What’s it like to build a company at 23

Published in

The Startup

9 min readFeb 5, 2019

Hello, world

My name is Slava and I am a co-founder of a fintech company aiming to connect developed and emerging markets through a global financial platform.

Background story

“Slava and Alex have both struggled through the adversities of emerging markets with family-related business in Russia and Romania respectively. Many healthy and growing businesses where forced to shut down due to liquidity issues and inefficient local credit markets. Having received education in the UK, they noticed how in developed markets funds sit in bank accounts for negligible rates. This miss-allocation of capital was very clear and the opportunities that come with it seemed within reach. They thus started iterating on the best way of bridging the gap and creating a system that would provide a more efficient allocation of capital globally through financing international trade.”

That’s how we would describe it to investors in the Due Diligence Pack.

In reality, it was mostly driven by 3 forces:

The desire to create something that would make the world a better place
A vision of how to improve the inefficiencies of the current system
Drive to have a high degree of freedom and live life to the fullest

Being an entrepreneur is not a path for everybody, but for the ones that dare it holds a lot of joy and fulfilment.

Here is a small video that brilliantly shows what’s it like. Anybody who’s been there will understand :)

I am going to talk about the key takeaways I’ve had throughout my entrepreneurial journey so far.

The unexpected help you get

When one truly decides to go for it and puts all of his/her energy towards creating something, strange things start to happen.

At first, the goal seems to be unattainable and there is no understanding of HOW to get there. However, if you keep going it starts to shift. A lot of people seem to appear that are interested in what you are doing and are looking to help. I do not know if the reason for that is our relatively young age and the buzz around the Fintech space, but it is rather baffling.

For example, the other day we spent nights doing a Due Diligence pack for investors. Writing pages of answers covering credit procedures, system security and other fun stuff and then iterating on it. Yet, no one seems to have done the final proofread before we sent it to external parties and it was full of small spelling mistakes. That is unacceptable when you are trying to deliver a message to investors: “We are in our early 20ies and will do a good job managing your money!”.

However, an MD of a multi-billion dollar hedge fund spent his time reviewing and editing every page and going through it with us. He later sent our materials to 12 parties ranging from CEOs of other funds to heads of family offices with no apparent benefit for himself. Our investors teach us different skills from B2B sales to credit risk and fundraising. Often people we hardly know go out of their way to make intros.

I guess, if people are able to see the vision of what we are building and connect to it, there is an inherent desire to contribute to its realization.

Or maybe it’s just the fact that there is a limited amount of nutheads going for a statistically disastrous path of creating a startup. SO, the ones that do stand out. Especially when you are in the finance space going against the giants like banks.

Crazy speed of learning and growth

All of this help came to me as a surprise, but an even bigger surprise was the crazy speed of learning. The amount of things you learn as a team member in a startup in 6 months is equivalent to 3 years in a corporate. Now if you are a founder there is a multiple of at least 10 to that.

No person is qualified for that job unless they have built a company before. Corporate skills are only indirectly transferable as they are usually specialized, while as a founder you need to be a generalist integrating multiple disciplines to have a holistic vision.

Therefore, you learn on the job. There is no structure, no clear tasks and no rigid organizational structure. You create everything from scratch and it’s fascinating.

In the beginning, you don’t really know what you are doing, but as you go things start to become clearer through myriads of chats with people who have been in the space for a while, research of the market as well as legwork with customers.

You start thinking that now you know what you are doing, but in half a year, you look back and think WTF was I doing back then.

That cycle will keep repeating itself and that’s a normal process. Going from 2 people working on a couch to a team of 10 in different countries and then to a company of 100 people requires completely different skillsets and mindsets.

So, the most important quality a founder must have apart from perseverance is the ability to learn and learn fast. This learning by itself is already a great reward for the work.

Rollercoaster

Yet, it is truly a rollercoaster. You never know what to expect. One day you had a brilliant meeting, making you think that you closed a long-awaited lead You feel like the company is going to the moon! A week later, the same lead pulled out and you realized that you have enough cash to last only for 2 more months. Suddenly the tide has shifted to you feeling like all of this is just too much.

