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Product guy building hyper competitive teams
Articles by Hristo
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Hristo Borisov reposted thisHristo Borisov reposted thisA new office and a birthday, both celebrated last night in Warsaw. Last night we marked the opening of Payhawk's new Warsaw office in the best way we could imagine: by celebrating Endeavor Poland's 4th Anniversary. Warsaw is one of Europe's most exciting tech hubs, and there's no better way to plant our flag here than alongside the founders shaping it. Highlights from the night: - A fireside chat with our Co-Founder & CEO Hristo Borisov and special guests on scaling globally and paying it forward - Bartosz Lipnicki looking back on four years of Endeavor Poland Thank you to the Endeavor team for an amazing partnership, and to everyone who joined us. Here's to the next chapter for Poland's tech ecosystem.
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Hristo Borisov shared thisHad a great chat about AI and the future of tech with Мениджър. Thank you for the cover! You can read the full article here (in Bulgarian): https://lnkd.in/df5juG8M
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Hristo Borisov shared thisWhat is a better way to open two new offices for Payhawk in Stockholm and Warsaw than to bring customers and partners to Sweden vs. Poland football game? Stockholm will be Payhawk's Nordic hub. Swedish companies can hold SEK balances, issue SEK cards and pay Swedish suppliers in SEK with no FX in the middle. They can also top up accounts and pay bills through Swedish IBANs and receive supplier invoices over Peppol directly into accounts payable. Native integrations cover SAP, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Visma Net. And best of all, exchange money and make international payments with interbank rate + 0.3% which is 4-5x better than any bank today. Polish customers can also hold PLN balances, issue PLN cards with controls applied before money is spent, use local Polish IBANs for top-ups and payments, and exchange currencies at leading exchange rates. The platform is available in Polish, and Payhawk serves customers in the country under its EU electronic money institution licence. Payhawk receives KSeF e-invoices directly into accounts payable, matches them to the right expense, purchase order or project, and codes them for the accounting system. Read more for Sweden: https://lnkd.in/d2bbQ3em Read more for Poland: https://lnkd.in/dYEmHgJ3 #MadeInEurope 🇪🇺
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Hristo Borisov posted thisLong-overdue series of posts on how we used AI to transform Payhawk across every department to 2x revenue growth with less headcount YoY. Over the last 24 months, Payhawk has transformed into an AI-native company. While keeping headcount smaller, payment volumes are growing 95% YoY, and engineering completes 2.97x more tasks. AE productivity is up 84% and BDR productivity is up 105%, against 15w% and 41% higher targets with Q4 still ahead. ARR per FTE grew 76% YoY which tells you whether a company is growing through scale or through leverage. AI is the single most important reason, but not because of magic tools. It's the pressure and "permission to build" a business plan that depends on operational efficiency, not headcount. Because if you don't, somebody else will. AI amplifies the way a team already works. Hand it to a leader who shields the team, avoids the hard problems, or aims low, and you'll get a faster version of the same mediocre result. 70% of the senior leaders behind these numbers started as IC. Fix your leadership philosophy with the most common leadership mistakes I see every day: ✅ Protecting your team instead of exposing them to reality - New managers tend to shield the team from external pressure. You feel responsible. It feels kind. It isn't. A team inside a bubble sets the wrong pace and the wrong tone, because it never hears the signals that should change its direction. Your job is to give them the real feedback and stay in the room to help them act on it. Nikolay Pohlupkov is a great example of how to get this right. ✅ Retreating into IC mode when things go wrong - When results slip, the instinct is to go back to doing the work yourself. Use your IC skills to show a new way of working, not to plug gaps. The point is showing the team a path they hadn't seen. Our CRO Gabriela Belnikolovska joined a 2h cold calling session with our BDRs, and opened the biggest deal we've closed all year. ✅ Believing you need the answer to everything - Don't be ashamed to say - I don't have an answer right now. And decide with about 60 to 70% of the information. You'll likely be wrong about half of it anyway. The daily life of Martin Jürgen Reindl. ✅ Refusing to change a decision once you've made it - The biggest sin in leadership - get more data, see the decision is not optimal, but still stick with it. Changing your decision should be a normal conversation with your team. ✅ Aiming too low - High targets are rarely the problem. Low ambition is. A target 2-3 times beyond what looks possible forces the real conversation about what has to change. More on this soon. Thank you Yana Panayotova for 75% of employees having KPI. ✅ Not building your successor - In a fast-growing company, you'll need someone in your current role within six months. Stretch people often with problems that feel out of reach. The ones who lean in are your next leaders. Get the leadership right first. Then the tools multiply what your team can already do.
