Welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs. This is the podcast where we celebrate the stories of successful entrepreneurs who've overcome challenges and setbacks to build thriving businesses. In this episode, we're talking with Slava Podmurnyi. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Visartech, a company that helps businesses advance their processes with robust engineering practices. Slava is a true leader who not only focuses on implementing growth opportunities for his clients and his own company but he also regularly shares his experience on various media platforms such as Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine, and many other podcasts. And we are privileged to have Slava with us today, his journey is one of resilience. Welcome, welcome to Resilient Entrepreneurs, Slava.
Thank you for the invitation and hi to everyone. Vicki and Laura, it’s really nice to see you and once again, thank you for giving me the opportunity to share something with the world. I always like to do that.
Yeah, I see that you do. And I love that you are so generous with not only your knowledge about your industry but also with yourself and your own personal story. And yours is I mean, one of adversity. And let's start at the very beginning, you were born in Ukraine and then actually grew your business to the US. Tell us a bit about that. What's the backstory there? And how was that transition for you?
That's true. I was born in Ukraine and grew up in Ukraine, got higher education there so pretty much the first part of my life was really connected to Ukraine. But at some point, I realised that local business is not okay for me, the market is not so big. I thought that, okay, it's the time probably to scale the company. There were different opportunities at the time but for some reason, I chose the US, probably the biggest market. We were always focusing on innovations, and I believe the US is number one in terms of innovation, new technologies, probably that's why we started the business also.
It's like living the big dream. When you make it in America, you make it anywhere.
Kind of yeah, based on movies, maybe.
Yeah, exactly. This romantic philosophy. Is that how you found it to be? Was it pretty easy for you to break into that market, or..
There were some probably like bureaucratic obstacles at the very beginning but nothing complicated, it's kind of easy to open the business. I mean, from a legal point of view,
make all the bank accounts and all the operational stuff.
And I like people in the US, they are very open, it's really easy to talk to them at meetups, conferences, you can easily talk to anyone and you can find good contacts and opportunities.
So moving across the planet to start your business in a new market, what were some of the first steps that you took? What secured and landed you your first client or two?
So I would say the first step is definitely to make all the legal operations just to make sure you are safe because when you’re an entrepreneur it's really easy to break some rules and get into trouble and get some fines. First thing we hired pretty good consultants, and they helped us to open the legal part. Before any legal steps, we already had some clients in the US but we realised that it's better to have a physical presence there because you are definitely supposed to be closer to your clients so you can speak the local language to them.
The first client and the biggest one at that moment, and we still actually collaborate with that client was a golf company, they were doing simulation and we were very eager to help them to build this. At that time there was no such word as the Metaverse probably, but I now realise that what we were doing and still doing is Metaverse for golf people where they can practise their skills.
Oh, that's cool. Did you find that it's changed now in terms of feeling like you need to be next to your client? To be in the same proximity? I mean, since COVID and since Zoom and since so much has changed. What do you think for your business? How has it affected you?
You know there is no direct answer probably, I would say yes and no. Definitely it's so much more accessible. I mean, the internet, the communication, we can use Zoom, we have cameras and we are used to that thing. We worked remotely, the whole company works remotely, there is no physical location. At the same time, it's always always better to be closer in terms of legal actions, it's better to have the company in the same legal zone as your clients. It's for sure more protection for your clients. More trust, more transparency probably. But again, now I'm trying to open a new market for our company, maybe Europe. We have a few clients from Europe but I'm really interested to scale it up, especially during the crisis, it's always an opportunity to find something new and enjoy it. But again, it's good when you grow, it's better definitely to be there and grow with you personally. But when it's stable, maybe it's time to search for other markets, other countries. I wouldn't say it's a good idea to stay only in one country, but it depends on the business.
