BBC News meets a Bulgarian IT entrepreneur [video] | Hacker News Reader

BBC News meets a Bulgarian IT entrepreneur [video]

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75 pointsdanboarder79 comments

In Europe we have this hope to find/create a Silicon Valley to compete against US. The problem is, we simply can't. We don't have, as well said before, the "Siliconvallish" investor. We can keep trying, but it's a culture problem, we need to change that, then maybe we can try to compete.

Silicon Valley is not about ideas or just tech-companies, is about investors and culture. In Europe experimenting is very very difficult, I worked on a project involving big data, predictions and very advanced live stuff that at the moment are hot in SV, but in Europe investors look not interested or ready to support this field. Another huge problem is the poor ability of European investors in following the tech-trend. 6 months ago I did a presentation about a product I was working on, looking for fundings, it was for one of the biggest VC/Incubator (focusing on medtech, green energy and hi-tech) in Switzerland and at the of the presentation I have been asked by the president what "a phone notification is" and "what is bluetooth LE", so I spent my QA time answering basic questions about the current technology instead about the product I was working on. I know not all European VCs have a similar mindset, but the general importance order for an European VC is: intellectual property protection, amount of money required to release, high market barriers looking for no short-term competition and, lastly, shipping time.

An American investor doesn't care too much about competition, as long as the company provides a far better service (with a clear real advantage) this is not an issue, IP is important, but only if the product gains traction and goes mainstream (so it means $ that mean patents), the amount of money as well is not an issue, with so many VCs you can manage to get all necessary fundings if the product is valid, so what really matter is entering in the market as soon as possible with something that is good enough. These are just few examples I faced, but there are many other differences...

Every area in the US that isn't the Valley tries to claim it has, or is working on, an equivalent. They are mostly where you are in terms of replicating the valley.

I always say, if you want to replicate the Valley you need to steal Valley's investors, but I don't see any valid reason for them to leave... :)

Agreed. You need the people to take the risks.

Now, please excuse me while I fashion coconut husks into headphones and wait for my planes to land.

"Something of something" is never really that.

Thats exactly how it is. I wish Europe had more "ok lets try it"-money and the funny thing, every politician is complaining about why we don't build the next Google/Facebook etc.

Because you have to fund 50-100 companies and let them grow to achieve that without a valid business model of "how will you earn money?"

This "how will you earn money" and its follow up "You honestly think people would spend hours upon hours of their free time infront of a keyboard and screen and doing what was it you said building boxes and stuff with lego like pieces!? Why would anyone play games thats not productive".

In general, entertainment, never passes these nay-sayers.

With rare exceptions, Germany is like 5-10 years behind US in tech. Imagine how bad is it in other countries... It's not even funny, Europe is completely losing it.

You really can't make such sweeping statements, though, they don't make sense, thanks to the internet. I've met people doing plenty of advanced stuff here in Italy. And plenty of others who are not really doing interesting things. Same in the US, though.

They are unfortunately exceptions and will never reach proportions of US corps due to not having access to "free money" like in the US via VCs (and also crazy tax rules in EU). When you talk to actual German entrepreneurs, many of them say that "first I raised all the money myself and then the bank was willing to lend me a similar amount with the money I raised as a collateral". So either you get money by political connections (which means you will be operating a China-style buddy company and not a competitive one), or you'd have to bootstrap it yourself with slow growth and high probability somebody in a more agile country with a better access to capital will copy your idea and squeeze you out etc.

ORLY?

In what field?

People can pay stuff online directly with their bank details in Germany, no middle man (read, paypal) needed, and cheques are pretty much history.

How fast are the quickest trains in Germany compared to the USA?

Yes, some traditional companies are way behind in technology, but newsflash, there are a lot of companies like that in the USA as well

On the other hand when you see those ridiculous spreadsheets that Deutsche Bank uses for 2-step authentication to the e-banking you feel like in a shite 60s spy movie. When you actually log in it feels like the 90s though. And 80% of German people seem to go with tradition/history even when it is not really rational. Really makes me wonder how the two core components of the German value system - Tradition and Pragmatism - conflict each other in such situations and how they are becoming less and less compatible with every passing day.

On the other hand they sometimes play very very well together - you cannot have a great technological advancement such as ICE - unique in world scale - without both pragmatism and the stability to plan centrally for 30-50 years ahead.

