Our next guest wears many hats. Hristo Hristov is a serial entrepreneur involved in the development of digital media in Bulgaria. He is an angel investor and a partner in the VC fund Eleven Ventures . He is also a mentor to startups in the entrepreneurial network Endeavor. Currently, Hristo is the CEO of the private equity company HR Capital and of Darik radio . In this episode, he reflects how his experience in journalism prepared him for the entrepreneurial journey ahead and gives us a glimpse...
Mar 08, 2022•58 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast Our next guest is one of the few engineers to have walked on the red carpet in Hollywood. Peter Mitev is the co-founder of t he software company Chaos . And owner of Oscar and Emmy awards for technological achievements . The company offers technology for rendering and 3D visualizations known worldwide. It has applications in design, architecture and entertainment among others. In the beginning of 2022 Chaos announced a merger with the German Enscape to begin the next chapter of their global expa...
Mar 01, 2022•58 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast Our guest today is one of the most experienced product managers in the Bulgarian tech-scene. Her name is Mariya Rashkovska and she is the head of product management of the Bulgarian Adtech company PubGalaxy . Last year, PubGalaxy was acquired by the Dutch scaleup Azerion . Prior to joining PubGalaxy, Mariya held management positions at companies such as Telerik and Financial Times. She is also the co-founder of Product Tank-Sofia and a consultant who helps IT companies build successful products....
Feb 22, 2022•51 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Our next guest has always believed in the idea that space is closer than we think. Raycho Raychev is the co-founder of one of the fastest growing space tech companies in Europe - EnduroSat . EnduroSat builds nanosatellites and it offers shared satellite missions that give nations, companies, and even universities access to space . Raycho Raychev has also created a leadership and space education program in Bulgaria called “Space Challenges' '. That is where he met the people to first join him on ...
Feb 15, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Next, on The Recursive podcast we welcome an experienced engineer and a pioneer in the computer software industry in Bulgaria. Boris Simandoff currently serves as the VP of Tech Innovations at Via, the on-demand transit tech company , born in the US. He’s also the General Manager of their engineering team in Bulgaria. He has more than 20 years of experience in the field of software design, code optimization, and distributed network systems. In his conversation with Georgi Nenov, Boris Simandoff ...
Feb 08, 2022•51 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Our next guest found entrepreneurship driven by her mission to help people and create something meaningful. While looking for a clinical trial for her sister diagnosed with a medical condition that lacked traditional treatment, Maya Zlatanova saw the need for a platform that helps patients look for alternative treatment. This is how FindMeCure was born. The company is now bringing research closer to patients by developing tools for patients and providing analytics to the healthcare industry. Or ...
Feb 01, 2022•53 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast Next on The Recursive podcast we welcome one of the most prominent executives and pioneers in the IT industry in Bulgaria. Ivaylo Slavov is a citizen of the world. Having a long and successful corporate career in Germany, he came back to Bulgaria more than 15 years ago to help set up the first nearshore IT operations for American giants like HP. 10 years ago he started his own company BULPROS and quickly turned it into one of the fastest-growing IT companies in Central Europe. Last year BULPROS ...
Jan 25, 2022•44 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Next on The Recursive podcast, we welcome a female entrepreneur who is passionate about business change, automation and the circular economy. Adina Huma is the co-founder of a Bucharest-based platform that offers sustainable packaging solutions for e-Commerce players called R-Create . Adina and her co-founder Linda Vasilescu aim to help online retailers reduce waste, lower costs, and attract customers with a green policy. She’s also a seasoned consultant and project manager, And guided the digit...
Jan 18, 2022•55 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast The Recursive podcast is back from winter break. Our next guest is an entrepreneur who is keen on technology and AI as much as he enjoys talking about philosophy and leadership. Ciprian Borodescu is the co-founder of MorphL, a start-up that developed an artificial intelligence-based solution to help online stores increase sales, and optimize their product metrics. His startup was acquired by the French company Algolia before they even managed to raise a seed round. Ciprian now serves as the Head...
Jan 11, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast 2021 has been a spectacular year for our next guest. Hristo Borisov is the co-founder and CEO of the Bulgarian fintech startup Payhawk, which raised a 20M dollars Series A in the first half of the year, followed by a historic for the Bulgarian ecosystem 112M dollars Series B in November. The startup which helps SMEs manage their expenses has ambitious plans for expansion in the US, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Hristo Borissov was a software engineer and a produc...