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of the people we work with are in the early stages of finding a business. So what advice would you give them once they get to that stable place that you're just talking about? And then they're ready to scale up and expand. Because we always like to think globally and in our business and especially with Vicki moving to Australia after we started our business in small little Bermuda, now we think a whole lot bigger in terms of what we're doing. But what advice would you give to someone as they're ready to take that leap? What challenges did you face and have to overcome and process?
Probably you know, cultural differences are the most complicated things. I mean, it's the same for not only for business, even for just people. So I would say it's good to study the culture a little bit, maybe you must be fluent in that language, or at least have someone near you to be fluent in that local language. Of course, we can use English right now everywhere but when you work with local clients, again, like I'm trying to do this now in Europe and it's so much different.
Everyone speaks English in Germany, for example, but it's still so much better to speak German. So I'm studying another language, which is probably good for my brain.
Oh, my goodness, how many languages are you speaking currently?
Three? Oh, I would say I speak Italian a little bit.
Bueno. I'm not even sure if that was Italian! Oh. And then, of course, I guess you're a coder as well, you speak computer language, no?
I used to. I have my degree in computer science. And I worked as a developer, coder you say like maybe 4-5-6 years. So I was pretty much confident in the speciality. But at some point I realised I needed to switch to management and after that, I scaled the business maybe four times and then again, maybe even eight times, a lot.
Tell us about that process, scaling a business. I mean, it's a very interesting topic. And no matter where a person is in their business, they're always considering I think, when are they going to scale? How are they going to do it? How big? Yeah, what's your experience with that?
Again it's really nice when you're in this scale process, for example, now it's a crisis and I feel that we still try to scale even, despite all of, you know, all those challenges, because I believe that business, any business, is supposed to scale. If the business is not scaling it means you can have big troubles very soon, so it's supposed to be a growing entity, if it's not growing it's a problem. But when you scale, it's always a challenge because definitely, you have more advancement, and you think about hires, structures, processes. Sometimes people invest too much into scaling itself and not concentrating on the production actually. You always need to make sure that you have first of all enough money to do that, and secondly, that those processes will be synchronistically evolved to the kinds of processes which will work for your exact business and exact moment. For example, if you do a very complicated composition, it may not be effective for your business, you'll have zero margin on it. So maybe it's better to think more in an adoption way, so you need to adopt the principles you need right now at the moment, but also always think about the future.
Yeah, absolutely. I'd like to shift a little bit because I'm curious, culturally especially, when you go back to your childhood, what was entrepreneurship like growing up for you? Were there entrepreneurs in your family? Were you a kid with a lemonade stand, or was it something that came a little bit later in your life?
So definitely, it came later in my life, probably early university time. My family, my father is an electrical engineer, my mother is a journalist so it has always been more about doing the job and so on. I have zero business people in my family for generations probably. I would say it's the hardest part because sometimes I feel really stupid, like uneducated in business so I’m trying to get more education there and just learn principles. Because it's harder when your family's not from business circles, and you don't know how it works and how to make it efficient.
Yeah, and I guess you can't really ask them for advice or guidance on things because they're probably scratching their head saying, Why are you doing this in the first place? Why don't you go and get a job?
Sometimes I'm still asking that question to myself.
Absolutely. So what was it that attracted you to entrepreneurship?
I was always curious to scale things up, just to make it more strategic. When I was small, I loved to play strategic games, like SimCity, Civilisation, all those big titles, where you can play and control the world, the city, I don't know, improve it. And for me, it was very enjoyable. I don't know, I was always tied to some online games, a lot of my childhood connected to games and initially our company, we were doing computer game development. So a lot of examples from game development, probably. So yeah, I was concentrating on those games, building them, creating some new advancements and improving the life of my citizens, I always was interested to make a bigger impact. And I believe it's only possible if you do business, maybe politics, but business looks more straightforward.
I'll take business over politics any day, any day. Is it true that your first client was an Instagram for pets?
Oh, yeah, that's true.
Tell us about that..
