October 17; Hellenic delights 🇬🇷

A few days with colleagues and friends in beautiful and tasty Thessaloniki... this was the highlight of my week

Happy Sunday,

Bulgaria is a lucky place in so many ways, and one of them is that it happens to lie right next to Greece, one of the world’s most beautiful countries and sought-after travel destinations.

Just a short three-hour drive from Sofia, and you find yourself in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city, and bustling cultural and business hub with over a million people living in its metro area.

First things first: a proper Varvagianni ouzo from Plomari with the first meal in Greece

Like it often happens, the places right around the corner are the places you often overlook, and over the years that I’ve been living in Bulgaria, I definitely didn’t go to Greece nearly as much as I should have. I’ve been about a dozen times, but it was usually Athens or Thessaloniki, with an odd Halkidiki or Corfu beach, and a few hops to the island of Syros in 2019, when my friend and partner Erik Anderson and I hosted our SummitSummit there.

One of my old Insta shots of the Thessaloniki skyline, with the White Tower, from 2018

A couple of months ago my friend Michalis Stangos from Athens, a known businessman and investor, called to tell me about an innovation expo he was organizing in Thessaloniki in October, and I decided this was a good moment to finally start coming to Greece more often.

With our impeccable host this week in Greece, my friend Michalis

On Thursday, Ellie and I drove down to Thessaloniki and enjoyed ourselves a wonderful couple of days of meeting entrepreneurs, seeing venture and business colleagues again, and of course relishing in the fantastic Greek cuisine and hospitality.

Glad to have been able to invite a few of my regional VC friends to come to Thessaloniki this week, to speak together at the Beyond Expo

Same people, different venue… great dining and wining at Mamalouka in Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki has a centuries-old tradition of being a meeting place of trades and cultures, and when I think about the regional venture and innovation industry, I believe we have no better place in Southeastern Europe to serve as such for our community as well.

With Ellie at H Mourga: our best new restaurant find in Thessaloniki this time

Thessaloniki has by far the most flight connections of any Balkans airport, and is easily drivable from Bulgaria, Albania, North Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia. It also has tons of hotels, restaurants too many to count, and a large exhibition center. In past years, the city already brought us together on a few occasions, when its municipal OKThess entrepreneurship center, under its former head, the affable and formidable Simon Bensasson, hosted regional investor meetups, and I believe it’s a tradition we need to resume as we restart the post-pandemic in-person networking.

Despite some of the horror stories I heard of post-Covid Bulgarian-Greek border antics, it took us just 4 minutes to pass the Promachonas border station this week

And of course, apart from work, Greece is just a complete pleasure to the senses. Excellent food, amazing wine, and endless art, design, and culture wherever you go.

Another amazing discovery, the Gerovassiliou winery just 35 mins south of Thessaloniki. Known and loved in Greece for resurrecting the nearly-extinct Malagousia grape variety

This coming week, Ellie and I will be staying in Greece to work remotely from a beach on Halkidiki just for those very reasons. Who knows, we might even get lucky with the weather and get a swim or two in the crystal-clear Aegean waters. Tune in again next Sunday to find out 😉

Thanks for checking in! 😇

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