-the-road to work with our Vitosha team on location at the office, in a close circle of coworkers, taking nearly all external meetings remotely. In this we follow the trend common across Bulgaria, and I’m grateful at how our local authorities have managed to control and combat the pandemic while minimizing disruption to the daily routines of (most) office workers.
Beyond that privilege, the real comfort is to be able to schedule nature escapes so much more flexibly, and to save time on many previously customary in-person interactions.
Ski getaways continued: Bansko ⛷🎿
Staying true to our biweekly tours of Bulgarian ski spots, Ellie and I found ourselves in Bansko this week, following our workation formula of 8-hour workdays combined with either early mornings or late afternoons on the trails.
We spent one day alpining down the breathtaking slopes of peak Todorka, at 2600m altitude Bulgaria’s highest groomed ski slopes. This was a warm week, with day temperatures at that altitude slightly above zero, and no precipitation. This means that at night, the soft snow turns into pure ice concrete, which with our modest downhill skills was quite the thrilling challenge.
After that it was time for two days of our usual winter favorite: cross-country skiing. Spending this entire winter in Bulgaria, we miss the meticulously groomed classic Nordic skiing trails that we’ve come to love in Alaska, California, Sweden, and Norway. Bulgaria has an interesting history with cross-country skiing: during the socialist years, probably under influence of cross-country-heavy Soviet Union, Bulgaria raised an entire school of competitive athletes in XC and biathlon, and built a number of great trails, even hosting several global skiing contests. Since then, due to the abundance of mountains, downhill skiing has completely taken over, and nowadays groomed cross-country trails are few and far between. Usually grooming happens only sporadically a few times per season, and it’s never dual (for skating and classic), but just for skating, which can be done by the same grooming snowcats used for downhill slopes. We’re now thinking of adding skating skis to our collection, as our classic ones are less fun on trails with only flat grooming.
Over the past decade Bansko, unlike the other mountain resorts in Bulgaria, which maintain a traditional and sometimes trashy ski resort vibe, has steadily grown into a hotspot for remote living and global nomading, with many Sofia and foreign locals buying apartments and moving permanently to the town. Nothing shows it as much as the rise of hipster coffee shops, coworking spaces, EV charging spots, and trendy “modern Eastern European” restaurants.
The work- part of workations is all about huddling with laptops in a cozy apartment or lodge, if we’re lucky featuring a fireplace (not this time) and sauna (yes, this time 🧖🏻♂️). Apart from the usual team and company meetings, and lots of terms negotiating and drafting, this week I had fun taking part in a few refreshing online event formats.
Learning to appreciate digital networking 👨🏻💻
When 2020 unraveled, it came with a massive surge of online business events. Always careless for video calling (pre-2020 I was that guy who never turned on his camera during calls), I found myself suddenly bombarded with daily invites to speak, panel, jury, happy-hour or contribute otherwise to some online format or other. I usually declined, and quickly noted that most newly online events were either heartfelt, if desperate at times, attempts to keep the business of networking going for battling gloom and loneliness, or simply hastily transformed online versions of previously offline events, usually for the sake of continuity and sponsor appeasement.
Now, a year later, I clearly see how things are transforming for the better. This week I was asked to give a talk and Q&A to a newly formed investor network in Central Asia, and it turned out to be a very nice 1h 10m lunchtime chat with a group of angels and VCs in that region, organized at a week’s notice, and not pretending to be an actually produced event or conference.
Another fun occasion was paneling with a few esteemed colleagues from other European funds at The Town Hall: Fintech; a vertical format in collaboration with UK Trade & Investment, launched by my Sofia friend Ed Tsvetanov, who until recently ran the remarkable Revolut operation in Bulgaria. It was a pleasure talking and learning on a specific topic with people that would’ve been very hard to get into one room had it not been virtual.
A particular moment of joy was raising a virtual glass to the official launch of The Recursive; the new and very ambitious regional venture media outlet, based out of Sofia and covering venture news all across the region. Irina Obushtarova and her team recently phased out of running the CEE operations of TrendingTopics, and have taken on a big business and media challenge to create a sustainable, regional online media channel, uniting the various Southeast European founder, investor, and innovator communities. I wish them lots of luck and will be helping wherever I can in this mission, as it’s something I have deeply believed in since the day I decided to make this part of Europe my home, a decade ago.
Finally, yesterday, we had the pleasure of hosting the Teenovator Idea Weekend event from our Vitosha and launchlabs Sofia office. Teenovator is a Bulgarian NGO that runs entrepreneurship challenges for high-schoolers all across the country. While the event itself was virtual, Teenovator take a serious approach to online content production, and kindly asked us to host the presenters and mentors of the format this weekend, where they ran the event in a professional pop-up studio set up in our office. I’m happy we can provide support to such a great initiative in this way.
Beyond Sunday Max…
This week I won’t offer you another innovative way to get in touch online; instead, if you’re in Sofia and feel like meeting people in person, come visit me and my colleagues for an after-hours coffee or bubbly at the office. We love friends who stop by for a chat, so just comment here or get in touch directly for an invite 🥂
Thanks for checking in today and talk to you next Sunday! 😇
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