Sure, it's funny actually, but it was a nice example. So my partner and co-founder of Visartech Anatolii, he's our CTO right now and I, we decided, Okay, it's time to do business. So we have found a client and there was a person from Spain, maybe Portugal, not sure, it wasn't a long time ago, they asked us to build Instagram but for dog owners, so if you have a dog, you can post a picture of your dogs, you know, specify different variables, like breeds and other stuff. And we basically copied the Instagram API and created a product. At that moment, and early iPhone and Android stores, people were able to make really wild money out of simple applications. We all remember that story about the guy who made a torch application and made more than a million dollars, just selling the torch application.
We all wanted to be that guy.
Yeah.
That was like gold rush times, probably. But many people, they neglected marketing activities and other stuff. They decided, okay, it's a store, you just post an application, you get success. But our client made a really good application, it worked, he had some good clients, but probably he missed investing in a lot of marketing. But it was a nice application, it worked out, there were some people with dogs really. It was nice to test the application to see all those pictures.
So of course, this was years before Instagram and Facebook was really taking off or was 13 years ago?
I would say. Yeah, kind of. It's like 2010 probably. Instagram was popular already and Facebook, definitely but maybe not so popular as today. People live their lives on Instagram right now.
Yeah. Those were the days of Instagram where you actually could get to the end of your page. Like you'd be able to scroll and be, Oh, you've seen up to this point. Like, oh, cool. Okay, I've taken all of my Instagram for the day and you'd move on. Now, there's no such thing. Right? There's no such thing.
Just for the record, folks, just for the record before we move on, my new puppy has her own Instagram account. I just had to get that out there.
I know people do that right now. That’s so nice actually.
Oh, she's just too adorable not to.
I want to know how many followers she gets in the next six months.
Six months? You’re giving me six months, that's very generous. Thank you. I’ll need it.
I'd love to know Slava what your feeling is on what's coming next. I mean, we've been talking a lot about AI. We actually just did a webinar on ChatGPT and the power of that in marketing in general, but what's your feeling on what's next? And how AI is going to revolutionise your business? And business in general.
We already use, 100% of our people, our workers, experts, they use AI tools for sure, already. And a lot of people in my network have said, if you're our employee and you're not using AI, probably you need to say your farewell. So I mean, just in private conversations, but still, I see the trends, that's definitely. I believe in maybe a few years, maybe five years, not so far away, we all will be using AI, and it will cut some routine jobs for us. We’ll rely more on AI basically, like asking Siri for the weather today, we all do that every morning, probably. Before that people used to check the skies and that's it. So, AI will be a big thing. Everything will be using AI. It's a little bit scary but it's evolution, we cannot stop the progress.
I've been calling it a revolution. I think we're going to look back on this time, as such a pivotal moment in history and what's going to come next, I don't think we can even fully understand yet. And it's just moving so fast. To me, I think it's super exciting. But definitely, we hear from a lot of people how hesitant they are, how they are worried about losing their jobs but I think it's about how our jobs are going to evolve. And like you said, if you're not using it already, and I've heard this before, if you're not using it ready in certain businesses, you're already obsolete, it's gonna go so fast. You've got to be using it and optimising what you do.
That's true. I mean, the pace is scary fast right now, in everything. It's like, we have so many events and actions happening around us and it's getting faster and faster, like more accelerating models.
Yeah, we were seeing that ChatGPT adoption rates in the first five days hit over a million users. Was it a million or three?
It could be hype, you know, we saw many applications which were growing really fast and dying really fast. But you see people still, they use more and more and they find new applications, I believe we're still not sure how to use the AI. I’m trying to educate myself right now, searching webinars, maybe I will get some sort of diploma for using those tools, I believe it will be a thing soon.
Oh, yeah. You will be adding prompt engineer to your resume as a new title, if you don't already have it there. Is there anything that you'd love it to do that it doesn't currently do? Is there anything in your day-to-day that you've thought if only it would do this?