"Deutsche Bank uses for 2-step authentication to the e-banking you feel like in a shite 60s spy movie"

I agree 200%. Germans love that and it's DB after all, I assume other banks have something more modern (other banks in Europe use electronic tokens)

I was writing about software. Of course everyone knows German cars are much better than US ones (even the dumbed down ones sold in the US that don't need to handle speeds over 100mph). Obviously, US doesn't care about trains, Silicon Valley has like one line comparable to average S-Bahn line and nobody cares anyway. As for your lack of a middle man in paying online via 'Bankeinzug', instead of merchant bearing the cost of payment, you're depending on how many free transfers your bank gives you until it starts charging you fees for any additional transfer (and Amazon often splits your charges per item so you are likely to run over your limit easily).

I think you are talking about technology adoption, especially in business. That's a different issue, and something that I don't see as a problem.

But in terms of companies, there is no version of 2005-2010 Google, Amazon or Microsoft in Germany. Not even a 1995-era Microsoft.

I think SAP would beg to disagree.

In terms of revenue or workforce, maybe, but I don't think SAP will ever have the worldwide impact of a Windows 1995 launch, or anything that happened after that.

It's not just that. Europe has a more "private" culture... While some American companies puts "everything" in the open, Europe discusses and gets clients more "privately"...

We have a lot of big companies, but almost none of them contributes to opensource for example. Some SMB's do this (adapting the american way?), but no big businesess.

This is a current trend, I don't see a problem to have closed source, Microsoft built an empire with closed source-code and solutions, nobody complained with it. Now we are in the sharing economy era, so it makes sense to open when possible.

The big 3 problems in Europe are the lack of investors a "Siliconvallish" mind, the lack of a certain amount of money for so called "experimental" technologies and REAL exit-strategies opportunities.

Why I pointed these 3 factors? Having a right investor believing in hi-tech and experimental products, you get the money to start is also someone that bring the right kind of network. With the second factor you can scale, scaling in Europe is VERY expensive (different languages, VAT, cultures, etc...) and the amount of money required is very high. The third factor is required to get the first and the second one, we don't have a working acquisition schema. Investors are too scare to put money on hi-tech in Europe just because exits are REALLY difficult. In the Valley, if your company has a great product, you can end up bought after just 6 months, in Europe this is extremely rare.

That's point of view, I would real like to get some statistics about it and write an article, if you know a good and reliable place where I can find some valid data, they are welcomed.

The problem with investment culture is twofold.

1) A lot of European money is Old Money, as in really old. You don't get to hold on that much money for hundreds of years without being on the conservative side when it comes to overly-risky investments.

2) Effective redistributive policies in the richest Northern countries have historically reduced the concentration of money to the benefit of society as a whole, but they kept low the number of people with "money to burn", a requirement for bootstrapping a healthy VC ecosystem. As a "leftie" myself, I honestly wouldn't know how to fix this without screwing up a lot of other (arguably more important) elements. Southern countries didn't redistribute as much but their elites tend to "run with the till" as soon as they can, which obviously does not help investments at any level.

Overall, I think trying to ape SV is a waste of time; each country or district should try to leverage its own cultural elements that can bring success, which might not include the requirement for VC backing.

> Overall, I think trying to ape SV is a waste of time; each country or district should try to leverage its own cultural elements that can bring success

This way of thinking is so terribly wrong. Early-stage investment is absolutely crucial to tech startups. It is not "copying silicon valley" to say that early stage investors are crucial, any more than saying that having snow or mountains is crucial to creating a ski resort. Same for many other factors.

No more excuses. No more "not invented here syndrome" of cities saying that they shouldn't copy successful parts of silicon valley, just because they don't want to feel like imitators. This attitude that every city can be special in their own way while ignoring what really matters is hurting founders.

> Early-stage investment is absolutely crucial

Yeah but it's not written in stone that such backing should come from VC companies similar to the ones operating in SV. If capital is not distributed in the same way as in SV, there is no point trying to aggregate and invest it the way SV does.

VCs don't do first stage funding, almost never. What you're saying is not at all how it works in SV. The early stage investment typically comes from private angel investors who previously got rich from startups themselves, and invest their own money.

1st stage investment sources are absolutely needed. It's not optional just because it's not easy to accomplish. Trying to compensate in some other way that ignores early funding is total nonsense. There's no valid substitute. There's no way around it that doesn't hurt entrepreneurs.

