In various executive roles, I helped build Veeam Software from pretty much zero to over $600 million in annual revenue in under eight years, which resulted in the company being acquired by Insight Venture Partners for $5 billion. By 2017, Veeam had become too big for my taste. I made an exit and invested in about twenty startups as an angel investor. Among them were a space satellite manufacturer, a burger chain with a franchising program, a game studio, a fashion retail stores automation company, and many of my favorite AI and deep tech startups. I have helped them and many others, which I’ve advised without being an investor, to scale globally.

I have learned a lot about what it means to build a great company from scratch throughout this journey. There are no silver bullets, mind you, no simple recipes. It is all about this unique combination of passion and the desire to change the world with an efficient end-to-end revenue generation process, dull day-to-day operations, regularly tested, and improved.

I tried to capture and describe this balance in this book through stories, cases, anecdotes, and a pretty detailed operating manual on setting up your company and business processes from the practical point of view.