To be honest it sounds kind of weird, but I like communication and I believe we just need those items to be closer to us. So we'll hope that Apple will release those headsets, maybe this summer even and I believe it's the future. Soon mobile phones will die in a few years I believe. And we all have some sort of wearables, eye lenses, chips inside our brain. Probably longer for chips but definitely glasses and very soon.
Yeah, look since I've been a kid, I've often wondered why haven't they come out with a chip that you can just get implanted, like the dog gets the chip, the microchip and it's back. Just give me a chip that has 15 different languages and I can be fluent wherever I go. What are we waiting for?
I believe actually that languages will disappear very soon because of AI technologies. Like imagine you will have wearables, they are smart, intelligent and they are able to, already you can Skype, they have live free translation and it's already operational, you can really use it. Imagine in a few years there will be no languages in the world.
So interesting. I hadn't even thought of it from that perspective. Here I am thinking I need the language but actually everyone can understand it because of translation. I’m so old school, forgive me.
I'm too. I still like you know petrol engines compared to electric, I don't know why.
That's not a very favourable perspective, but we'll let you have it.
I can have it for a few more years, more probably.
So you've been running your business now for over 13 years, which is impressive, right? Getting past the 10 year mark is impressive in business and something to be celebrated for sure. But no doubt you didn't get there without some good challenges along the way. So what have been some big ones that you've had to deal with and overcome?
Again for some reason, maybe some legal problems, not with government but sometimes you work with different people, yes, different clients. And I would suggest people to be more careful with agreements you sign because sometimes people don't want to make it partnership, they don't want to do business, they just want to benefit out of your collaboration. So I would suggest, be careful with agreements, make sure you sign things you can actually deliver, because sometimes it's physically impossible, not because of your limitations like that, it's just a tricky agreement so invest in a legal team, legal advisors.
Now I can tell by that smile that you might have been burned.
Not so bad, actually. I had few bumpy moments in my business career connected to maybe some legal stuff and everything was good, like we delivered whatever we were supposed to deliver and clients were happy in the moment, but after some time, they came back and said, Oh, we’re not satisfied, we don't like the job. And we asked why? What can we do? I believe when we work in service, when you work with people, the client is always right, it's the rule. And even if they're not correct, just try to help them, make one step forward towards the client and help them. And probably because of that, we're always able to avoid any problems because we're always trying to discuss, find a resolution in a good face and just deliver something to clients, so they can return investments. It's always better to communicate, make sure everything is not noted in agreement and other stuff just to make it safer.
So people aren't always what they seem to be.
Sometimes no, but it's rare occasions.
Yeah, I guess that builds resilience. What would you consider resilience to be? How do you define that? What does it mean to you?
I would connect resilience to intelligence and to adaptation. So you're intelligent if you're able to adapt to any circumstances. For example the current crisis, yes, it's insane, the big war is happening and probably it's some sort of worldwide war, we'll know it in few, hopefully it will end soon. At the same time AI, as you can see, the speed of development is so fast, so you need to adapt even faster, you need to compete with more people, more and more people are available in the market everyday. Yes, more students and there's smart people around and you still need to compete, you need to earn your money. So I would say resilience is adaptation and intelligence at the same time.
I like that definition.
Yeah, I really like that. That's the first time someone has said that, in that way, put it in that way and I really appreciate that. I think your perspective is a little different and very interesting and especially you mentioned students, right, and kids coming out of school now. I know, I have children, they're 10 and 14 and they adopt all technology as soon as it's out, they're interested, they're checking it out, they're using it. And it's different than older generations that are a little hesitant to try it out. And that's going to be the difference in the next few years when these kids graduate. Or even if they go to university, some may not, they might be able to learn through that new AI technology faster than us having to go back and learn it, they're learning it already and they're gonna be able to adopt it really quickly, and build all kinds of new new things in the near future. So any advice for young people? What you might suggest that there's a young person interested in entrepreneurship? What would you tell them?
Newsflash young people don't listen to advice but go ahead, share it anyway Slava!
