What were you building at 17 or 18 years old?

At Digitalk Conference in Sofia, I watched three teams of founders aged 17-19 present products live in front of a jury and the full conference audience.

They were the three teams that had earned the top places at Digithon two days earlier. Now their ideas had moved from a fast-paced hackathon into one of Southeast Europe’s leading technology and business events.

The products were impressive. The bigger story was the ecosystem forming around the people who built them.

From a Build Room to the Main Stage

On June 7, I mentored a team of four TUES students at Digithon. In only a couple of hours, they moved from an idea to a working AI-assisted revenue management MVP.

Our team did not finish in the top three, so they were not among the teams presenting at Digitalk. I wrote about why I still considered their journey a win in the story from Digithon.

Two days later, seeing the finalists on a major conference stage completed the picture.

The young founders were not treated as a school group performing a side activity. They were presenting real products in front of investors, operators, technology leaders, and an audience that expected them to explain the problem, defend their choices, and communicate their vision.

That progression matters:

  • Give young builders a difficult problem
  • Give them experienced mentors without taking over their work
  • Give the strongest teams a credible public stage
  • Put them in the same room as founders, investors, and future partners

This is how talent becomes confidence, and how confidence starts becoming a company.

More Than Three Products

The most encouraging part was not any individual feature or technology choice.

It was the culture behind them.

More young people in Bulgaria are creating, experimenting, and thinking like entrepreneurs before they have even finished school. They are not waiting for a perfect credential, a large company, or permission to begin. They are identifying problems, assembling teams, testing ideas, and learning how to present what they have built.

That changes the starting line for an entire generation.

At 17-19, these founders are already gaining experience many people first encounter years into their careers: uncertain requirements, limited time, difficult trade-offs, public feedback, and the responsibility of turning an idea into something another person can understand and use.

The value is not only in producing more startups. It is in producing people who know that they can build.

Bulgaria Has Never Felt More Alive

I have been part of Bulgaria’s technology community for years, and it has never felt more alive than it does now.

You can feel it in the number of people building products instead of only discussing them. You can see it in the founders returning to share hard-earned lessons, investors engaging earlier, established companies opening doors, and media organizations treating technology and entrepreneurship as central business stories.

Digitalk brought that energy together in one place: young founders on stage, experienced operators in the audience, friends and familiar faces among the speakers, and conversations continuing long after the formal sessions ended.

The conference itself reflects the change. Organized by Capital, one of Bulgaria’s leading business media organizations, together with LAUNCHub Ventures, it connected technology, capital, media, and entrepreneurship. With A1 Bulgaria as technology partner and Endeavor among the event partners, it showed what becomes possible when the different parts of an ecosystem work together.

An ecosystem becomes real when those connections stop being exceptional and start becoming normal.

Sofia Is Starting to Compete With San Francisco

Sofia is not San Francisco in scale. It does not yet have the same concentration of capital, global companies, or decades of compounding network effects. Pretending otherwise would weaken the point.

But cities do not begin competing only when their numbers become equal. They begin competing when they develop the same essential energy:

  • Ambitious people building close enough to collide with one another
  • Experienced founders willing to share what they know
  • Investors looking for potential before it becomes obvious
  • Events and media that give new ideas visibility
  • A culture in which starting something feels possible

That energy is becoming increasingly visible in Sofia.

The distance between a student with an idea, an experienced technical mentor, a venture investor, and a major conference stage is becoming shorter. The conversations are becoming more international. More teams are building from Bulgaria with global ambition rather than treating the local market as the limit of what they can attempt.

That is where Sofia is starting to compete with San Francisco: not by copying it, but by creating its own dense network of builders, capital, experience, and opportunity.

Media Can Help Build an Ecosystem

Capital’s role matters because media does more than report on an ecosystem after it succeeds.

It can help create the connective tissue that allows success to happen.

By bringing young founders onto the same stage as established technology leaders, Digitalk sends a clear message: these ideas deserve to be taken seriously now, not at some undefined point in the future.

Visibility creates role models. It introduces founders to people who can challenge or support them. It shows students in the audience that entrepreneurship is not something happening only in Silicon Valley, London, or Berlin. It is happening in Sofia, among people they can meet and learn from.

That is how an ecosystem develops belief in itself.

Sharing the ApplauseLab and xHeal Story

Digitalk was also an opportunity to reconnect with friends and familiar faces among the speakers, meet new people, and share the stories behind ApplauseLab and xHeal.

Those conversations matter because companies are rarely built in isolation. They improve through honest exchanges with other founders, technical leaders, investors, customers, and people who have already made some of the mistakes you are about to make.

At ApplauseLab, we want to participate in that exchange from both sides.

We build ambitious AI products and share what we learn from taking them into production. We support emerging developers and founders when our experience can help. We also stay open to being challenged by the people building around us, regardless of their age or job title.

The strongest ecosystems do not separate established builders from the next generation. They put them in the same room.

Keep the Chain Moving

Digithon gave young teams a place to build. Digitalk gave the finalists a place to be seen.

The next steps belong to the founders, mentors, investors, companies, educators, and media organizations willing to keep that chain moving.

Bulgaria’s technology ecosystem has never felt more alive. Sofia is becoming a city where an ambitious idea can quickly find collaborators, experienced guidance, an audience, and a route toward something larger.

The challenge now is not to admire that momentum from a distance. It is to keep contributing to it.

Thank you to Digitalk Conference, Capital, LAUNCHub Ventures, A1 Bulgaria, Endeavor, and everyone who created space for these conversations and gave young founders a serious stage.