“Happiness is a state, but not a goal. It is a conscious choice.”
Atanas Simeonov went into business for himself unexpectedly, in the murky wilds of the 1990s, with a story worthy of a novel (told, in superhuman fashion, here).
Today he is a successful entrepreneur in many unexpected directions. Over time, he has added the digital sphere to his traditional offline ventures with the Ocean Investments platform, which includes the cybersecurity company Amatas and the software company Resolute, where until recently I worked as a programmer.
Digital Stories has hosted engineers, writers, even a priest and a conductor. But this is the first time the guest is someone who has made entrepreneurship his calling, and, through the Endeavor platform, a means of changing the world around him.
Where would he head if he had to start today? Can entrepreneurship be learned, or is it a matter of luck or talent? Is artificial intelligence a good direction for investment? Is it the field that will allow our country to achieve serious success? Where is happiness, and why are billionaires so often missing it? When will we learn to value our health and take care of it?
– If you had to start out as an entrepreneur today, where would you head?
– Over the years I've thought a lot about what I would do if I had the choice. In entrepreneurship you usually start with some idea, then you modify it, conditions change and you adapt to the opportunities. But, broadly speaking, I would make a product—digital or physical. What matters is that you create something, whether it's software or a table.
– These days, though, it's somehow fashionable to link entrepreneurship with the digital world.
– That's true, and I don't think it's okay at all. Nor is the widespread idea that the IT startup ecosystem is the only one there is. In reality, an ecosystem can't function on its own, and this sector wouldn't exist without the others. So when I think about what to develop and how we should develop the Bulgarian ecosystem, I try to keep it balanced. Lately there's been a lot of talk about entrepreneurship and how startups happen, but a banitsa shop—banitsa being the cheese pastry Bulgarians eat for breakfast—is a startup too, and so is a confectionery workshop.
I talk to an awful lot of people who run traditional businesses, and I think it's a problem that in their world there isn't enough talk about how to start and how to grow. I often joke that at some point
we'll have lots of IT, lots of computers, and no salad on our tables,
because there will be no one to grow the tomatoes and serve them to us.
The focus of our group is balance—both physical, traditional business and digital.
– And yet it seems the digital world isn't “told” enough. I, for one, only learned what a startup is after I moved into IT.
– That's when I learned it too. Before that I was building companies and had no idea they were startups.
Because the IT industry is knowledge-based, because it develops very fast and because it's making enormous amounts of money globally right now, it can accumulate knowledge and use every modern means of communication.
It used to be like that with the banks, and before them with the industrialists. There is always one leading industry that makes the most money and talks about good practices. What I have always tried to do is
“steal” knowledge from all kinds of industries and apply what I've learned in all kinds of industries.
I think it would be useful for the startup ecosystem in Bulgaria to take good practices, in this case from the IT industry, and apply them in traditional business. They always have to be adapted, but my experience shows that it's possible and can be very successful.
Why isn't this talked about more?
In Bulgaria, we hardly talk about important topics anyway, and this one is no exception.
– Why is that? I have the feeling that the successes, and IT news in general, don't reach society. We argue and fight over whether to tear down a monument, not over the fact that we already have a company valued at a billion dollars.
– Things in technology happen faster than people can adapt, and adapting takes time. People have fears; this is something new. Besides, in Bulgaria there is still a mass culture of rejecting rich people.
I think a large part of society doesn't know how to react to news like this, that we have a billion-dollar company—whether it's good, whether it's bad, whether they're crooks who stole something, what exactly they do, the whole lack of understanding of what it means for a startup to become a unicorn. Even within the ecosystem, people don't understand that phenomena like this send ripple effects through the entire ecosystem.
Another explanation can be found in Bulgarian history: we had a brutal interruption of more than 40 years, under communism, of any business and entrepreneurial practice in Bulgaria. It's perfectly normal that, starting over, people need time to see it as something positive. It's a question of literacy, of time, of the right communication.
And for me it's very important that we talk to each other. I've been a newcomer to this industry for seven or eight years. Another thing that gets in the way is that speaking some complicated language, full of foreign words and abbreviations, is seen as very sexy and important, and that doesn't help make things understandable.
And sometimes people are simply afraid to ask. In the beginning I was the dumbest person in the room; I admitted it and I asked. I had no problem accepting that I didn't know. When you approach things that way, people are willing to share.
