Introduction

I had coded my first startup project on the ten-hour flight Frankfurt - Johannesburg back in 2004 while working for Microsoft as a Global Alliances Manager. It had become quite popular, hadn’t made me a dime, and died miserably once Yandex, a Russian Google competitor, launched a competing product.

Since then, in various executive roles, I had helped to 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, a space satellite manufacturer, a burger chain with a franchising program, a game studio, a fashion retail stores automation company, and a bunch 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.

Throughout this journey, I have learned a lot about what it means to build a great company from scratch. There are no silver bullets, mind you, no simple recipes. It is all about this unique combination of the 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. As Andrei Baronov, Veeam co-founder and “Steve Jobs of infrastructure software,” used to say – “You know what they say in Silicon Valley, that the best product doesn’t always win? Well, guess what – best product never wins without the best sales, marketing, and operations!”

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

I won’t be talking much, or at all, about the product. There are countless good books and resources that focus on how to design and build a great product. However, the same cannot be said about a detailed discussion of the operations and business processes in a growing company.

Hence, I focus more on the principles on which a truly great company is built, and the principles of organization of the company operations. These principles should age well, as they are based on basic human psychology and behaviors, as well as the best practices of experimental testing of the processes you want to implement in your company. The tools may and will change, but if you learn these principles and practice them, you will have no issue applying what you have learned in the new circumstances.

I hope you will find this book useful on your journey towards turning your passion into a great company!

How this book is structured

TBD: description of the book structure and some comments on each chapter. E.g., make a mention that the concepts in this book are quite timeless, tools may change, but the concepts remain.