I’m looking to join a Startup

I’m looking to join an early-stage startup with a big vision, on a technical (Software Engineering) role.

My priorities:

1. I have to believe it’s a unicorn opportunity.
2. It should be early (< 50 employees, ideally <10), but there has to be some funding (12months of runaway or more).

Here is a bit more about me…

Technical Expertise

I’m a swiss army knife as an engineer with pretty wide expertise.
Here are the technologies I’ve used most recently:

• Web: Node, MongoDB, Strapi, Nuxt, Vue, Angular, ES2018, HTML5, Stylus/CSS3
• Dev-ops: Kubernetes, Docker, kops, Helm, Prometheus, Grafana, sh/bash, AWS (but I try to stay cloud-agnostic)
• Cross-platform:
  — native: C/C++, JUCE
  — hybrid: Cordova
• Analytics: Amplitude, GA
• In Audio & DSP I have experience with: FFT, Fast Convolution (NUPOLS, UPOLS), Sampling (DFD Streaming);
• Graphics: Photoshop, Pixelmator.

Entrepreneurial experience

I’ve been building my own products for the last 6 years.

My work has been on the front page on Hacker News and has been covered by mainstream press.

I know how (and when) to:

• do things that don’t scale (the initial venture into the unknown), piercing through hard problems, building MVP’s and looking for PMF;
• AND design & build strong foundations.

Just in the last 11 months:

• I have built 2 products (https://uchanged.me, https://trial.land);
• I’m working on 2 more (https://thepropz.com, https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/mythverb);
• I founded a startup community - we already had an exit (Startup Sofia);
• and I launched an investing newsletter, currently with 400+ subscribers (https://fomo.report).

Where I still suck

1. [as an entrepreneur] Fund-raising, Sales and Building Teams;
2. [as an engineer] Reciting Algorithm & Data Structure implementation, recalling names of Design Patterns I actively use, memory size of data structures on different platforms and similar interview trivia.
3. [as a person] Arguing with people caring more about their ego than solving a problem.
4. … and likely a bunch of other things I’m unaware of. :)

What I’m looking for

Software Engineer, VP of Engineering, CTO and/or technical co-founder — all of these opportunities interest me.

I want to help build a unicorn company, so:

1. I’m mission-driven;
2. Equity is more important to me than salary;
3. I’ll relocate ASAP, but remote works, too (currently, I’m in Sofia, Bulgaria);
4. I’m prepared to spend 5+ years, 60h a week, on this next venture;
5. I’m pretty agnostic to specific industries.

If you are interested or would like to make an intro — I’ll be happy to chat!

Best,
Nikolay Tsenkov
1-page Résumé: https://tsenkov.net/docs/nikolay-tsenkov-cv.pdf