Yes, and what I'm saying is that other cities will likely lack "investors who previously got rich from startups themselves" with an angel attitude, so there is no point in trying to hunt them down.

The beauty of SV is that you can find capital at pretty much any level: from bootstrapping angel to big-time VC to exit deal. Other districts will likely lack some or most of that, at some or most levels, and will have to compensate some other way.

Yes, the second most common source of investiment is government.

But while VCs look at (potential) earnings, governments usually look at utility (if they're not favouring their friends, of course)

A government would never invest in 80% of SV companies today. There might be financing options though.

So, while left-leaning governments make sure everybody has their needs attended, they also make pretty much sure that nobody can have too much money to invest

Beg to disagree, for two reasons.

* No two places can be silicon valley, just because of the twofold effects of concentration and competition. I.e. SV is what it is not only because of culture, but also because all big IT corps have their headquarters their, and they simply can't have two headquarters.

* Not all places are best of as clones of SV. In particular, if you don't have a widespread educational and technological infrastructure, but rather any other form of assets, then it may well be better just to try to be something else than SV (e.g. a mining/industrial/financial/cultural centre, or just a place people go to sleep). The real world makes money, too.

There already are many silicon valleys though:

- NYC is the silicon valley of certain types of finance companies.

- LA is the silicon valley of movie production companies.

- When the space race was at full speed, there was a silicon valley of aerospace technology companies. Perhaps there were several.

- You might say NYC used to be the silicon valley of theater, news paper companies, advertising and media companies.

- Silicon valleys of painting and sculpture used to exist.

But, do you see any examples where access to 1st stage investment funding was optional? No, that's nonsense. The availability of 1st stage funding is the absolutely non-negotiable primary factor for any of these to exist. This is the secret to all of these "silicon valleys". People go there because those cities give you the best chance at immediately raising money for the type of work that city specializes in. This factor dominates everything else. I could possibly see Silicon Valley being divided up into more specialized sub-areas, and other cities taking the lead on those areas. But it will never happen unless the city is also leading in access to 1st stage capital for that industry. This has proven to be the case 1000 times over, across many industries.

So the BIG question - does having talent in a city attract 1st stage capital to a city? The answer is a clear NO, it does not. This has been proven so many times. Other factors do attract 1st stage capital to a city though.

Tech nerds often seem to believe Silicon Valley is about tech and ideas. Well, partly it is. But a larger part seems to be the financial climate: There is an abundance of angels willing to gamble a couple of million on startups. Angels don't do that in Bulgaria or anywhere else in Europe for that matter. And there are far fewer angels. This is mostly because of different tax systems especially when it comes to write offs after losses vs profits.

SV is all about investors. Ideas pop up everywhere, it'd be crazy to think that there aren't as many ideas popping up in Bulgaria, India or London. The problem is mostly with the environment -- investment culture and ease of running a business (how hard is it to deal with the state).

*Edit: gii, you're hellbanned.

I highly recommend people read the book "The Ascent of Finance" by Niall Ferguson. It was a change in finance and economics that helped propel the industrial revolution. The book really highlights how crucial finance was, above other factors such as new phhsics and engineering discoveries, which made the early days of capitalism possible.

Do you mean "The Ascent of Money"?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Money

Ah yes that one, I was going off memory.

The largest city by funding after Silicon Valley would appear to be London, which raised 2/3 of the around 1/30th as much funding in the whole of the UK as in the US [1]. I suspect that there are more than 1/30 as many startups but that the average deal size in Europe is much smaller.

I would say the problem is less the "local rules" like tax systems - after all, nobody would call California tax-friendly on a global basis - and more the sheer number of existing, successful, wealthy entrepreneurs for whom angel investing is second nature, coupled with a professional, long-established venture funding industry with diversified, long-term committed and professional LPs (such as endowments and pension funds).

PG commented on the aggressivity of deal making in the Valley even compared to the established and world-famous hub of Boston [2]. The whole essay expands well on this thread topic.

As a Singapore resident for several years, I used to think that "the rules" were what mattered - taxes, government regulation, ease of obtaining visas, cost of living, proximity to large untapped market and cheap talent... but the stories appear in HN and elsewhere regularly for a reason: none of the hubs have even a fraction of the activity of the Valley and are unlikely ever to have it, no matter how much matched funding the government does. Would you rather raise 2m for 10% in 3 weeks, or 200k for 20% in 3 months? Of course, that 200k is several years' funding for an Indonesian startup.