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Hristo Borisov shared thisObsess with your customers rather than your competitors. As a founder, it's easy to spend your day with with numbers, KPIs, roadmaps, competitors or the internal dynamics of your business. But the only obsession that matters is the one with your customers. Hearing how well or not so well you are doing is the most important metric. Anatolli drives long-haul across Europe for Discordia. Every month, Payhawk's Procurement Agent clears 2,500 to 3,000 of his company's requests without anyone touching them. This used to generate a massive overhead with a dedicated team in the finance org which is now fully handled by an agent. Thank you BBC StoryWorks for telling the story of two very different jobs, but with one idea how technology should give people their time back on what matters most. For audiences outside the UK: https://lnkd.in/enASFYV3 For audiences inside the UK: https://lnkd.in/eBzsxm95
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Hristo Borisov reposted thisHristo Borisov reposted thisMonth-end close shouldn’t mean pulling together answers from five different places and figuring out what’s complete and what isn’t. That’s why I’m genuinely excited about what we’ve built for Payhawk’s Fall ’26 edition. We’re connecting Payhawk directly to the AI tools you already use, with a set of Playbooks for the jobs your finance team runs every month. This means finance teams can move even faster and get better insights from their data. I got to demo these Playbooks myself. Here’s the first one: Speed Up Month-End Close 🚀 One conversation instead of five separate checks with the same controls behind it. Want to see more? Join us on September 29 at 2:00 PM (BST) for the full Fall ’26 edition. Register here → https://lnkd.in/djmA5fFg
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Hristo Borisov reposted thisHristo Borisov reposted thisEvery customer buys Payhawk differently. Everyone still got the same implementation checklist. Not anymore. Our Implementation Agent looks at what you bought and builds your setup plan the moment you sign in. No generic checklist, no waiting on an implementation manager to walk you through it. Just yours, ready to go. My favorite bit in this demo: watching the Agent turn a two-year-old approval spreadsheet into a live workflow, in seconds. Come see it for yourself at our Fall '26 edition webinar, September 29, 2:00 PM (BST). I'm gonna be there too. Join us here 👉 https://lnkd.in/d3GwDCbe
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Hristo Borisov shared thisКацаш на летище София и се потопяваш в магията на българската реклама. ✔��Първа линия на булевард - не ми се мисли как живеят тези на втора-трета линия. ✔️Усещане за простор - за какво ти е простор, като просто може да имаш усещане? ✔️ВашияТ, усеШане, екс(к)лузивни, борба между точка и многоточие - отвсякъде вдъхва доверие. И за гранд финале, всички силно заинтересовани трябва да звъннат в … нищото, защото е трудно и кода на България да си напишем без грешка. You had one job ….
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Hristo Borisov shared thisWelcome to Europe, Eric Glyman, Ramp and all US founders coming with fresh valuations, famous cap tables and big expectations to conquer Europe. #MadeInEurope 🇪🇺
Hristo Borisov commented on a post
6d
Thank you Juan Moliner Malaxechevarría!
Hristo Borisov replied to a comment
1w
Michael Ivanov most probably. They also named it Getaway, so they can escape you from your money
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Hristo Borisov reacted on thisHristo Borisov reacted on thisWitaj Polsko! 🇵🇱 Happy to announce @Payhawk is opening its office in Warsaw, with a local team, a localized product, and native PLN support for Polish customers. We kicked things off with a CFO meetup at Varso Tower, the tallest building in the EU (I only learned that yesterday). From there, straight into Endeavor Poland and's birthday celebration (great work Anna and Bartosz!) saying hello to an ecosystem that's clearly buzzing. It was lovely to meet companies like viktor.com, Booksy, Docplanner, and Solidgate. This was yet another proof to me that we are all building something special in Europe, each country in its own way. Can't wait to get this started, so DM me; we are still hiring. 😉
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Hristo Borisov reacted on thisHristo Borisov reacted on thisExcited to share that Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan has invested in ElevenLabs. 🔥🔥🔥 We believe voice is becoming one of the most important interfaces for how people interact with AI, and ElevenLabs has distinguished itself through exceptional technology, product quality, and commercial execution. Thrilled to partner with co-founders Mati Staniszewski and Piotr Dabkowski as ElevenLabs continues to scale globally, including into Canada. Looking forward to working closely with Ashley Kramer, Max Lemmens, Maciej Mylik, Andrew Epstein, Michal Filip Kowalik, PhD, Gayathri Padmanabhan, and the one and only Todd Grover, alongside my amazing TVG team. #VoiceAI #ElevenLabs #ArtificialIntelligence Avid Larizadeh Duggan OBE, Olivia Steedman, Kieran Mahanty, Amaury Vangrevelynghe, Vera Schulz, Selina (Haojia) Liu, Henrietta Dehn, Kevin McGurgan OBE, Anna White, George Milne, Kizito Odunze, Ritesh Patel.
