Vlad Tenev

So he was 31 when he came over to the US.

So his formative years, all of his friends from high school, they're all still in Bulgaria.

So when he goes back, that's when he's hanging out with people, staying up late at night.

In America, I think it's really just the family and he's got a couple of friends from work.

But Bulgaria, I think he still thinks of as home.

So these folks from University of Delaware came.

They were impressed by my father because at the time in Bulgaria, if you were a professor of economics, there was a lot of pressure institutionally to teach like Marxist theories, like Adam Smith, free markets.

Those were all taboo.

So they had all of the...

Western literature locked up in the basement.

It was like banned literature.

And my dad would tell me the story about how he would sort of like sweet talk the librarian, essentially, and she would let him go down there and he would read all the stuff and it would make its way into his thesis.

but his thesis was about a taboo subject.

And so they made it hard for him to actually defend his dissertation and finish.

So they were kind of holding it up.

But then everything shifted, right?

And when these folks from University of Delaware came, that weakness was like his biggest strength.

They were like, okay, well, there's people here that actually aren't Marxists and who understand this stuff.

And so he got an opportunity to get a scholarship to do a master's at University of Delaware.

That was 1991.