January 11, 2022 • 47 mins
I lead the Mobility and Energy Transition practice with a focus on all things EV, Autonomy, and Energy Infrastructure.
Drake Star Partners is a global investment banking firm serving the technology, media and communications sectors (TMC) with offices in New York, London, Paris, Munich, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Berlin, Geneva, and partners offices in Singapore and Dubai. The firm focuses on M&A and corporate finance for its clients worldwide. Drake Star Partners has completed over 400 transactions since 2004, 70% of which are cross-border.
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Episode Transcript
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Intro/Outro (00:00):
Welcome to the learner.co show hosted by Kevin horic and his fellow learner co-founders listen in is groundbreaking leaders discuss what they've learned, discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research articles, and lessons that shaped their journey to listen to past episodes and find links to all sources of learning mentioned. Visit learner.co that's learner with two L's dot co.
Kevin Horek (00:26):
Welcome back to the learner.co show. Today we have Vitaly Golem. He's a partner at Drake star in the San Francisco office, and he leads the global mobility and energy transition team. Greg and John, what are you guys looking forward to hearing from Vitaly today?
Jon Larson (00:43):
Yeah, I'm really interested in our interview with Vitaly he's an investor, he's been an entrepreneur and he's also a podcast host and an author. I'm interested to hear what he has to say on various topics.
Gregg Oldring (00:59):
Yeah, I think this is going to be pretty cool because Vitaly is one of those people who is a truly a lifelong learner. He has started from the bottom and worked his way up in a really indirect path. I think those kinds of stories are super inspiring and super interesting. And so I'm ready to dive in. Very cool.
Kevin Horek (01:18):
All right. On with the show, Vitaly, welcome to the show.
Vitaly Golomb (01:22):
Thanks for having me, Kevin. Yeah, I'm.
Kevin Horek (01:23):
Excited to have you and talk to you again. I think what you are doing in the startup entrepreneur electric vehicle mobility space is actually really innovative and cool, but maybe before we get into that, let's get to know you better and start off with where you grew up.
Vitaly Golomb (01:43):
So I was born in ADESA Ukraine. It was Soviet union then, and my family immigrated to Silicon valley San Francisco first. And then I grew up in Cupertino. I've been here since the age of eight in California.
Kevin Horek (01:56):
Very cool. You went to university and actually you have quite an extensive education. Do you want to maybe give us a quick overview of that?
Vitaly Golomb (02:06):
So I was a young self-taught designer. I was, I was in a band when I was a teenager and I design all of our flyers and all of our advertising. And that's how I learned Photoshop illustrator. I, I, I, I faked it till I made it. I showed up at Kinko's ended up being hired as a designer at 15. And that's awesome. I was the youngest employee of Kinko's before it was bought by FedEx back in the day. And I really got started with that. By the time I was 18, I was a just out of high school. I was working full time. The dot-com days running a team that was, everybody was about average twice as old as I was. I had no idea, a little mustache going on. At the same time, to please my mother, I finished my degree in computer and video imaging with a minor in digital audio.
(02:55):
That's kind of where it all started, but I really learned business by running companies for couple of decades now.
Kevin Horek (03:01):
Very cool. Walk us through your career, maybe some highlights along the way to what you're up till now.
Vitaly Golomb (03:12):
I like to call myself the Benjamin button of investment banking. All right. What that means is usually you have people that, they'll start investment banking right out of business school. Then, a decade later they'll learn kind of do deals and start leading transactions. Whereas I, as I just told you started as a designer, as an entrepreneur, I always had that bug in me that I probably got from my father, who was always a tinkerer and inventor and engineer who, became an entrepreneur. And, I kind of went through that whole process and, one thing led to another and, I learned business and I started my own companies. I B I started advising funds and startups later when I learned the hard way, everything that I know wrote a book that came out a few years ago, that's now used by accelerators in business as a textbook.
(04:07):
I actually joined HB after the company split into HP Inc and Hewlett Packard enterprise to help launch the corporate venture arm of HP tech ventures. That's really the corporate venture arm, Silicon Valley's original startup. That's when I got an opportunity to that. That was really the first time I worked in a large company in an enterprise in fortune 100 company. My career learned a lot there about, bureaucracy and in corporate politics and then took off and started my own with a partner starter, then a small investment bank. My practicing mobility grew quite substantially. I decided to last year emergency practice with Drake star, which is, a leading, number one cross-border investment bank and us and Europe.
