Mircea Paşoi

Summify in the Romanian Press

After our San Francisco November trip, we went back to Romania, where we were luck enough to be approached by the Romanian press and we got to to talk our story and about Summify!

Here’s an article from Forbes Romania, where we talk about Summify, life in Vancouver and the differences between building a dot-com versus a dot-ro:

Next, we got featured on Pro TV, with the headline “They refused salaries of $100,000. They started their own business.” Here’s the video (in Romanian):

I’m very grateful for the chance to tell our story, and I hope more Romanian entrepreneurs will follow in our footsteps and tackle opportunities in the international market!

Vegetarian in Vancouver

Like I promised in my previous post, for the whole month of February I ate only vegetarian (meat-free) food every day. It was a very interesting 30 days trial for me, so I want to share my experience.

Why veggie?

I’ve wanted to try vegetarian food for quite some time, mainly out of curiosity. My girlfriend and a bunch of other people I know are vegetarian, so I always wondered what I’m missing on.

There weren’t any ethical reasons behind my trial, I only wanted to find out if there are any health benefits to such a diet.

Veggie-friendly

A decisive factor in finally trying out this experiment was that North America is so vegetarian friendly! I know from many restaurant trips together with my girlfriend that in Romania the only vegetarian food you usually find a is a veggie pizza or maybe a Caesar salad.

Here, the situation is completely different. Every single restaurant I’ve been to has at least a few vegetarian dishes. The range of possible food choices is huge, so this made my trial very easy (I easily get bored eating the same thing).

Some examples of vegetarian foods I ate:

• Pizza, Lasagna, Pasta, Burger, Vermicelli
• Vegetable sushi: rolls, tempura and tofu-based dishes like tofu teriyaki
• Indian food, Thai food
• Falafel, Spinach pie
• Mexican food: tacos, burritos
• All kinds of salads

… and the list could go on!

How was it?

This was far from being a scientific trial, so any personal observations and conclusions should be taken with a grain of salt. With that out of the way, here’s what I noticed:

• Eating vegetarian made me feel ligther. No more feeling drowsy and sleepy after eating and no more feeling like I’m about to explode when I eat a bit too much. It seems vegetarian food is much easier on the digestive system.
• I often times felt hungry after eating, at least in the beginning. I’m a firm believer of the eat only 80% full principle (because you live longer and healthier), so I think of this as a plus. I should really do it more often.
• I lost weight. Didn’t really measure how much, but it was physically visible there was some weight loss going on.
• I generally felt better, although this is very subjective, and hard to correlate with the diet.
• Interestingly enough, it took me over 20 days to actually feel any of the effects I mentioned. Others have reported that there is a period of detoxing and overcoming cravings, so I guess it’s pretty normal.
• As a bonus, I spent less money on food because vegetarian dishes are usually cheaper.

What’s next?

At the end of the trial, I switched back to my regular diet (with meat). The deal breaker for me was that some meat foods are just more tastier than anything vegetarian I’ve tried. There was a benefit to going back to eating meat - it helped me realize all the differences between the two diets and I am now convinced about the health benefits of eating vegetarian.

Consequently, I’m not giving up on this! In the very near future, I want to do a semi-vegetarian (may include fish and sometimes poultry) 30 days trial, maybe that will stick!

A New Life

It has been 2 weeks since we arrived in Vancouver and I must say, these have been some really intense couple of weeks - in a good way!

This comes after the very nerve-wrecking period before departing to Canada when there was so much stuff to do:

• Pass 4 exams in my Masters Degree in Distributed Systems at University of Bucharest
• Get a Canada visa, plane ticket, medical insurance, etc.
• Find a new team for balaur.ro and handover the project (soon to be announced)
• Give the current team at infoarena.ro all the necessary rights to operate without the founding team
• Move all my stuff from the apartment in Bucharest I was renting
• Spend time with family, my girlfriend and my friends
• Do some promotional stuff for ReadFu (TV show, web show, press)
• Work on ReadFu and balaur.ro

Not a short list for only a few weeks, but I somehow squeezed everything in, or at least I tried. :) Luckily that period has passed and I am now living in the beautiful town of Vancouver and working on turning ReadFu into a very succesful web business.

The first two weeks have been an interesting mix of really cool events: meeting with all the other teams, doing a pitching workshop, meeting with Guy Kawasaki, learning about term sheets and incorporating a company, meeting quite a few Romanians, etc., mixed with a lot of practical stuff: recovering from jetlag, finding a house to live in, buying a bed from Ikea, learning how to use the public transit, finding out the good places to eat, etc.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what happened, more details will soon follow on the ReadFu blog. Regarding what’s next, it looks like it’s going to be a really challenging (and fun) journey, and that I’ll learn tons of stuff along the way (and do a lot of mistakes also). It will take total immersion for us to come out of this successfully in the end!

It goes without saying that I’m very excited about this chance we’ve been given. For all intents and purposes, this feels pretty much like hitting the reset button and stepping into a whole new life with endless opportunities!

One more thing… As part of this new life, I’m doing a trial of eating only vegetarian (no meat, not even fish) for the entire month of February. Really curious how this will turn out. :)