In my own attempts at fund raising, I often had to explain what a startup was (thank you PG for your great essays, which are immensely helpful there) to seasoned "classical" investors with dozens of deals under their belt. I don't blame Singaporeans and other "foreign hub" residents for moving to the Valley as soon as they can. The result: typing this on an American-designed Macbook Pro whose OS is based on BSD (where B stands for Berkeley), on a browser designed by Google in Mountain View by the same company that designed my phone. The tech landscape is utterly dominated by American companies even if as much as 40% of their founders are first or second gen immigrants [4].

The sad thing is that governments know full well that the rules have, at best, only a marginal effect on an established industry hub [3], and so get away with a lot more than they should.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/02/londons-startups-hit-a-high...

[2] http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html - "Over and over, I've seen startups we've funded snatched by west coast investors out from under the noses of Boston investors who saw them first but acted too slowly. [...] And yet within a month it had happened again: an aggressive west coast VC who had met the founder of a YC-funded startup a week before beat out a Boston VC who had known him for years. By the time the Boston VC grasped what was happening, the deal was already gone."

[3] David Ogilvy mentions in one of his books that his agency paid as much as 73% tax. How's that California tax rate looking now?

[4] http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2013/04/25/40-larg...

What fascinating timing. I'm a software engineer who has lived in San Francisco for 15 years, most of that time working at different tech-heavy startups, and starting my own twice. I've been in Europe for the past week, flying tomorrow to Sofia, BG for five days. If anyone in Sofia is reading this and would like to meet for coffee, etc., contact me at amax at redsymbol dot net.

I am not an investor and don't fully understand how startup financing works even in SV, and certainly not anywhere in Europe. However, it seems to me that if you're an angel or VC, there is a remarkable opportunity in places like Bulgaria. Potentially a great deal of investment demand (i.e. entrepreneurial tech talent), compared to investment supply. Lots of new challenges, I'm sure, but competing with other investors apparently isn't one of them.

(Hmmm... if you're an SV [EDIT: American] angel/VC and are thinking the same, email me as well. In the event I meet some promising BG entrepreneurs in the next week, it's possible I might be able to make some meaningful introductions.)

I might manage to go at WebIT Bulgaria[1] the 22nd for a couple of hours. Send me an email, we might catch up.

[1] http://www.webit.bg

I became interested in Bulgaria last year after being granted a scholarship to study the language for a summer. After learning a bit about its history and thinking about its growing potential, I started working on (and am approaching completion of) a scifi game set in Bulgaria.

It'd be interesting if Bulgaria went on become a major tech hub in the future, if just to make my project somewhat prophetic. :)

More related, but after making my project public, I got quite a few small companies from around the region contacting me about wanting to do cross promotions with their games. I was rather surprised with the number of games coming out of the region, as well as the overall quality of them. The Balkans as a whole seem to have decent potential for tech growth, likely due to the low cost of living and fairly high percentage of english speakers.

Don't forget the large amount of state aid flowing into Silicon Valley due to the massive US defense budget. Bulgaria does not have trillion dollar jet fighter projects, surveillance satellites, large-scale graph databases for NSA/CIA/Homeland Security, various nuclear weapons systems, ... - all which demand many many billions for innovations in software and systems every year..

History lesson: http://steveblank.com/secret-history/

That's not something I expected to see on the HN front page today.

I'm a Bulgarian ex-pat living in the UK (moved away not because of the corruption - though that's a problem too - but because of poor culture fit). From personal experience, pretty much everyone I know who's got a good job in Bulgaria is working for a foreign IT company. I was also surprised to see Sofia at the top of the best European cities to be a digital nomad in. True enough. It's got a few pretty good coworking spaces and, coming from the West, everything is pretty damn cheap.

It's great to hear of success and progress in Bulgaria.

Re. the title Europe's Silicon Valley I would go for Sweden with an amazing amount of successful start-ups and game studios for such a small country.

Generally though the sensible comparison would be London or Stockholm.

What about Berlin?

Since 2005, 9 % of global billion dollar exits have come from the Nordics[1], a region less populated than Germany. In comparison, the rest of Europe only accounted for 8 % of global billion dollar exits. So the Nordics win, hands down, here.

