Georges Gurkovsky

Entrepreneur & Investor at Mercury JSC, NGB Consulting Ltd.

My experience and deep interests:

• Culture

• Investing

I am based in: Paris

I am curious by nature and driven by the desire to learn and understand different points of view; traits that were nurtured during my upbringing: I was born in France to Bulgarian parents, brought up in Africa and the USA, before going to boarding school in the UK and attending Oxford University.

After working in advertising and banking in London, I moved to Bulgaria in 2004 to get to know my family and roots, and to set up a property investment business. Over the last two years I have been working on a project to develop an international, year-round mountain resort in Bulgaria that would bring the best of new technologies and sustainability practices to mountain tourism in the 21^st century.

One of my life long passions has been learning languages and understanding other cultures, so I recently joined internet start-up Zéduki.com, which is a language-learning platform where teachers and students are matched according to shared interests. Having learned five languages over a lucky lifetime travelling the world, I have always found that the best way to learn is to chat with people about shared passions. The existing academic system still relies on old methods of teaching that does little to give people the confidence to just talk in other languages; Zeduki aims to free the Frenchman/Italian/German/Chinese ... that is inside all of us.

Despite being born and bred in a city, I have a deep need for nature. When snow is falling you will find me in a refuge in the Alps, and in the summer in a tent wherever there is good wind for kitesurfing.