Bucharest, Romania
I've always loved solving problems and building new things from scratch. That's what led me to co-found The Recursive in 2021, in the middle of a pandemic. The bet was simple: Central and Eastern Europe was full of tech companies worth knowing about, and almost no one was telling their stories in a way that traveled beyond the region. Five years on, we've published 3,200+ stories, reached 3.8 million readers and viewers, and helped 550+ companies enter new markets. Now we're making a bigger bet, and, like the first one, at an uncertain moment for the world. We're expanding into the Gulf (GCC), with initial focus on the UAE and the German-speaking markets (DACH), and building the relationship infrastructure between all three ecosystems: CEE, GCC, and DACH. Cross-border deals don't happen between strangers. They happen between people who already understand each other's context. These three regions are increasingly each other's customers, capital, and partners, and they still don't understand each other well enough. That gap is expensive. Closing it is the work. At The Recursive, I'm the Managing Partner for growth and delivery. Delivery is the hands-on work of getting a company ready for a new market and then into it, and it runs in three stages. - Get Ready: we pressure-test whether you're ready for the market — market fit, organizational readiness, the competitive landscape - then build the positioning and go-to-market, and validate it in real conversations with buyers, investors, and ecosystem players from our network. - Get Known: we turn that into recognition across media, events, and editorial-grade content. - Get in the Right Room: we build direct relationships with the decision-makers in your target market before the deal conversations start. On the growth side, our intelligence is read by senior leaders at VC firms like Sequoia, Creandum, Earlybird, EWOR, Dawn, and EBRD, and at enterprises like Oracle, NVIDIA, Meta, Revolut, UiPath, JP Morgan Chase, and Deel, alongside thousands of other investors, operators, and government representatives across 32+ countries. We've also built a habit of finding the best founders first. We wrote about Payhawk ahead of their seed round, years before they became Bulgaria's first unicorn. We interviewed ElevenLabs co-founder Mati Staniszewski in 2023, well before the company hit $500M in ARR and an $11B valuation. Through 2026, you'll find me on the ground in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Riyadh, and back in Sofia, Bucharest, Warsaw. If you're a founder, investor, or builder in any of these regions, reach out.
Put the foundation for The Recursive editorial strategy and values.