Also, between 2000 and 2014 Sweden saw 263 exits valued at $23.7 billion. That's more exits than the rest of the Nordics put together.

I would say Stockholm is a safer bet than Berlin :)

[1] http://arcticstartup.com/2015/03/16/creandum-9-of-global-bil...

Berlin is getting its momentum now. A lot of engineers moving here, salaries are growing. Sure that's my anectodal experience, but I would not compare the data from 2000 to 2014. Even couple years ago it was different - no BlueCard schema, lower salaries, few English-speaking companies.

I'm sure Berlin is getting traction and I've no doubt it will be a big tech hub. But I would probably place it more as an "Austin" than as a "SV".

Another issue is red tape... Germany banning disruptive ideas like Uber and Berlin banning AirBNB doesn't make me super excited about the prospects of launching a disruptive startup there.

Funny, a lot of companies founded by "the Nordics" chose Berlin to establish themselves

See: Deliver Hero, SoundCloud, etc

Bulgaria in brief:

- EU and NATO member

- 10% corporate tax rate

- 10% personal income tax, flat rate

- Among lowest operational cost in a European market economy

- Duty free trade covering markets with over 550 m customers

- English language studied by 70% of students

- 7% of workforce has engineering degrees

- Macroeconomic and financial stability - one of the lowest government debts among EU countries - less than 20%.

You can register Ltd for about 100 EUR, office prices - about 8 EUR/sq.m.

No, it's not. For one thing, even at this pace Bulgaria's IT industry will take years or decades to come to close to even certain other cities in Europe.

Secondly, Bulgaria has a well deserved reputation in Europe of being plagued by corruption.

In recent years, Sofia is booming with large multinational companies, exploiting the relatively cheap labour there. There is a disproportionate amount of young people attracted to these jobs, because they are still paid a lot better than anything else.

Same thing in Romania. Everywhere in Bucharest or large cities are multinational companies attracted by relatively low wages and qualified workforce.

Which doesn't disprove my point that the size of Bulgaria's industry will take a long time to reach that of other places.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to belittle the country's achievements. It's just that labels like "next silicon valley" should not be judged by "growth" alone. And same thing for wealth and living standards: Growth is essential to get to the top, but it's not equivalent to being on the top.

About your second point, yes, there is corruption, and yes, corruption is bad. But the problems are generally in public sectors and EU funds (big corruption generator!). I doubt if you invest in IT or hire in IT you will have any problems.

If you are considering Bulgaria, you should know it has flat corporate income tax of 10% (lowest in EU).

On the other hand, Bulgarian corruption is at a 15-year high.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/bulgaria/11...

I'm a Belgian guy who moved to Bulgaria for this ;)

But VAT makes it worse than the US for tech startups in practice.

As I said in another thread - yes, there is corruption. But it is mainly in government spending, EU funds, big corporations. If you hire someone in IT, or work in IT I doubt you will face corruption yourself. Also, there are currently very real Parliament efforts for constitutional changes aiming at fixing this.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/05/data-best-programming-tale...

"Another way to look at the country numbers is to determine the average country ranking of Stack Overflow users above the 5,000 rating threshold. On this basis, Bulgaria has the highest average reputation among top users in the world. Here’s how: If we sum up the reputation of Stack Overflow’s top users by country, and divide it by the number of top users, we get each county’s “average reputation”. Bulgaria has “only” 40 users with a 5,000+ reputation, but their total score makes it the country with the highest average reputation in the world. In other words, if you are top user in Bulgaria, chances are you a total Stack Overflow rockstar."

I'm happy somebody sees my country in a good light, but in all honesty, many things are lacking for Bulgaria to become a "silicon valley"

I'm pretty sure London or Shoreditch, London is. They call it Tech City.

Isn't that the neighborhood currently undergoing a huge corporate gentrification? If it's what I'm thinking, there was a great article on it I read last year that I'm sure I'll not be able to find, talking about how the startups are being pushed out by skyrocketting rent from all the posh folks filling it up to make themselves, their companies, law offices etc. seem hip.

Yup. And that description pretty much backs it up too. SV has the same problem.

Exposed air conditioning ducts above one's head used to be the sign of an unfinished office undergoing renovation. Now in London it is the sign of hip and cool startups, or more established firms going through a mid-life crisis ;)

Agree, though I like the Silicon Roundabout name more. The Tech City name to me seems like a government idea, sort of Information Superhighway....

