I did not strive to get rich. I enjoyed business.
Before launching my current startup, I joined a company bringing in a mere $100 and together we grew it to over $800 million in value. Certainly, that has been a successful business, but we never started it to get rich quickly.
You too need a different reason for starting your business. If you want it to impact a market or even just have longevity, your business at its core must wage a constant battle to find the truth. And for a business, “the truth” means value. As an entrepreneur, you should be spending every day getting to the core of what “value” means to your customers.
You will have one job and your job is to build a venture that will search for real value and “the truth” of what your client really needs.
Separate people’s goodwill from the truth.
When you are getting ready to launch a new venture, you should find five potential customers and talk to them about the concept, product or service — whatever you are about to bring to market. Then say, “I am contemplating starting this business and I need your help. I would very much like you to convince me why I shouldn’t do it. I am hoping you will listen to the concept and tell me why it won’t work.”
After explaining the concept, shut up. Don’t “sell.” If your potential customers encourage you to pursue your idea, then you need to go one step further: Ask them right there to pay for the product. Not make an investment, but pay for the product. Tell these customers to consider that act a prepayment for serious value, to be delivered soon.
I have started many companies, and asking for the money right on the spot is a critical act. All of a sudden, a completely different conversation happens. It is a real conversation, and one that drives progress.
All of a sudden, those people you’re talking to may tell you that their purchasing department is not really adding any more vendors right now, or that they want to see a couple of more iterations first, or that you’ll need to show them 100 other clients using the product before they can commit to anything. Or maybe they’ll say they are out of cash.
Whatever their reason, you’ll be separating their goodwill from the perceived value of not just your concept, but their belief that you can execute it.
Next, ask why you shouldn’t do it, and if all goes well with that conversation, ask for money. Usually half of the people you ask will still give some excuse why they can’t pay now.

Be willing to adapt, anytime, quickly.
I was 16 when I decided to cut the apron strings and move out. My home country, Russia, become the focus of my journey. I focused on a period of self-discovery and was holed up in the middle of this world where it was just the internet and me. Within weeks I fine-tuned my computer skills and cooled on the idea of building tech. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. There was one small problem: my voice.
I tried to be very formal and put on a deep voice to clients over the phone so I didn’t have to meet them and would be able to hide how young I was. I was so terribly embarrassed about it for so long when I actually should have just owned up.
When I returned to the US I brought a laptop and a bunch of contracts (drawn up by my father) and a list of executives’ ears to bend. Keeping up appearances, I set up a consultancy company and managed to convince a few companies to hire me.
But the early days were not all plain sailing.
I always had the sense of being able to beat the system and have this kick-ass product that I would never need to raise money for, I would never need to sell out, because the business would bring all the attention to our secondary business [web development firm] where people would ask us to build them a website. Surprisingly, this worked for a few months. I kept up my consultancy gigs until our main business began doubling its numbers of users every few weeks. Our web development clients eventually got more and more pissed off because I was not returning their calls and at that point I was just totally fucking it up. Clearly they could see our main business was my one and only focus and they were getting shafted.
It was at this moment that I needed to grow up. Investors were circling, but our CEO’s youthful defiance prevented the firm being shipped across the startup factory of Silicon Valley. Late 2008 we did manage to raise $4.5m by selling the other one year old company as part of a funding round. We did however repeatedly turn down offers to move the company to the hyper-competitive West Coast, where we think entrepreneurs spend their time worrying whether Apple, Google or Facebook are going to steal their most talented engineers. New York is a more supportive city for startups, this is however arguable, even if it does not have the obvious allure of Silicon Valley.
We never reached the level of a business such as Facebook with a price tag of hundreds of billions of dollars, but we were always relaxed about our growth. There was a time when we could see the computer screen of every employee in our New York office. A year later we operated on two floors and were nearing 100 staff members. For a long time we did not want to be employing more than a dozen people.
Our Driver
The key driver for us was the meritocratic network. Big names such as Lady Gaga and Barack Obama gave the site some celebrity lustre, but the creativity was always found in our most dedicated users. Photographers, designers and musicians. 85% of our users posted more than 20 times a month on average, and this was a major motivator to keep growing.
In conversation I could evangelise on the force of creativity for hours. At times I rather pause and take a moment before I continue with animated zeal.
Like many of the hottest internet firms, we had no proven business model. The company’s “lack of revenue” prevented some major Silicon Valley venture capital firms from participating in our $85m funding round in September 2011. It was at this point that our president pointed out how we needed hundreds of millions of subscribers to become profitable.

Nailed it!
We were constantly tested along the way. Particularly in the first three years, there were a lot of mergers and acquisitions people who would pull us aside and you’d think — “Well, shit, I could be a pretty rich 24-year-old with very little effort.” But we held firm, we stuck it out. In 2013 we knew why, as we sold for $1.1 billion
There are a lot of rich people in the world. There are very few people who have the privilege of getting to invent things that billions of people use.
In the upcoming months I will continue talking about the topics of business, growing as an entrepreneur and financial & technical planning.
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