I guess this is standard for founders. I am described by close people as a very stable and calm person, which helps to limit reactions to such fluctuations. However, it still gets to me sometimes and I have to work through it. While my co-founder, who is more emotional can get quite affected for a short duration. So, it is imperative to develop control of your emotions and mind through meditation or other techniques and to have absolute faith in your vision.

These rapid changes also bring quite a lot of excitement into work, as there are constantly new tasks, new possibilities and new problems to solve. If you are able to change your reactions to uncertainty and overcome the resulting stress by viewing it as growth opportunities, it becomes a true adventure.

Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness in their book Peak Performance present research, which shows how true growth happens when a human is performing “just manageable challenges”. Meaning that they are out of their comfort zone, but not completely overwhelmed by the difficulty of tasks at hand. This holds true across all fields from sports to creative occupations. Growth mindset enables the transformation of stress into a creative capacity and a drive to execute at your best.

The unexpected challenges

You will need that mindset, as the journey comes with a whole load of unexpected challenges. It seems like the media talks about the “tough life” of being an entrepreneur to the extent where it gets annoying. However, they do have a point. These challenges really catch you off guard and force you to deal with them to avoid the death of your company.

In the first year of running a company, there has been a lot of these, but the one that I found most difficult is building a team.

The company is nothing else than a group of people working towards achieving a shared goal. In good cases, they also share a purpose. No matter how you look at it, what makes or breaks an organisation are the people in it.

Building a team and a company culture is no easy task. You need to find people that not only have the technical skills to do the job but also fit into the team culture and work environment. In our small team, we already experienced how when either part is missing it does not work out.

A skilled person coming from senior banking positing had the technical capabilities to do the job (or so we thought at a time) but was not hands on enough to deal with a constant flow of small startup fires. He also was not able to connect with the mission of the company to appreciate the intrinsic rewards beyond just extrinsic monetary compensation. That led to him quitting and leaving us shorthanded at a time when we were going live.

On the other hand, the person who has been with us from very early on did not possess the skills to grow with the company. Good connection to the mission and the team, but the quality of work has always been subpar. At the early stages of the company, you cannot afford someone who does not deliver their best. After much of discussion and hesitation, we had to fire the person. It was one of the most difficult acts I had to do as a CEO.

After these experiences, we came to understand the phrase: “Hire slow, fire fast”. That’s why now we aim to interview for both technical and fit components, have a strict trial period at the end of which if it’s not working we make a decision immediately.

Unreal level of fulfilment

“Timing, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success.” — Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder

Overcoming these challenges though is what brings amazing feelings of fulfilment. By pushing our boundaries and expanding beyond previous limitations humans experience satisfaction and fulfilment. This is our nature stemming from evolution. In order to grow, we have to go through transformations, which are often uncomfortable, but that lead to us becoming better versions of ourselves.

The same underlying principle can be observed in a rabbit utilising every bit of its muscles and nervous system to run at maximum speed from the fox as well as in a Yogi reaching peak concentration in meditation to achieve a transcendental state.

Every day you take a step closer to realising your vision and attaining your goal. You can see it in your mind and over time it starts becoming a reality. However, happiness lies not in the destination. It lies in this everyday progression.

Happiness is not a goal, it is a journey.

That’s why it is so important to love what you do and believe in it enough to keep pursuing. The goal will keep evolving, but your attitude to work defines the quality of that work and the effect it has on your overall experience of life.

This is illustrated by this short story about 3 men transporting stones. Each of them is being asked: “what are you doing?”

Man 1: Moving stones

Man 2: Working to put food on the table

Man 3: Building a temple for our town

They are doing the exact same job. Guess which one is going to be more fulfilled?

Choice

Creating a company is a beautiful, stressful, fun, surprising and fulfilling journey. It’s a form of creativity akin to art or writing just in a social science sphere.

When you step on it, you need to have a clear intention stemming from the heart. The less self-centred the purpose the more inspired you are going to be and the further you will be able to push yourself when things get tough.

Not everyone needs to be a founder though. Majority of people are going to be happier in other positions. What’s important is to choose a place where you grow, feel supported and inspired to realise the company’s mission.

We are alive for a short period of time. It makes no sense to pursue something that you don’t love or that doesn’t propel your growth, as most of our time is spent at work.

Therefore, choose wisely.

Thank you for reading.