October 3; Human stories behind the business of doing business 👩🏽‍💼👨🏻‍💼📈

Honing in on the human faces and stories beyond the contracts and spreadsheets... this was my week 🔥

Happy Sunday,

It’s been a busy week for me back at the Vitosha office in Sofia. We’re progressing well with our investment plans, as we signed another six deals in the past two weeks and plan to close two more this week and next. With these upcoming two, we’ll be at exactly 25 investments in the less than 12 months since we started with the Vitosha fund; not only an indicator that we’re on track with our aim to invest in ~100 companies in four years, but also a moment to reflect with gratitude on the bigger scope of why we’re doing it.

My teammate Kamen at Vitosha last week, presenting our workflow to the founders of the latest six companies we invested in recently

Like many venture fund managers with a founder background, I got into this profession about a decade ago with the ambition to increase my exposure and impact. After you’ve made a mark with one startup as a founder, it’s a natural thing to want to do the same on a bigger scale; less operationally and more strategically involved in more companies.

Last week with Nikola Ninov, founder and CEO of our portfolio company Petmall.bg, the region’s fastest growing pet goods retailer

With Bulgaria in general and Vitosha in particular, there’s also the argument of “the rising tide that raises all the boats”. Despite widespread skepticism with how the country is developing, Bulgaria is in my view a solid European success story in the making. In the past ten years that I’ve lived here, the growth and progress have been incredible, both in numbers and in the perception of public services, public spaces, consumer behavior, attitudes in business and in culture, and so many more things.

From the venture angle, I have a pretty grand vision when I get asked about why I’m doing Vitosha. We’re building the next qualitative stage of an ecosystem, which, if we do things right, will yield dozens and possibly hundreds of successful organizations, both in business and in society, in the next decades. Our current work is an early first step towards that goal, as we enable hundreds of people to gain experience with entrepreneurship and business.

Paying a visit a few months ago to the atelier of Eirene Studio, a Vitosha company in the high-end fashion sector

Whether that experience yields results right away, with the projects we invest in today, or years down the line for some of these people, in their second, third, or thirtieth project, is less important for me today.

With Teodor, the CEO of Hobo, our investment in Bulgaria’s first own micromobility startup

Which is why the human factor is the most crucial determinator when I look at prospective deals. The human story of why and how a founder is doing what they’re doing tells you so much more than the numbers and the forecasts. Which of course are very important, but don’t actually give you the story of where things might be decades ahead.

My partner Marin and I, flanked by Georgi and Assen from Assen Aeronautics, a company developing passenger drones

I’ve established a bit of a tradition with our team at Vitosha, to tell these human stories, of our founders and their companies, and I’m looking forward to sharing more of them in the weeks and months ahead, written by my colleagues and myself, on the deals we do at Vitosha.

Here are a few of my stories from the deals we’ve done so far, and that I’m unequivocally excited about:

• The story of Tim and his passion for sports and e-sports, that led him to build Augment.gg, a toolkit for professional e-sports players

• The story of Bozhidar and Zdravko, who managed to save a local water pumping station in Sofia 30% of their energy cost, and are now implementing their GridMetrics AI solution to industrial plants on three continents

• The story of fashion manager Irina, who saw a big underserved niche, and launched Eirene Studio to design and market high-end apparel to girls and young women all over the world

• The story of Assen, a Bulgarian aerospace enthusiast who made a mark with several aviation endeavors, and is racing to be the first to bring a working passenger drone to the market

• The story of Teodor, who saw the lack of last-mile micromobility options in Bulgarian cities, and launched Hobo as the first integrated provider of individual transport-sharing services

We update our Vitosha portfolio overview regularly with the stories behind our investments, so check it out every now and then if you enjoyed reading these.

Thanks for checking in today and talk to you next Sunday! 😇

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