Dec 21, 2021•54 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast Our next guest has been an entrepreneur even before he knew what that meant. He earned his first money as a teenager, drawing graffiti for small businesses in Bucharest. Bogdan Nicoara is currently the co-founder of Bright Spaces, an end-to-end digital leasing platform for commercial real estate. Born in Romania in 2019, the startup is aiming to become a global tech disruptor in real estate. With a background in software development and digital marketing, Bogdan loves starting new projects and f...
Dec 14, 2021•59 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast Next stop for The Recursive podcast - Bucharest. It is where we meet serial entrepreneur and angel investor Gregoire Vigroux . The Frenchman who fell in love in Romania, set up all his businesses there, and made his goal to show everybody all the opportunities that the country presents. As a hyperactive person who likes to be challenged every day, Gregoire is born with an entrepreneurial mindset. He has co-founded and invested in more than 25 businesses across Eastern Europe and has had 4 exits ...
Dec 07, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast Next, on The Recursive podcast we welcome seasoned entrepreneur Ilia Krastev . As the CEO of A Data Pro , he’s managing a diverse portfolio of companies in the data and information economy - the business news provider for Southeast Europe SeeNews , the media monitoring company Perceptica , the business platform for renewable energy - Renewables Now , and the scientific unit, based on AI solutions Identrics . Ilia Krastev is also the chairman of the Association for Innovation, Business Exce...
Nov 30, 2021•59 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Our next guest on The Recursive podcast is an illustrator and designer turned entrepreneur Gergana Stancheva. She and her co-founder Angela Ivanova found a way to say goodbye to plastic in the packaging industry. Together they created LAM’ON in 2017 - а startup producing biodegradable laminating film for print and packaging. Several years later they are ready to launch officially and sell their products in Europe. They are focused on building up their production and distribution lines here in Bu...
Nov 23, 2021•44 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast Our next guest is a seasoned French businessman whose entrepreneurial journey is deeply intertwined with the fast development of the Bulgarian post-communist economy. Xavier Marcenac first came to Bulgaria in the early 90s, as the country was opening up for foreign investors. After several years of managing companies in Europe, in the early 2000s he came back to start one of the first BPO companies in the country. A sector, which later became one of the fastest-growing branches of the Bulgarian ...
Nov 16, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast In Bucharest again, we meet the co-founder of established software company QUALITANCE and most recently the AI-assisted platform for digital transformation FLOWX.AI Ioan Iacob. FLOWX.AI has just raised $8.5 million in a seed round , led by PortfoLion , with Day One Capital and SeedBlink also participating in the round. In this conversation with Ioan for The Recursive podcast, you will learn: How a Romanian engineer in Silicon Valley, overlooked because of his accent, beat the odds and changed th...
Nov 09, 2021•57 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast Next on The Recursive podcast, we welcome seasoned entrepreneur and investor turned political candidate Daniel Lorer. His journey in the business world has been versatile and rich. Starting as a coder, turned into a sales executive, who then turned into а startup founder with a couple of successful exits. After years of living between Tel Aviv, Paris, Brussels, and Zurich, he came back to Bulgaria and entered the venture capital world with Sofia-based BrightCap Ventures. Now, Lorer is at a turni...
Nov 02, 2021•39 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast On the next stop in Bucharest, The Recursive podcast welcomes Ilinca Paun . She is a person who knows the price of taking big risks to chase the freedom and the excitement of the unknown. At the top of the corporate ladder as the manager of Colliers in Romania, she quit her job as an expert in the real estate business to become an explorer. She co-founded The Entrepreneurship Academy and became a teacher there, advising young people on their entrepreneurial journey, but also learning from them. ...
Oct 26, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast The next guest of the Bucharest edition of The Recursive podcast is a person who anticipates future trends and helps people and organizations see the opportunities in them. Ciprian Stanescu is the co-founder of Social Innovation Solutions , an organization that assists leaders in creating sustainable tech, entrepreneurial & policy solutions. With a background in political science and economics, Stanescu consults both NGOs and companies on social impact and innovation. He’s also a professor a...
Oct 19, 2021•47 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast Season 2 of The Recursive podcast kicks off in Bucharest. We first meet XENIA MUNTEAN, the co-founder, and CEO of the marketing collaboration platform Planable . She considers herself “an accidental entrepreneur”, even though she started her first business when she was just 20 years old. Today, the platform she and her co-founders built to help marketing teams collaborate better is used by over 5,000 teams around the world behind brands such as Hyundai, Christian Louboutin, Viber, and the United...
Oct 12, 2021•58 min•Ep 1•Transcript available on Metacast What is the archetype of a great leader? Does leadership come naturally to people or is it something you can learn on the job? What are the skills you need to adopt and nurture to grow into the leader you want to become? To wrap up Season 1 of The Recursive podcast we picked some of the best insights on leadership that our guests shared on the podcast. In order of appearance: The Vice president Regional Communities Strategy at IT company VMware Diana Stefanova believes that many people hav...
