My Visit to Launchub, the First Bulgarian Startup Accelerator

On Tuesday night I visited and delivered a talk to the cohort at Launchub, Bulgaria’s first software startup accelerator. Launchub is financed by a seed fund made up of private and EU money. Launchub is hosted at a great co-work space, betahaus, in downtown Sofia. It was great visiting betahaus and meeting the teams. I quickly noticed that the Bulgarian accelerator is the exact opposite of AcceleratorHK; in Bulgaria, the teams are engineering heavy, while in Hong Kong, the teams are business people/designer heavy. Too bad we are too far away for a merger.

I delivered a talk titled: “Lessons Learned From a Career in Startups.” I spoke about raising money, how a business partner is like a wife/husband, how to align staff’s expectations with your own, and then some general customer development (pivots, mvps, and all the current popular lingo.) My bosses at Telerik are involved in the accelerator and are mentors, so I told some jokes about them too.

At the Q&A time, Lyuben Belov, the program director, wanted me to put a team on the spot and have them do their pitch. I turned the tables on him and first asked Lyuben to pitch to me to invest in Launchub. (One of the lessons was to be ready to go now!) Lyuben did a fabulous job and then we picked one team, Useful at Night, to pitch. (It is also cool since this team also applied to the AcceleratorHK, but they are already in Launchub. I invited the team to come to HK for a week and spend time with the AcceleratorHK cohort.)

Evelin Velev from the team did a great job with absolutely no prep time.

To round out the evening, I put one of my Telerik colleagues on the spot when asked about the future of hybrid development. Hristo Neychev is the director of BizDev for Icenium, so he best be able to do this. He did not disappoint and we had fun, I was making slides on the fly for him.

After the talk and lively Q&A session, we went to a downtown bar and had some food and drinks and talked all night long about startups, technology, and why I joined a Bulgarian Startup when I came to Telerik many years ago.