January 30; Laboris Gloria Ludi 🚀
More investments, some games, and back on the skis... this was my week 😇
Happy Sunday,
Another week flew by so fast, it must be January. Like most mid-season weeks, this one was full of work, with some neatly scheduled fun here and there.
About work 🧑🏻💻
At Vitosha, we have gotten to 42 portfolio investments under our belt, which means we’re nearing the half of our projected portfolio size of ± 100 investments. This also means we’re shifting our focus gradually from new investments, a process we’ve mostly routinized by now, to actually portfolio-managing the investments we made, which, as they mature, require more and more involvement and support.
Still, we’re not sitting still when it comes to new deals; we’re working hard on another six or so investments, which we hope to finalize in the coming weeks.
This week I had the pleasure to share the story of another recent investment of ours, a company called Elca.bg. It’s one of those rare, exciting opportunities where it’s a solution for the local market here in Bulgaria, but one that’s big enough that it has an amazing growth- and return potential. Elca’s founder, Kremena, was until recently the CEO of Bulgaria’s largest electricity distributor, and has the ambition to become Bulgaria’s first utilities comparison platform, as the country gears up to finalize its energy liberalization process this year.
As of now, Bulgaria still has three electricity monopolists that cover the different parts of the country (West, Center, and East), which were created during the privatization of the old state-owned provider twenty years ago. The European Union mandates full liberalization so that each business and household can choose a provider and rate that they wish, and it’s expected that this will finally be implemented here in Bulgaria in 2022. With over 40 providers already registered with the regulatory authorities, Elca.bg aims to become the main entry point for customers to choose rates and close contracts with providers. Check out my full story about Kremena and her fantastic team and plans here:
About games 🧩🎮
When we’re not working, we’re playing! About a year ago, I stumbled upon a cool book at Gifted Sofia, which I bought without much thought, and this week Ellie and I finally unpacked it… leading to two hours of great fun.
Panelki is one of the many cool editions by Zupagrafika, a Poland-based collective of architects, designers, and urban development historians, who publish all kinds of books about socialist and brutalist architecture. This specific work about socialist-era pre-fab panel blocks contains a scale model, with 164 cardboard pieces that you pop out of the book and assemble a 27cm/9cm/18cm housing block with.
For most of us who spent (parts of) our childhood behind the Iron Curtain, these unsightly concrete boxes are the main environment we remember from those years, and despite their utter ugliness and inhumanity, compared at least to what civilized city dwellings ought to look like, they fill many of us with nostalgia, for those careless childhood years where everyone lived in a tiny apartment in one of these, and seemed happy about it. As Charles Aznavour famously quipped, after one of his tours of the Soviet Union, when returning to France and being asked by journalists about his experience there: “The Soviet people are the happiest people in the world, because they don’t understand what misery they live in”.
How can one talk about games in January 2022, without mentioning… Wordle! Ellie and I got hooked, together with hundreds of millions around the world, on this beautifully simple word-guessing game. Six tries to guess a five-letter word, no app installation, all web-based, no time pressure, and just one word each day, the same for everyone around the world. It’s become my favorite three-minute ritual each morning as I sip my coffee:
In many ways, Wordle’s beauty is that it’s the antipode of modern casual gaming, or of attention-sucking digital products as a whole. There’s no revenue model, it’s not engineered to make you an addict, it’s not even an app that can spam you with notifications. It’s a nostalgic throwback to the games we played on our computers or GameBoys as kids and teenagers. I’m excited to see if the maker of the game will be able to turn it into a business, without giving up on the game’s characteristics. Check out this great write-up in the New York Times about the game and its creator.
And as if Panelki and Wordle wasn’t enough: today we got our Meta Quest 2 VR system delivered, that Ellie ordered for the office! We’re just unpacking it as I type this, so we’ll send you updates from the Metaverse in the next Sunday Max!
About skiing ⛷🎿
After jealously following our friends’ Insta stories from the slopes and the snow over the past week, we finally escaped Sofia this week for a day-and-a-half of skiing in Borovets. With temperatures between -5 deg C and 0 deg C, and lots of sun and a good pack of snow, it was delightful. Borovets is probably my least favorite of the ski areas in Bulgaria, but being only 70km from Sofia, it’s definitely the most convenient one, and once you get away from the tourist trap of the town center, its nature and facilities are actually quite superb.
Thanks for checking in today and talk to you next Sunday! 😇
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