Oct 05, 2021•22 min•Ep 11•Transcript available on Metacast In episode 10 of The Recursive podcast, we meet with Bozhidar Bozhanov, the co-founder of cybersecurity company LogSentinel . He’s also one of the driving forces behind the digitalization of the public sector in Bulgaria. A software engineer with a passion for technology and an active citizen stance, Bozhidar has a talent for explaining complex topics. His company Logsentinel offers an information security product, which allows companies to track every single event that takes place in their info...
Sep 28, 2021•47 min•Ep 10•Transcript available on Metacast In episode 9 of The Recursive Podcast, we welcome Diana Stefanova, Vice President Regional Communities Strategy at VMware . Currently, VMware is the biggest IT company, operating in Bulgaria. In love with math from an early age, Diana Stefanova has a solid background in finance. Her expertise is in the strategic and business development of both startups and global companies. She started her career in technology startups in the US and quickly rose to leadership roles. Currently, she is also a par...
Sep 21, 2021•59 min•Ep 9•Transcript available on Metacast In Episode 8 of The Recursive podcast, Irina meets the Head of Engineering of the American company Product Hunt Rado Stankov. A Bulgarian software engineer, Rado was one of the first employees of Product Hunt who developed into one of the best technical leads in the Silicon Valley. Rado is а frequent guest at tech conferences and podcasts, sharing his knowledge about productivity, product and time management, and working in a remote setup. Rado believes that Southeast Europe as a region needs to...
Sep 14, 2021•51 min•Ep 8•Transcript available on Metacast Episode 7 of The Recursive podcast welcomes a very special guest - motivational speaker, executive coach, and serial entrepreneur Peter Sage. Entrepreneurship is his game, but understanding human behavior, and the psychology of why we do what we do has been his passion for the last 30 years. Peter Sage has been traveling the world, writing books, giving lectures, coaching others, running marathons, trying to answer the question - how can we become better versions of ourselves. In his conversatio...
Sep 07, 2021•1 hr 17 min•Ep 7•Transcript available on Metacast In the sixth episode of The Recursive podcast, we welcome one of the pioneers of technology entrepreneurship in Bulgaria Georgi Kadrev . He’s the co-founder and CEO of image recognition company Imagga and Kelvin Health , а startup building a digital solution for early detection of breast cancer through AI. A software engineer by qualification and a go-getter by nature, Georgi is driven by the aim to create things that are useful to others. He is also an associate professor at Sofia University wh...
Aug 31, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep 6•Transcript available on Metacast In episode 5 of The Recursive podcast, we welcome the Bulgarian human rights researcher turned social entrepreneur Iva Gumnishka. Only 27 years old, Iva is the founder of Humans in the Loop, a social enterprise aimed at providing refugees, asylum-seekers, and migrants with marketable computer skills. Humans in the Loop is specialized in data annotation for the computer vision industry. Their employees perform manual labeling and verification to train machine learning models. The social enterpris...
Aug 24, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast In episode 4 of The Recursive podcast, we get inside the mind of the serial entrepreneur and professional coach, and startup advisor Hristo Neychev. Currently, he is a partner at ST6, a company that delivers consulting services in the fields of software development, DevOps, cloud technologies, lean methodologies, and design thinking. In the last decade, he has been an advisor, trainer, and consultant to many entrepreneurs, Fortune 500 companies, and other business organizations. Driven by his pa...
Aug 17, 2021•48 min•Ep 4•Transcript available on Metacast In episode 3 Irina meets with the Romanian serial entrepreneur and angel investor Mircea Vadan. He’s currently a partner at Activize, a startup scouting and acceleration program in the Romanian and Eastern European ecosystems. Mircea is also a board member and investor in Transylvania Angels Network , an initiative bringing together business people interested in angel investing & mentoring tech startups. A computer science engineer, who’s passionate about entrepreneurship & tech startups...
Aug 10, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep 3•Transcript available on Metacast In episode 2 of The Recursive podcast, we meet with one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the Bulgarian startup community - Svetozar Georgiev - Zarko. He’s one of the co-founders of Telerik, a dev tools software company that was acquired by Progress for $262.5M back in 2014 - the biggest to this date exit in the local ecosystem. Since then, Zarko has been focusing his efforts on sharing the learned lessons with the next generation of Bulgarian leaders. He’s been driving the dev...
Aug 03, 2021•50 min•Ep 2•Transcript available on Metacast 