Kevin Horek (04:52):
Very cool. So what exactly does Drake star do?
Vitaly Golomb (04:56):
Investment banking is quite different than investing, right? They both have the word investing in them, but investment banking, think of us as advisors to companies retain investment bankers to do more of a complex financial transaction. It could be a later stage capital raise where it's much more formal. Whereas, an early stage startups you're talking about, two guys, a dog and an idea, and you're really evaluating the team when you're talking about growth, capital 50 million, a hundred million plus type of raises. It's a much more formal process and you need advisors to help you with that. Of course, I'm an a, if the company wants to sell itself, or if it's a large company looking to buy a startup or a peer, or do some other more complex transaction, that's where we come in as advisors. Got it.
Kevin Horek (05:41):
Okay. You guys have done a bunch of really interesting stuff in the autonomy, electrical vehicle space. Do you want to talk about that and what you're kind of seeing and maybe some trends that you're, you've been seeing or things that are coming in this space?
Vitaly Golomb (05:57):
Yeah, absolutely. We, as a firm, we've done over 50 transactions in the mobility and energy transition category. What that means is, everything electric, autonomous shared and connected also the energy transition. That's, that's what we call charging networks and all that infrastructure that needs to go in to support these future electric vehicles and beyond, hydrogen, et cetera. We've done some real interesting transactions and I can talk about some of my favorite clients in the past. I advise a little company from Croatia called Remax Automobili okay. Mispronounced. It is now the company that owns or runs Bugatti in partnership with Porsche. I've been in the mobility space since, before it was cool right now, it's the last couple of years, electric vehicles have become kind of a foregone conclusion and everybody's will die. We have to invest in these great companies, but I can tell as short time back as maybe three years ago, it was very difficult to fund these companies because they have very high capital requirements and it takes billions of dollars to start a new car company with Remax.
(07:05):
We, I got to know the team. I met them first when they were eight crazy kids in Croatia in 2012, and they built a prototype, duct tape and toothpicks. They built the first electric HyperCard. That's awesome. Then, by the time I got really involved with the team and I'm still good friends with all of them in 2015, the company was a couple of hundred people and went out and raised the first, really substantial round. That's when Porsche came in later and they got set on a trajectory they're on now, very cool company, all over, just this month, Robert report wired covers, very hot now, but quite different. I, on my podcast interview with Matera rematch CEO, and we're just kind of laughing about how difficult it was now, then, and how much everybody wants a piece of them. Now, the other one, that's really interesting that I've been working with for several years now.
(07:59):
You'll probably hear some news on at some point soon is Hyperloop, TT, Hyperloop transportation technologies. This was the first company organized to commercialize the Hyperloop concept back in 2013, about six weeks after that famous white paper came out and they ended up completely redoing that technology, doing something brand new there and from scratch. It took them about six, seven years to build the technology stack. Most people don't realize, Hyperloop is not this like a hundred year from now concept, but it's very likely you'll be able to buy a ticket and right in about two, three years,
Kevin Horek (08:35):
I think that's awesome personally. Like I, like I would, I'm tempted would fly wherever that starts happening and just go ride the thing. Like, I think that's probably one of the coolest maybe inventions of my lifetime. Maybe, I don't know if people would agree with that or not, but like it seems like such a cool technology.
Vitaly Golomb (08:54):
Yeah. I would say that, this is the biggest thing to come into transportation since the invention of commercial flight in the thirties. Wow. It's a really big deal. I'll give you an example why, well, first of all, the entire system is covered in foldable takes. It's actually net positive on the energy. It generates more energy than it uses. That's great. So that's a big deal. You have the fact that it's going to be city center to city center, right? It's on the ground at airplane speeds at full speed. It's actually faster than commercial air flight because it's at the speed of sound and you can't break the speed of sound with an airplane because you're gonna have a Sonic boom over the entirety of the path, right? That's right. We have the old, what's it called the old plane, the cross Atlantic, oh, the Concord, there we go.
