June 6; appreciating science and tech

Anti-allergy meds, vaccines, and other wonders of our times 😇

Jun 06, 2021

Happy Sunday,

Summer very well may be everyone’s favorite time of the year, but since I started developing hay-fever allergies about 20 years ago, the beginning of summer is always a love-hate situation for me: great to be outdoors, and thankful for the long days and late sunsets, but for about 3-4 weeks, until the worst of the grass blossom is over, I need to have these around me all the time:

Second shot 💉

This week Ellie and I got our second scheduled shot of the Covid-19 vaccine. Like everyone said, the side effects were minor this time; Ellie had sore muscles for about 24 hours, and I just felt it in my arm for about that much time.

Now with both shots in our bodies, and our full vaccination to be official on June 16, we’re excited to see where we can travel with our vaccination certificates. I’m keeping a close watch on the Reopen EU website, where there is handy tool that shows you the combination of any two EU countries of origin and destination, and the travel rules depending on your Covid-state.

The fast growth of the startup founder community 👩🏻‍💻

One of the most exciting things I do at work is coordinating the early-stage investment program we have with Vitosha, called Vitosha ACCELERATE. We’re now approaching the end of the hands-on program with 7 teams, and I’m looking forward to hosting a series of meetings and events during and after summer, to present these companies and the progress the founders have made.

Running ACCELERATE, after a seven-year break from being responsible for accelerator programs, has been a very interesting experience with a huge learning curve for me. For one thing, doing this during a pandemic has been really challenging. Almost no in-person interactions, total inability to bring mentors from outside, or take teams for meetings to places like London, Berlin, or SF, and attending events with and for them. It was tough and I often felt unable to give people as much value as I would have wanted to.

The other big learning moment, and a positive one, is how much the industry has matured over the last decade. Just here in Sofia, there are now several entrepreneurship programs that help first-time founders learn all the basics of building startups. I decided to take a pro-active approach by being involved with these programs as a mentor, giving back as much as I can from my experience and what we have at Vitosha, and at the same time gauging which founders and teams have what it takes for us to take an investor perspective on them.

The Silicon Valley-based Founder Institute has its main global ops base in Sofia, run by my friend Janet Todorova, who gives founders from the entire CEE a great opportunity to attend a world-class program

So far, I’ve been involved as a mentor and jury panelist at the Founder Institute Eastern Europe Spring 2021 Virtual program, and at the Beyond Pre-Accelerator program run by JA Bulgaria. The two programs are quite different one from the other, but both absolutely excellent at getting first-timers to drink from the firehose of the early startup experience. With several dedicated program managers each, a rich pool of great mentors, and an intricate system of tasks, reports, selection moments, it’s really so much more than I ever had when I first started thirteen years ago.

Joining a jury panel on the online graduation of the Beyond Pre-accelerator program last week

Being involved with both the Beyond and the Founder Institute programs, I realized an interesting truth: as an industry, we have come full circle on acceleration. Back in 2005, the first accelerator programs started with the idea to decrease seed investor ticket sizes, and thus investor risk, all while using mentorship programs to gauge first-time founders, increasing the chances of betting on a good one for investors. Today, with so many growth resources available, like the Founder Institute, Beyond, and other pre-accelerator programs, there is almost no business case anymore to invest small tickets in inexperienced people if they haven’t gone through such a program. Whatever portfolio program you run as an investor, it can never match the hands-on intensive learning that good pre-accelerators provide, and we should rather reserve our small-ticket and mentorship resources as the next stage for the best founders who emerge from these pre-accelerators.

I will be expanding on these thoughts as we continue to improve and expand Vitosha ACCELERATE, and I hope that we become a great channel for the best pre-accelerator graduates to grow their startups with our help.

Sunday Max

Discussion about this post