A usual day — not usual insights.

Sergey Leshchenko
Jul 22, 2017 · 4 min read

Every so often I get utterly excited by what I hear, see, or experience in my day-to-day life.

Yesterday, I paid a visit to one of the Kiev tech. communities meet-ups, accounted for a total of 3 of them to have already been held.

This was a rather appealing concept where all the speakers were giving their speeches in English, even though not all of them were Native speakers, and despite the pre-set agenda, the Q&A followed in English, too. That gave a flavor of the international environment, henceforth everything that took place next was kind of buttered up.

Let me give crack and lay out what I’ve discovered or reinforced in my mind during the course of the 3 given lections.

The first speaker, a founder of “You team”, a London based “booking.com for business” alternative, named Anton Mishchenko, narrated all about the path of his company, that lets businesses in B2B, hunt for the individual talents in outsourcing development agencies, and then make cooperation deals with the companies the individual is working for.

Among quite obvious things such as ways of converting prospects using a custom-designed sales funnel, based on gathering feedback, rather than “pushing for a sale”, Anton slipped a couple of not-so-obvious pieces of information. For example, addressing my question about the risk of direct deals between clients and agency employees, where bypassing the system may take place and bring problems to both second party and intermediary, Anton retorted that “all freelance platforms do have this risk on their table. In our case, it’s more of a problem starting the 2nd deal, as for the first one, there is always this “trust issue” that we help to solve in our framework. It’s all dependent on the people values, hence we do not fight against something that may or may not happen, except for putting a legal agreement before a sign-up.”

Fair enough, I concede. I personally, however, have already recruited about 15 freelancers to work with my company directly, after the mentioned “trust factor” has been established using the outside platform. Maybe it’s a blessing in disguise for businesses that look for a talent, then? Who knows.

Another guy that captured my attention in a kind of a provocative way was Mark Turell, an experienced entrepreneur from Berlin. Mark started by saying that “if you thought that for the last hour sitting in this audience you have not moved a single mile, you are all wrong”. We at least traveled a thousand miles with the globe rotating. Actually, this was rather an illustration to assert that “nothing is real”. Since nothing is real, your chances of doing or not doing something are just the same. Mark gave some stunning examples of how, by not trusting the well-accepted economic theories, you can make something absolutely remarkable. That to say, in his words, “economic models are bullshit”. Have you heard of birthdays paradox? According to it, in the room of 30 people, the chance of 2 persons having a birthday in 1 day is about 75%. No kidding. Mark asked the public (around 35 people) — “does someone have a birthday, on March 3rd, as do I?”, and not 1, but 2 (!) people raised their hands.

Paradox? Or rather a crowning example that all — that we are pre-determined to believe — is just an illusion. Another sense is common sense, — but sometimes, you should not use it, as it plays a bad joke with what you can, or can not do. Mark has deliberately told about his experience of achieving ridiculous results by having a fairly low input. “I am a lazy person, in my core, so I find ways to do big things the easiest way possible”.

With that being said, his ways of contributing to the lives of societies, either by streamlining Zimbabwe presidential elections, or helping Ukrainians during the Maidan times, are contingent upon the, what he calls, an “altruistic gene” inside every human being. He says that scientists and economists fail to realize that the times of being egocentric are slowly passing away. In an incremental trajectory, today’s socially-connected people, want to give as much, if not more, as they want to gain.

By surrounding himself with the people of such a nature, Mark is able to do stuff that is uneasy to believe at the first sight.

“People are donkeys, when you think about it. The thing that motivates donkey to do or not to do something, except for the well-known “stick and carrot”, is nothing else but another donkey.”
In other words, as my good friend calls it, “sheeple”.

This in no way is an assault, but rather a reality we live in. I am a donkey, you are a donkey, we are, to a higher or lesser degree do the things our surrounding does. In effect, it’s kind of cool, as by using this, and some other core principles highlighted in this article, you can make people follow your lead, and perhaps this, somehow, will change the world for the better.

    Sergey Leshchenko

    Written by

    Пишу про свой опыт в бизнесе, философствую. Former COO and co-founder of DexDigital/Co-Founder of Beverly English.