[norswap]

> The economy is not developed, making it extremely difficult to convince anybody to buy anything you try to sell them. People are pessimistic and desperate, most of the rich make money through corruption and criminal activities. There is little support or financing for running a legitimate business. Talent is scarce. There is nothing to compete over and nobody to compete with on a local level.

Away with the violins already. Bulgaria may not be entrepreneur friendly or corruption free, but it is not a misery cesspool (source: my friends there).

> Unlike the people I met in the Silicon Valley, only a handful of our tech-oriented students had participated in hackatons, contributed to open-source software, had started a personal blog or answered questions in online help communities such as StackOverflow.

This is classical Silicon Valley fetichising. Some wannabe entrepreneurs have it too, here in Belgium. But if you want that mindset, you better look at the rest of the ideology that comes with it. Personally I want no part in it.

Nevertheless, the rest of the post shows that it is in fact easier to start a business in Bulgaria. The relative immaturity of the tech scene means it's actually much easier to make a splash and find opportunities. Better be self-taught in the land of opportunity then well-schooled in a saturated market.

And at the end of the day, that's also what entrepreneurship is: doing your own thing, with no one holding your hand.

[Kaizeras]

> Bulgaria may not be entrepreneur friendly or corruption free, but it is not a misery cesspool

I absolutely agree with your opinion. There are companies like Telerik (acquired by Progress Software) and Chaos Group which have earned our country a formidable reputation on the global tech scene and it's relatively easy to get recognized. The overall ennvironment is good too - the country has grown a lot since it became member of the EU. Despite all this, it doesn't have the extremely competitive atmosphere, the "evolve or die" mindset of the more developed markets. There is nobody who's going to push you out or take you over. Personally I think such type of atmosphere would have let us grow much faster and innovate quicker.

> Nevertheless, the rest of the post shows that it is in fact easier to start a business in Bulgaria.

I'm not implying the opposite. It's easy to start a run-of-the mill software development outsourcing business and sustain it, but with such "immature tech scene", it's very difficult to evolve it in something bigger, and that's a big problem.

p.s I'm the author of this article

[psvx]

I'am an ex ChaosGroup employee and I can tell you that if there's one thing I learned while working there, it's that all these constraints are in your mind. You can find talent here. You can create a product here and sell it worldwide and be successful. You can be competetive or better than your western competition. In some ways, doing this is even easier than in the west. My view is that in order to be greatly successful, you need 3 things, no matter in what part of the world you happen to be:

1. Great idea.

2. Great timing.

3. Lots of work.

(besides the companies you listed, I could also mention coherent-labs.com, which are also global leaders in their market).

[charlesdm]

I don't live in EE (and maybe I'm naive about this), but shouldn't it actually be easier to find great talent if you put in an effort?

I mean, there are great people in pretty much in every country, and if the alternative is, say, (boring) outsourcing development work, shouldn't you be able to convince people with above average (local) pay and offering them a great place to work, etc?

[taway_1212]

> convince people with above average (local) pay and offering them a great place to work

With hardly any VC money around, you don't really have a way to pay for those.

[charlesdm]

Nonsense. You’ll make plenty of money by actually building something people will pay for. You know, a product can actually make money without raising VC?

[taway_1212]

I agree, but then you have to bootstrap with your savings, which means you definitely won't be paying above average wages and renting nice offices etc (which is what I was replying to).

[Luc]

A great many successful entrepreneurs have money (and often a tradition of entrepreneurship) in the family to get them started. No VC needed.

[auganov]

Don't need to raise local. And you probably shouldn't anyways if you're in Europe.

[vminkov]

That may be valid only if you're able to raise good money but the tech investing culture is quite underdeveloped here. The startup scene needs several bigger exits to make the investors greedy and curious about it and also construction/private property yields huge profits right now, so the tech startups are not the spotlight catcher.

[charlesdm]

Without making this sound ridiculous -- sometimes it just doesn't make sense to do tech. If I can make crazy returns investing and/or building property, you should probably be doing property and not tech. EE is probably a good place to be in terms of property investing at the moment.

But there's probably a place for both.

[yitchelle]

4. world class execution.

Without this, all you have is just time to tinker about on an idea.

[taway_1212]

> only a handful of our tech-oriented students had participated in hackatons, contributed to open-source software, had started a personal blog or answered questions in online help communities such as StackOverflow

People do it mostly because they feel employees expect if of them. I guess employees in Bulgaria have different expectations, so students adjust accordingly.