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Hristo Borisov reacted on thisHristo Borisov reacted on this🇧🇬 OfficeRnD founder Miro Miroslavov is back with a new startup! And €2.2M in seed funding. His new venture, 1club, has raised the round from LAUNCHub Ventures and BrightCap Ventures, roughly a year after getting started. Together with former OfficeRnD colleague Martin Kirov, Miroslavov is building an AI-native platform for sports and fitness businesses, bringing memberships, scheduling, payments, marketing, websites, and mobile apps into one system. The new funding will support expansion across the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and Singapore, alongside team growth and further product development. For Miroslavov, the move from coworking software to sports came from a personal interest, and a gap he saw in the market. 💬 “I realized I wasn’t ready to retire just yet. I started thinking about what I actually wanted to work on, and I’m a huge sports fan. That’s my other passion.” Read the full story and our conversation with Miroslavov on The Recursive. 👇 https://lnkd.in/dagH7AgR
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Hristo Borisov liked thisHristo Borisov liked thisI saw a headline this week that the trade unions are fighting to block EU Inc. No wonder some of the top UK and European founders are leaving the region at an alarming rate and setting up in Delaware. How could you not? Look at the announcement of Listen Labs yesterday as an example of what amazing Europeans can do in America. In three years, you can build an amazing company and sell it Salesforce for $1.9B - or turn it into a global leader like Stripe over a decade. I speak to founders all over Europe and, compared to even a year ago, I am seeing them flee for the US at an increasing rate. This part of the world is losing in AI because it is losing many of its best people. This is not a capital problem, it is a regulatory one. The vast regulatory overhang of GDPR, AI Act, CADA, DSA, DMA, DFA and many other three letter acronyms. The slow pace of change and the blocking of any basic simplification efforts like EU Inc. The complicated tax dynamics punishing founders and startups with wealth taxes, exit taxes, and archaic labor laws. They all add up and make it terribly unattractive to stay here and build. What is scariest is there is no major political leader in the UK or Europe who is aware of this problem or working to fix it. The UK PM made a 30 second reference to AI in his speech yesterday. He is worried about tweaking the bus fares rather than empowering the UK to be a global market leader. The other leaders in the EU are all taking selfies, boasting about new tech laws like fan boys and girls with nothing to show for it. We need to act, and act now, or we will lose an entire generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs who will create economic growth and opportunity elsewhere. If we don't, all we have left are old palaces and the chance to be selling gelato and hotel stays to tourists.
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Hristo Borisov reacted on thisHristo Borisov reacted on thisThank you for having me at the fantastic event yesterday, Hristo Borisov and Gabriela Belnikolovska! It's exciting to see how fast Payhawk is growing. I'm confident Nordic companies have a lot to gain from your approach to managing company spending. Looking forward to seeing what comes next! 🚀
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Hristo Borisov reacted on thisHristo Borisov reacted on thisSometimes the best way to see the real impact of technology is not through numbers or systems, but through the everyday experience of the people who use it. We are excited to share that DISCORDIA is part of a new video produced for Payhawk by BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions. Alongside the story of Payhawk’s Co-founder and CEO, Hristo Borisov, the video features our long-standing international truck driver, Anatoli Lazarov, sharing his experience of using Payhawk on the road. For Anatoli, the Payhawk app and its AI assistant make managing and reporting expenses while travelling across Europe faster, easier and more efficient. His story also reflects something bigger about DISCORDIA. Technology plays an important role in the way we develop our business. We continuously invest in and implement new solutions that simplify processes, support our people and improve efficiency across different areas of the company. Thank you, Payhawk, for the partnership, trust and opportunity to grow and develop together. #DISCORDIA #Payhawk #ValueGeneration
Experience & Education
Licenses & Certifications
Volunteer Experience
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Mentor
First Lego League
- 4 months
Science and Technology
I had the opportunity to mentor and coach a team of 7 children aged from 10 to 16 years for a period of 4 months during the First Lego League round in Bulgaria. The Lego League is a competition organized by Lego and SAP to foster science and technology adoption among children. The team won the price for "Best Robot" by outperforming all 11 teams.
Patents
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CognitiveFlow™
Issued US10991369B1 62/624,594
CognitiveFlow™ is a technology that uses declarative programming techniques to create conversational intelligence for a chatbot without the need to build decision trees using imperative languages such as .NET, Java or JavaScript. Using CognitiveFlow, you are required to describe all conversations your bot can have with a user in a single JSON cognitive flow definition. The technology can be trained with goals, examples and data from existing backend systems, similar to the process for training…
CognitiveFlow™ is a technology that uses declarative programming techniques to create conversational intelligence for a chatbot without the need to build decision trees using imperative languages such as .NET, Java or JavaScript. Using CognitiveFlow, you are required to describe all conversations your bot can have with a user in a single JSON cognitive flow definition. The technology can be trained with goals, examples and data from existing backend systems, similar to the process for training new customer service agents. The technology saves the development time of a chatbot up to 15 times compared to conventional imperative language code.
The technology is currently applied in Progress NativeChat.Other inventorsSee patent
Honors & Awards
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John Atanasoff Presidential Award for Outstanding Projects with Significant Social Impact - "Гражданите"
President of Bulgaria
The John Atanasoff Presidential Awards that distinguishes rising stars – researchers and entrepreneurs alike – in computer science and related fields, including cryptology, computational linguistics and robotics.The John Atanasoff Presidential Award for Outstanding Projects with Significant Social Impact category highlights projects – start-ups included - that address open and relevant issues of social significance. This is a team award for the social project "Гражданите".
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