Success means giving back: Emil Novakov, CEO of Scaleflex, on the importance of sharing your experience with the community

We introduce you to our new series of publications called “Success means giving back”. It is dedicated to supporting BIH’s cause of spreading the word about the great ecosystem of organizations with lots of potential in Bulgaria. With the publications, we try to highlight the importance of giving back to the community with some of the IT leaders in Bulgaria and companies that help building a sustainable future and drive economic growth.

The first guest is Emil Novakov, co-founder and CEO of Scaleflex. The company helps R&D teams, marketers, and content managers to manage, optimize, and deliver media assets, such as images and videos, and allows them to better collaborate with each other in real-time. What is the importance of giving back to the community and how important is it for him to have organizations like Bulgarian Innovation Hub in the community? This and many more you will learn here:

Q: Nowadays, many companies have innovative ideas, but most of the time they don’t succeed. What does a startup need to be successful? Is there a perfect formula for success?

A: The most important thing for me is a great team. For a team to be successful, people have to share similar values and a passion for a common goal or mission that a company wants to achieve. In my opinion, you can have the best idea in the world, the best contacts, maybe even unlimited funds, but if you don’t have the right team, you will not succeed, or at least you will not fulfill your potential. What is gratifying in the journey to success is to start with a core group, and always make it a priority to extend the team with people who share the same vision and approach.

Q: You focused on the importance of the team, do you think we have the right people in Bulgaria to build a global company?

I believe that there are a lot of talented, smart, and hard-working people in Bulgaria. There is no doubt that there is space for them to build a global company. What I have found in the last 3-4 years is that demand for Bulgarian professionals is constantly increasing and is even exceeding what the labor market can offer. In the past, it was easier to bring people together with the goal of building a solution for the global market. It is getting harder to find the right people.

I decided to start Scaleflex in Bulgaria because it was a sort of reconnection with my roots. I left the country when I was very young and studied and gained my experience throughout Europe and the USA. That is the reason why I wanted to do something for the community here and share with people the knowledge I developed over the years.

Q: Building a community of tech leaders in SEE is very important for the development of the whole ecosystem. What is the best way of doing that in your opinion?

A: I think building a community isn’t something you can do artificially, it’s an organic process. It happens when like-minded people with similar values, with similar goals, maybe similar experience, obviously not the same, get together and decide to build something in order to be helpful to other people.

On one hand I believe that in Bulgaria we have a great IT community and fantastic leaders who are recognized and who are doing a great job. On the other hand I think there should be more efforts put on building a community of people from the industry for the SEE region. A better connection between tech leaders from Greece, Romania, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania, etc would foster a better SEE community and be beneficial across the communities.

Q: How important is it for you to give back to the community - to share your knowledge and experience?

A: For me giving back is extremely important. Giving back is sharing what people can achieve if they possess a certain set of skills or they put in a certain amount of work into something. This is important, because up until now or maybe just a few years ago, there were a lot of talented people in Bulgaria, but they didn’t know what they could achieve. That is one of the reasons thatI started Scaleflex in Bulgaria and its first office was here.I wanted to share what I have learnt throughout the years as well as my business experiences. Essentially I want to help them thrive and be successful with us.

Q: What is the impact of donating to an organization like BIH in your opinion?

A: It is especially important to support such causes because they can help the community grow. When these organizations have a mission that matches my views and helps others learn, I believe it is important to support them.

Q: Why did you choose to support Bulgarian Innovation Hub?

A: I decided to support BIH because it means helping companies from our region to broaden their businesses. This is very important. I also believe that I share common goals with the people behind BIH.