Founder's School
Real Equity vs Virtual Shares in Bulgaria: A Corporate Governance Playbook for Employee Incentives
Viktor Mitev Viktor is a partner at EY Bulgaria dealing with tax planning of deals, investment structures and transfer pricing setups. His focus is on the ecosystems in Bulgaria, Albania, N. Macedonia and has been supporting local entrepreneurs in tax structuring of their global operational footprint when scaling up and...
Founders, Stop Dumping Money on Your Go-To-Market Strategy
If you’re a founder, at least once you’ve googled “go-to-market strategy.” You’ve asked ChatGPT, and maybe read a few Medium posts. You’ve even downloaded every free template out there. And then followed the same default advice — define your ICP, pick channels, build funnels, and...
What Agency Founders Should Know Before Building Their First Product
Most CEE startup founders start their entrepreneurial journey by building an agency, like Omnisend, which began as a digital marketing agency, or MailerLite, which started as a web design studio in 2005 and pivoted in 2010 to productize email marketing. It’s a simpler way to generate revenue, learn the...
What CEE Startups Need More Than Money
The Central and Eastern European (CEE) has grown remarkably over the past decade, yet despite this, the region’s startup ecosystem remains constrained. And the bottleneck is not a lack of capital, nor is it simply a matter of political risk or market size, as people sometimes assume… The CEE...
How to Know Which People Your Business Can’t Survive Without
A practical framework to identify key people, assess risks, and decide what to do next. Founders spend most of their time finding market fit, checking out competitors, hiring, fundraising, attending board meetings and analyzing financials and projections. In CEE markets, where startups and scaleups are founder heavy, one type of...
Founder’s Guide: What Makes You Different vs. Why You Exist
Around 90% of startups fail, and nearly half do so because they build something no one actually needs. The root cause is simple: founders fall in love with their idea, skip user validation, and assume the market will care. It rarely does. Success often depends on clearly understanding the problem,...
What CEE Founders Can Learn From a German Factory: The Venture Client Playbook in Action
What if your startup’s next major milestone didn’t require raising another round, but signing your first serious client? Across the world, founders are often trained to think in fundraising cycles. From pre-seed to seed to Series A, everything is framed around equity capital. But in today’s...
Entering UK Market: 7 Common Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
In 2024, startups across the UK secured around $17 billion in investment, positioning the UK as the most popular destination for early-stage ventures in Europe. The nation’s thriving ecosystem is further highlighted by its more than 30 unicorns, reflecting strong growth and innovation, which makes the UK a...
The Talent Crisis in Tech Isn’t Hiring. It’s Leadership.
The talent crisis in tech is striking. The statistics speak for themselves: within the European Union alone, the tech talent gap could be 1.4 million to 3.9 million people by 2027. In one study from Deloitte, nearly 90% of business leaders said that recruiting and retaining talent was...