– I've read that Musk approaches things that way too—when he got into the rocket business, for example, he went in saying he knew nothing, and then quickly dug deep.
– I think the most important quality isn't knowing everything; that's impossible. The question is how fast you learn and how deep you go.
Musk is a very good example: he enters several industries he knows nothing about and then becomes the one who knows them best. The funniest thing is that it's not complicated, the approach is clear: you read, you ask, you learn, learn, learn… That's part of the problem—many people don't learn. I see doing business as part of a learning process, and I enjoy doing new things so that I can learn.
– You said we need to talk to each other more and more, but lately it seems ever harder for us to do so—between classes, between sectors, on a purely human level on Facebook. Why is that?
– Solely and only because we're afraid.
– What are we so afraid of?
– So many things. We humans are very productive at inventing things to be afraid of. We're afraid of making fools of ourselves. We're afraid someone will think we're dumber than we think we are. We're afraid of being insulted, of being hurt.
I think people drift away from being well because they run out of fear. Fears have to be challenged and healed.
– A survey came out recently showing that most young people are convinced the only way to succeed in Bulgaria is to have rich parents. How did we get here? Can we change this way of thinking?
– Yes, but it will take time. Young people today are the generation of the transition, the so-called transition from communism after 1989—I don't know where we're transitioning to, but we've been straddling it for quite a while, it's gotten a bit long.
– Almost like with Moses…
– Whether it'll take 40 years… we're on our way, 33 have already passed. I think this phenomenon is extremely negative for our whole society, and it's due to the fact that
many young people don't read and don't think critically.
A long time ago I did my own statistics: I took the list of the world's billionaires and analyzed how many of them inherited their wealth, how many had a university degree, what the patterns were. The list has grown a lot since then, but the trends hold. Self-made people are an overwhelming majority, and education is not a requirement.
We often look for excuses. Because it's easier that way, you tell yourself: “My parents aren't rich, so I won't be either. I'll wait for my next reincarnation.” That's not how it is!
Success, in whatever dimension, comes from persistence and hard work.
In Bulgaria there are the same, if not more, opportunities to build a successful business as anywhere else in the world. The question is whether you're enterprising.
There is no nation where everyone is in business, and that isn't the goal. But examples are very important, and in Bulgaria we have them both before 1944, when the communists came to power, and now.
– What are your favorite examples—from both periods?
– Before 1944, one of them is Burov, the interwar banker and politician. Also the industrialist Pencho Semov from Gabrovo, who built one of the largest textile factories of his time and is also known for his charity work.
For today's entrepreneurs I have many examples, from both the physical and the digital world. Without question the digital champions are my friends from Telerik, the Bulgarian software company, who are emblematic of our reality. Not only did they make the first big deal of their time, they created the ecosystem.
With Endeavor Global we did a study of the Bulgarian ecosystem using their methodology. Telerik's contribution shows up there visually, in pure mathematics. Its alumni have created more than 300 startups, and on top of that they fund companies.
For me, that's an example of how things should be done. You build a perfect company with a great culture. You leave it, but then you reinvest everything in Bulgaria, you develop the next generation of entrepreneurs and you teach people. And separately you set up a fund that develops the ecosystem.
Another favorite example of mine is Maksim Mitkov of Maxcom, the largest bicycle manufacturer in Bulgaria and the second largest in Europe. A man the media doesn't talk about, likable, calm. He has a turnover of 100 million euros, a manufacturing company, several thousand employees.
Ventures like these, over time and as they multiply, will change the environment in Bulgaria.
– You say most billionaires are unhappy people. Why?
– I know a few billionaires, but also quite a few millionaires, who are no exception. Because
they turn money, competition and the acquisition of material things into the goal and the only meaning of their lives.
When someone does that, whether it's for millions or for thousands, they become a slave to money. Money must not be your master. It has to be your servant—you use it to make good things happen.
It's a tool. Everything we do with it should be a means to something more meaningful, something bigger. When you upset the balance and lose yourself in the pursuit of money, it's hard to be happy.
– So what matters for being happy?
– That's the trillion-dollar question. Recently we had an event with Maria Laleva, and I deliberately provoked her because I knew what she'd say: “There's no such thing as happiness. It's all a path.” I'd rather say that
happiness is a state, but not a goal.