That’s true, but I’m always hopeful. they don’t listen to me but they might listen to others.
Yeah so definitely based on my experience, what I missed and now analyse in my life path, I would suggest probably go to a bigger company, maybe a corporation, work there for a few years, get all those processes so you understand the structure and start your business.
But I understand when you’re an entrepreneur sometimes it's hard to even think about working for someone because you want to scale, you want to sell, you want to do the strategy, and it's so romantic and fascinating. But probably, if it's possible, try to work in a company just to understand, to educate yourself on the structure, you don't learn, you don't study structures, processes, human relations in the university, you can study it but it's more synthetic knowledge, it's always better to have some practical use of it. So definitely, it would be now much faster if I worked somewhere in a big company, not start the business from the university.
It would have been faster for you, you're saying?
I believe so. Just a few years in a company to get around work culture because a lot of things I went through myself with my partner and the core team, some of us were never working in other companies. It was our first job and our first business. We made a lot of small, tiny mistakes which we could have avoided easily.
Or if you just get in and learn some systems, processes, how things work, because that's often what we forget, as the entrepreneur, we're not just building the thing, be it the service or the product, you actually have to be the HR manager and the accountant and which is stuff that…
The hardest part.
The hardest part!
All those operations.
Exactly. And it takes so long to figure these things out and you do. I know we've made our mistakes, too and it's part of the learning and part of the building. And I do think it is good advice to go work in the industry you're interested in and learn about it. In fact, I heard on a podcast today, Daniel Priestley, actually, who Vicki knows too, starting at a startup. So start working at somebody else's startup so that you're building alongside them making all the mistakes, but they're taking all the stress, and they’re paying for it, but you're learning because if you're in a huge corporation of 500 people, you might just be doing one particular job learning only that skill set, which can be useful, but nowhere near as useful as being the person with six hats trying to figure it all out at the same time. I mean, what you would learn in that type of environment is very different and exciting and crazy.
But not obligatory, you can start your business straight away if you feel that you're ready, just do it. Follow your dream.
Follow your dream, great advice. And I think it's those small mistakes. Yes, it takes us a little off track so that we have to come back but we learn from those, we build resilience, we don't do them again, hopefully. So it's all part of the journey really, isn't it? I think it was Steve Jobs who said you can only chart your path by looking back and then connecting the dots.
We don't know the future. Yes, we can only forecast it a little bit.
Precisely. So Slava, what's your number one book, podcast speaker or any other positive influence in your life?
I like reading about management, it's a lot of psychology in the side of management. Initially I started as an engineer, yes, so I was more thinking about technical structures and data and other stuff. But when you start working with people you realise that, okay, it's all about people and people they’re not machines, they're irrational, they follow their own path and you need to find a way to adapt them and motivate them. So you need to find a way to distinguish people based on their psychology. Yes, someone there are some people who are really good with other people, yes and they have this integration skill. There are some people who are really good in performance so they perform better. There are some people who are entrepreneurs, they like to sell, do the business, flaming things up. It's always good to have all of those people. The book is called The Ideal Executive. He's explaining what the ideal manager looks like and he distinguished based on psychology, dividing people in four big groups. And if you balance those groups properly for your exact business, you have the ability to scale your company and make efficient processes and other stuff.
Yeah, okay, thanks for that. So great book recommendation. But can I just take you back to your comment where you said, if you're not scaling, then there's probably going to be trouble in the near future? Can you flesh that out a little bit for us? What you're thinking with that?
Sure. So it's extremely easy. So you have people inside your organisation, yes. Freelancers, workers, employees, whatever, but in any case, you invest in your people, you want them to be smarter, you want them to be better. But if you're not growing and those people are growing, they will just eventually, evolutionarily they will go out and find another job which will be able to satisfy their proficiency, how their expertise is. And that's why the business can only grow, it can not stagnate, maybe once you're a big corporation its different but I have less knowledge about that, to be honest. But while you're a small or mid sized company, it must be constant growth, because your people are growing. And if you're not growing, you're gonna lose good people. If you lose good people, you may even lose the business, because business is for people, by people. Yes, it's a simple formula.
