Vlad Tenev

You know, I think I was rebelling against that a little bit.

And I just really wanted to be a scientist or a mathematician or some kind of inventor.

That was what I kind of gravitated toward.

Before the company?

Before, so I moved around quite a bit.

I have lived in LA as well, but I was born in Eastern Europe and then moved with my parents to the East Coast of the US.

And then I went to Stanford.

Yeah, I mean, I don't always remember like, oh, when I was three, this happened or when I was four.

Yeah, because it was just a very big discontinuity, right?

So I can basically say, okay, well, this was all the stuff before I moved to the US and this was all the stuff after.

And it was so different that, you know, that bucketing makes it very easy to bucket my memories.

You know, at around that time, this was in the early 90s, there was a huge transition in Eastern Europe.

Basically, the Berlin Wall fell.

You saw the Iron Curtain lifted.

And the late 80s in Bulgaria was a time of crazy optimism.

Bulgaria was doing very, very well.

Population was growing.

People had a pretty good standard of living.

We were winning Olympic gold medals.

So everything, by all measures, was really good.