With finding money it is good that Shoreditch is right next to the City (of London, not London the City https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc), and there is a good amount of Angels and VCs in Shoreditch itself.

I was very happy, and a bit proud (being bulgarian, but living in US since 1999) when Telerik was bought some time ago by Progress for $263M (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8492634) - I don't know the details, but it's glad to hear about tech succeeding in my little country. There are some awesome game developers there aswell, like Haemimont (of the Tropico fame), and plenty of others.

Nice snapshot of the conventional Bulgarian mindset - that the government is at the root of, and the solution to all problems.

The top real problems are obvious:

1) No angel investors. Particularly, no angel investors who got rich doing startups.

2) Immense business cultural differences from what startups need:

http://www.paulgraham.com/america.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hubs.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/startuphubs.html

There are other cities around the world that are full of tech talent. That's not special. In fact, it makes it worse for finding cofounders or employees -- because the vast majority of tech workers you'll meet got into it for the money as a basic PHP coder. This makes it harder to find the tiny fraction of the population that has the right mindset to work extremely hard and lower your quality of life to endure the extreme hardships of startups.

I just wonder when people will stop searching, creating, copying Silicon Valley.

#questionsthattheanswertothemisno

Ask Betteridge, he'll know the answer.

Bulgaria has great potential for that, well-educated people, low income. Young people really want to start building something. Yet, most of them move away.

Politicians need to create a climate in which start-ups get support and funding. Most importantly: Bulgarians need to tackle corruption if they want their country to be successful in the future.

The trouble in Bulgaria is, almost any profession outside of IT is paid laughably low. This creates an atmosphere where a lot of young people see this industry as the only viable career choice.

A commonly held belief is that IT can somehow propel the rest of the country out of poverty and corruption, but this is not realistic - the amount of people employed in that sector is still negligible compared to the rest (and it barely exists out of Sofia).

Or to be more specific, the people see being a MANAGER in an IT company as only viable long term career choice.

A million middle managers, and a small portion of younger people doing most of the work. Business culture of slowness, rudeness, laziness and a ton of office politics to try to become the next manager. The best young people move out at an astonishingly rapid rate. Result is tons of middle managers, and left over mediocre workers.

nope. that's prague :D though it's just in that there's more companies organised like the spoiled big babies in sofia (HP, SAP, etc)... Otherwise the culture of ambitious e-illiterate youth on both places is identical - UNSS and VŠE should merge in a single uni.

It is not. Salaries for programmers are pathetically low here - you can barely make more than 3K euro/month. The talent pool is small. And there is barely anything interesting going on in the way of startups tackling interesting problems.

Such figures are probably made by the top 5% programmers there, probably with some managerial responsibilities. The average programmer salary is around 1400 euro/month and this is what drives foreign multinational companies in flocks. Yet, the "cheap" talent pool has dried and the only way to hire decent employees is to steal them from other companies by luring them with more money.

Well, things looks the same in Poland, maybe salary being closer to ~2k±20%.

Of course any underdeveloped regions tend to pick up IT first (and sometimes that's it).

Because barrier to entry is much lower and paycheck is much better than in established industries hauling physical goods.

By the way, in a cult book "Deadline" story takes place in some invented country "near Bulgaria".

But, you know, Silicon Valley takes more than just some IT.

Is it just me or could this article title be straight out of a parody of HN?

Title and video being silly.. yes, but putting that aside....

IT sector in Bulgaria has increased dramatically over the years. And apart of the large companies having their offices (hp, vmware, vray, microsoft, google opening soon.. and few others) and potentially thousand of little studios that outsource on a global scale, there are good amount of engineers abroad.

With 2 startup incubators, 2 shared coworking spaces and the amount of people involved in IT is it good to think about expanding your team in Bulgaria probably yes (providing small pre-education will ensure your engineers fit your needs) Is it comparable with SV dont think so. But the percentage of young people working in the IT for such a small capital (Sofia) (estimating 2-2.5 million people) is rather high.

btw vray (or Chaos Group) is actually a bulgarian company

There are actually more coworking spaces, even state-supported (socialist style) ones. And the two that you mean (Soho/betahaus) are actually overpriced trendy wastes of money. Also I think that incubators/cw-spaces/angel investors and the other trends that appeared with the boom are vastly overrated.

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