Oh, that is such a good point that I haven't really heard talked about a lot. But it really is key, isn't it to develop that team. But then you, as the entrepreneur need to focus on “How do you keep it growing?” How do you keep it evolving and scaling so that you keep those good people because they're going to want to be incentivised to keep getting better to upping their skills and levelling up the business so that you all move together. It's an incredible thing to build a team like that, and difficult but exciting in the same way. I love that. So final question. What is the best thing for you about being an entrepreneur? What is it that you truly love?
From time to time, I'm getting older, yes and I'm not so passionate as I used to be maybe, less active, more calmer person. At the same time, I still have this feeling when I was playing those games when I was younger kid, I was playing those strategic games and that feeling that you are growing, building, scaling, helping other people improve their lifestyle. That's what I like the best because as an entrepreneur, you can wake out during the night and get an idea like, Oh, my God, I got an idea, like you just note it and you discuss it with your team in the morning and it's a brilliant idea. The ability to make more artistic impact, I would say is the best part of being an entrepreneur.
Slava, you've mentioned a couple of times about the crisis, we've talked very briefly about the war in Ukraine. Can we ask you personally where you are with all of that, and how do you feel with what's going on. You have an incredible leader in that country, obviously you're not in that country which is probably a really good thing, is there anything you wanted to share with us on that?
When I think about the company, the business, the past, the history, I always like to think about the crisis. Our company survived a few crisis, pretty big ones like Coronavirus, the lockdown, we shaped our business differently, we went from offices to remote work and never came back, which is so much good. We're more resilient now to anything, when you have people in different countries it's really hard to destroy the structure. At the same time, the crisis, we all see the war yes, it's terrible and the worst thing that in the long term it affects the economy because countries are more concentrated on military appliances and military businesses and helping people. It's definitely an evolution for everyone, we see that weapons systems are improving and even medical systems are improving and other things. But still, it's a huge gap and the whole world concentrated only on one location, one problem let's say. It's not like the Second World War, where every country was involved, physically fighting, but I believe it's kind of that crisis, where everyone economically at least is involved and the world is separated into two camps which is not good. It’s not about politics again, it's more about the economy, influence on the crisis and now we see that the whole IT sector went down by probably around 15 to 20% around the world yes. Less probably money for startups, less money just for comfort, I would say people spend more for surviving. So that's the problem and many businesses will probably not survive this year. We all hope that it will get better the next one, because this one looks like a very hungry year let’s say, for everyone on the market. But I'm really not sure that it will be ended next year with President elections in America and other big events, I'm not sure it will end. And we'll see how companies react, they optimise their people, they make their engineers, their production people more universal so they can, one person can do more jobs, be more efficient. I would say in general, if you're a good performer as a businessman, or as a developer, or any other work, if you're really good in it, you'll have the job, you'll find your clients, you will find your market. If you're not good at something you still need to study or you don't want to study, you're in trouble, there's a good chance you'll lose your job. You’ll need to rethink, you know, your motivation.
Yeah, that's very insightful and it's a rare opportunity for us to be able to talk to somebody who knows the inside of Ukraine and has lived it and you have such a hopeful, global perspective on what's happening. And it's quite matter of fact and I really appreciate that and so thank you for sharing those personal insights with us and with our audience. And on a business front, we appreciate you being on Resilient Entrepreneurs. You are published in Forbes, in Entrepreneur, you profusely share your insights, so thank you for being on this podcast also.
Thank you for the opportunity to share the knowledge. I'm always grateful for people doing that, it's not so easy.
Yeah. We wish you the best as you continue to grow in Germany.
Thank you, a new market awaits.
Wonderful. Best of luck with it all, see you again.
Thank you so much.
