Finding Needles in Haystacks #6 | Katya Kapelushnik

This is the sixth interview for Finding Needles in Haystacks, where we interview people who have unconventional paths into startups and the tech world. A member of Operations Nation and a seasoned startup ops professional, Katya sat down with Applied to chat about her unconventional path to working with startups and her thoughts on hiring processes.

What’s your name and what’s your job title?

I’m Katya Kapelushnik and I run product and operations in a small startup at the moment.

What does a normal day look like (if you have a normal day)?

This is anything from finance, management accounts, to recruitment and HR. Things like appointing people and recruiting, but also looking at culture, developing people’s progress in the company, setting up processes and anything in between.

How did you get into tech or working for software companies specifically?

I started in corporate finance, so I was in private equity or venture capital firms or mergers and acquisitions. I came to London 11 years ago, and in my last financial job we helped tech founders to exit their businesses. Whilst we were advising those founders, I thought, ‘oh, I’d really like to be on the other side of the table.’ I do realise now that we only saw the very successful people who built and sold their businesses. There are countless founders who don’t get to this point but I thought I really want to create something which will be of value and give it a future life or legacy.

The overall financial sector is full of people who were more about presentation than value add. And whilst I had very good managers or bosses, I think the people I met (mostly clients) were the type of people I really liked and were quite different and unlike the people in the financial sector. I really wanted to be in that creator and value add sector.

When you got on the other side of the table, what was your first job?

I was working for a digital agency. I started as…I think they called me the VP of Data? Basically I ran their data science function, which is a bit weird because I’m not a data scientist.

They gave me a large set of numbers and asked me to make sense of them. And I did. And this is how I started working with them. At first on a consultancy basis and then I ended up employed by them.

Later on, there was a person who started reading my blog and eventually contacted me. He said was building an e-commerce shops space (this was before things like Squarespace) and had more work that he could do. He said he wanted to start a company but needed someone to help run the company because he didn’t want to speak to people day in/day out. We sort of co-ran the company for some time. We grew pretty well, nothing to millions and millions, but enough to be a team of 11.

So, I guess you could call this my first startup startup job.

Do you have a hiring process that you went through that was either really great or nightmarish that come to mind?

I had a very good one about 3–4 years ago — one of the founders had a pretty good process at the time when the company was about 20 people. The process was light enough for me to not be overwhelmed (like the seven steps I typically have gone through with larger companies).

I only spoke to the two founders during the process which was in 3 stages. There was the introductory interview, core/technical presentation and then a cultural fit interview. It was quite light and felt good and robust enough for them to assess how good I was or who I was and what I could do or learn.

And I think I quite liked that it wasn’t formal, there wasn’t anyone ticking off buzzwords or boxes. I’m not great on self-presentation so someone interviewing me needs to probe around and see what I omitted or what I thought wasn’t worth mentioning.

It sounds like you had something in mind when I said nightmarish…Are there one or two elements of a bad process that you don’t like?

For me, it’s quite a nerve wracking process. I want to know whether I did good or not, and quite quickly. And I want to go through the process quickly.

The processes that I didn’t think were robust, were the ones that almost went too lightly or too quickly, and people who interviewed me were sort of selected from a pool of people who interview people, without a personal touch.

I mean, they were were nice, but there wasn’t any specific interest in me or any sort of probing around and it felt like the interviews were inconsequential. Even though I got through the next stage of those interviews, it didn’t mean anything for how we would work together, or whether we could work together.

It felt like a prebuilt process and I could see how a pretty random person could go through all of those stages (there were quite a lot of them), and then get the job where they don’t quite fit in. This happened to me in one of those places, once I started, I immediately knew I wasn’t the right fit and the process didn’t prepare me for that.

When you think about recruitment in general, what are the five words that come to mind?

• time-consuming
• nerve-wracking
• research (like what you ought to do from both sides)
• opportunity
• suspense

What has your experience been like working at software companies?

I think I might be quite naive in saying this, but I’m still there for the people. I’m still here because I want to be around people who create things from scratch.

I think these are my kind of people. I had a lot of education and sort of socialisation to not be a certain way and to mimic what the investors wanted to see or what larger consumer groups wanted to see. I really enjoy supporting people who are a bit quieter, and see them flourish and create things and let them be at ease with who they are and be part of building some sort of legacy.

When you think about tech, what are the five words that come to mind?

• industrialisation
• new-world
• diverse
• inclusive
• ever-changing

oh God… I think of industrial or industrialisation. New world maybe. Diverse, social lifting…Maybe there’s a better word for that — inclusive. I mean, I’ve not been living under a rock about inclusivity, but having come from finance, I think that tech is far more inclusive. And finally, I think ever-changing — that’s a good one.

We’ve been ending some of these interviews trying to compare peoples work in other forms. So, if software companies were a meal, what kind of meal would they be?

I think they would be some sort of bento. There’s a lot going on, there’s all these sorts of pockets. And in every pocket there is something quite different and you’re supposed to mix them all together, so you can taste all the flavours — You get the acidity and the umami, and whatever other rotating parts and flavours. It’s up to you how you mix it — you can consume one by one or altogether or in any combination.

There is a nice one in London called Aburi Bento near the Barbican — a mom ’n’ pop shop. Definitely recommend!