Of new beginnings and celebrations 🥂💫

Your weekly Sunday Max is back, with 40 of my favorite lessons learned as I turn 40 this year. Here's episode 1, on the importance of celebrations.

Happy Sunday!

Today is September 17th, which means it’s exactly two months till I turn 40 on the same day of the month in November!

It’s been way too long since I shared anything here on Sunday Max. As mentioned before, I’ve been uneasy all this time about regular weekly updates (yikes, my last Sunday Max letter is from February!), as my usual happy-go-lucky stories didn’t match my ongoing concern for Ukraine and the horrific russian invasion going on there.

But life goes on, and in this special year that I turn 40, I thought a great way to celebrate with all of you would be to share weekly thoughts on a selection of forty of my favorite insights that I’ve gained through the years.

Today’s insight and topic is celebrations, and speaking of which, I’ve been thinking hard all summer about how exactly to celebrate my birthday this year. The downside of having led a multi-local life is that I have concentrations of people that I like very much in several different places. I have lots of friends in Sofia, but also in the Netherlands, in London, on the US West Coast, and a few other places here and there. Doing one big party in one place means missing out on most of the people from most of the other places. And so I thought that the best way is to have many occasions; I will be in Sofia on November 17, and I’d love to have everyone who’d like to join here with me, but I’ll also announce dates in other places in the course of a year from this November till my 41st birthday in November of next year. Stay tuned for dates and locations near you here on Sunday Max:)

Celebrations are important. They’re also ephemeral; they appear as opportunities and if not consumed, they whither away. It’s a lesson I first learned during the early days of my very first startup, back in Amsterdam in late 2009. We had reached product-market fit with my co-founder Maarten, and spent two months negotiating an angel investment with a group of investors. Throughout this time, I was still on leave notice at my old job, so I had to keep showing up there as well. Needless to say, it was all work, without weekends and much sleep. Somehow, as we progressed from meeting to meeting with the investors, then to marking up and signing the term sheet, then to various closing formalities with the notary, lawyers, and the bank, we couldn’t find a moment to celebrate our achievements. Maarten always sternly said that we should wait till the money is in the bank, so the bottle of Moët Chandon that I’d bought for the occasion (an outrageous luxury for me at the time), stayed in the fridge of our shared apartment next to Oosterpark. Then one day the money did arrive in the bank, and we suddenly had so many other things to take care of that we postponed till the weekend. Needless to say, that weekend was spent on putting out all kinds of new fires, so by the time we finally did open the bottle, months later, it didn’t feel like a celebration of the investment at all anymore. Water under the bridge, or in this case, pretty fancy champagne for us at the time.

In the fourteen years since, I’ve been reminding myself of that feeling of lost festivity every time a possible cause for a party comes up, and if you know me, you now also know why it is that our fridges at home and in the office always have bottles of bubbly in them. Just so I don’t miss out on making an occasion memorable ever again.

And this weekend was no exception to that rule; yesterday was the 16th anniversary of our first date with Ellie, and it also happens to be Rosh Hashanah and the annual Sofia Day festival here in Bulgaria’s capital.

That’s more than enough reasons to have a little bash, and I’m really grateful to everyone who showed up yesterday, depleting our fish preserves, apples, honey, and of course, bubbly, and having a really wonderful time.

Now that I’m approaching forty, I realize I often don’t remember what it was we were celebrating on this occasion or that, but the memories of the fun remain, as well as the countless friendships, acquaintances, and ideas that first took shape at these gatherings.

Here’s to remembering to celebrate as often as we can, and not letting the hectics and worries of everyday life steal those fleeting moments from us!