Nasko Filchev is Strypes’ COO and is one of the first people to join the company after Koen van Wijk founded it in 2008. Nasko graduated and worked in Germany, but he wanted to go back to his home country, Bulgaria. He then discovered a job ad posted by a small company that was just starting out. There was a huge potential for growth and Nasko knew that by seeing the business model. He saw the potential in Koen as a founder, who had the knowledge and expertise to expand the company and build a strong link between its Bulgarian and Dutch branches. Nasko never felt the need to change jobs as his work at Strypes was dynamic enough. For him, Strypes was an organisation in constant development.
“At least for me, during the past eleven years, I worked at a different company every year. By a different company, I mean having different challenges during the years. Initially, the challenge was to create a small team. Today, the challenge is to win new clients, make new sales, acquire new companies, have strong marketing. The thing that keeps me loyal to Strypes is that there’s always development in the company.”
He has gone through all organisational steps of managing 1 to 250+ people. As COO, he has a close experience with all roles within Strypes – writing code, front office, Scrum master, team lead, technical lead, product owner, and operational product owner. “When an organisation grows, you don’t have a defined role for everything.”The difference between running a startup and a corporation
In a startup, everyone is close to each other and everyone knows what the other person is working on. In the startup stages of Strypes, Nasko found it difficult to explain to clients that he can execute and manage a project at the same time. Today, Strypes is a large organisation where even Nasko doesn’t know anyone and every change requires approval by several levels, groups, and people. Having strictly defined roles means that he now has to comply with their functions.“There is a big difference between ten years ago and now. Before, clients called us with a project, we had the people, and just started working on it. Now we have a detailed strategy and a process for taking in new customers and projects.”
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