It's a choice, and a conscious one. You can't reach it unless you've developed a certain level of self-awareness, of consciousness, of perception of the world. Unless you have a sense of gratitude, of having enough.
We humans try to understand complicated things when in fact we don't understand the simple ones. When we value precisely those, we can be happy.
Happiness is seen as a grinning reality, slightly infantile—being in a good mood while others can't understand why. That's not it. It's when you're in harmony with yourself, no matter what's happening.
It's all in our heads, in how we perceive things.
– An essential component of happiness is health, and you say this topic is a great cause of yours. The problem is huge: Bulgarians are completely uninterested in their health, we don't take care of ourselves, we don't go for checkups. How did it come to this? Can we reverse the trend?
– Health is the foundation. I keep repeating this ugly statistic:
in Bulgaria, 120,000 people die every year. And that's without a war! It happens quietly, and nobody does anything.
I think it's very hard to be happy if you're not healthy—it's the foundation. And the necessary condition for being healthy is to educate yourself on the subject, to be aware and to take action.
We're used to the state taking care of everything; we expect every temporary leader to solve our problems—from grandmothers' pensions to every illness of every person.
In fact, responsibility for health is personal. If you love your children and your loved ones, if you want to be with them and give to each other, won't you make some effort to have more time on this Earth?
People don't have this perspective; they see their lives as the decision of some government or as an inevitable fate.
Fate exists, maybe it's not very avoidable, but the stupid things you do matter enormously. We're world champions in smoking and in alcohol consumption per capita. If you look at all these statistics, it's a living miracle that only 120,000 people die; apparently we're quite resilient.
I strongly believe in prevention, which comes through education and through talking.
Since we talked about happiness: in various rankings in recent years we've been number one or two in the world as the unhappiest nation. That's something I very much want us to change. Because it's a question of self-perception; for me, the first thing is to work on people's mindset, so that they start taking care of their health, which then becomes a perpetuum mobile and sets everything else in motion.
– Everything we've talked about so far goes through literacy, education and the media. I think we need a new kind of media, suited to our times, and we still don't have it. Do you think a working model will appear soon?
– The media are a classic example of a transition between a traditional and an old business model. I think new solutions are appearing—you're a medium yourself, podcasts are a very serious medium for the new generation, Facebook is a medium, although not the best example. Abroad there are successful examples of media with their own focus that rely on people willing to pay for quality, genuine information.
In Bulgaria, what I believe has to happen, and we have a historical tradition in this direction, is an organization in the spirit of the buditeli, the enlighteners of the Bulgarian National Revival, with a non-material goal.
Nothing is free, but content is what really matters.
Sooner or later, the media that bet on the truth will succeed.
– To finish, let's go back to the world of technology. What do you think of all the recent buzz around artificial intelligence, around the notorious ChatGPT?
– The new thing right now is a working interface: a technology that isn't new, but that makes what already exists usable and visible to the general public. I think this is a long-awaited big change. It's always like that with new technologies—you know something will come of it, you know that's the direction, but exactly how it will happen, nobody knows.
– Do you think we can seize this chance and, through the INSAIT institute, become a regional leader, as Prof. Martin Vechev aims for?
– There are opportunities for our ecosystem, but these things really don't happen by chance. That's what I like about the word “ecosystem”—you don't get an apple all at once, like with 3D printing. First you have to find the right soil, sow, water, graft, tend the saplings until you get to the apple. The road is long, but I think this is the right direction. IT business is a very broad concept, but artificial intelligence sits very high up. You can't develop it without people with very serious scientific knowledge.
It's big news that we have a Bulgarian doing the work of a buditel, who decided to do the hard thing: to bring the knowledge he gained abroad back to Bulgaria. In fact,
all the good things 100 years ago happened exactly this way
—people went to Vienna, to Paris, to London, to the centers of knowledge and practice of the day, then came back and applied what they had learned here.
INSAIT is one of the very few examples where everyone backed the idea—the government, big foreign companies and the Bulgarian ecosystem.
What happens every day shows more and more that
this isn't a dream, it's a plan, and it's working despite everything.
Fortunately, Martin is Bulgarian: he doesn't give up easily, and the unpleasant things around him don't impress him or put him off.
Will artificial intelligence change the world and Bulgaria? Certainly; it's a technology of very great power. I hope that we humans manage to use it and master it to our advantage, rather than let it slip from our hands and wipe us out. The future will tell…