(09:46):
One of those things, it doesn't get leaves your mind and you can't find the word, but the Concord, the reason it could only fly that limited path is because you have the Sonic boom, the, very loud, but you're talking about city center to city center, something like San Francisco to LA San Francisco downtown to LA downtown in something like 30, 40 minutes. Yeah. Which is crazy. Right. If I wanted to fly, from San Francisco bay area to LA the flight short it's under an hour, but for me to drive to the airport for me to go through security for me to take the flight, whatever delays, et cetera, you have to load 150 people on the plane. And then you fly to whatever. You sit there, sit around, waiting for an Uber to get to where you're going door to door. It's, at least four hours really shout words, we're talking about 30 minutes.
(10:32):
So, I mean, that's going to change things fundamentally because you're going to have people that will be able to commute. Really, you know, we have urban sprawl. I was talking to somebody earlier today. With urban small, we won't be able to get rid of these two car households that the us has kind of spawned from the 1950s because we have, most people live in the suburbs, but we, with Hyperloop those type of transportation modes, we're going to be able to live even further. You're going to be able to commute. You're going to be able to live in completely different metropolitan area and commute to work in a completely different city. Right. New York to Boston, or what have you in New York to Washington. That's going to open up the world in a new way. And, and everything else is changing too. I mean, we're going to have a really interesting things happening in aviation.
(11:16):
Probably about 10 years from now, things move really slow in aviation, but it's really exciting time to be in this sector. Just to know what's coming down the pipe and how the world's going to change. Sure. Could you, in theory, put a Hyperloop, like cross continent or like under the ocean somewhere? Or is it just not the technology is not really there. It's not really, it doesn't make really any sense to do it like that. That's technology is there, but it's not really practical. Right? Because you start looking at cost per mile. If you put the tubes at the bottom of the ocean, the problem is that, right now, the way it's designed for safety is that there's a escape hatch, right. So often, right. You can depressurize and escape. If this thing is at the bottom of the ocean is not going to work.
(11:55):
Yeah. You can go for short, relatively short distances. It can go under water in the lake. It can go through a tunnel through a mountain, but mostly it will be on stilts above the surface.
Kevin Horek (12:08):
Got it. Nope. That makes sense. I'm curious to dive deeper into the book because it's been very successful, but do you want to elaborate what exactly is in the book? What's it called and what made you actually decide to write it?
Vitaly Golomb (12:24):
Yeah. The book is called accelerated startup and very purposefully, it's called accelerated started because I, I, I traveled around the world and I've given a lot of speeches and workshops and worked with a lot of founders. Everybody has a different accent and the same problems. These first couple of years for startup founders, especially the first time are really confusing, stressful time. Sure. It could be a, somebody very young, a teenager that wants to do a startup and, like shark tank or it could be somebody who just graduated college with technical degree. It could be somebody switching mid career from the corporate world. Startups are really a, a pressure cooker and a different kind of environment, no matter what you've done before. Nobody can really prepare you for it, where you're going in. It's closer to a science experiment than building a business. I wrote the book because I couldn't find any books that kind of took the whole journey with the founder.
(13:21):
There are lots of books on, how to raise capital, how to do how to build products and test user testing and what have you all the different bits and pieces. The idea was kind of this one continuum from idea to product, to company and what to do and what to emphasize on where to invest your time and where to not waste time. It's a book that's used by a number of accelerators and business schools as a textbook. It's not laid out like a textbook per se, but it's really instructive and it's in order of how the journey really goes.
Kevin Horek (13:54):
Interesting. One of the things that you cover in the book that I get asked a lot of times, or I think it's really hard to find is like any advice for finding a co-founder and, or building out your team.
Vitaly Golomb (14:08):
That's a very important thing, right? Building a team and finding co-founders that's probably, you can argue at the early stages, it's probably the most important thing because it's unlikely that you will stumble onto an idea. That's, that's going to be, this genius idea that struck you in the shower and then you built it and everybody loves it and great, totally. It really doesn't work that way. You have to iterate and you're going to be, iteration number 40, but who's in the trenches with you and their creativity and knowledge to balance out your knowledge. You might be a creative or business person. You, then you need somebody that's more technical or vice versa. You really need to find people that you can work well with together. When I was on the other side of the table as a VC, I was looking at those team dynamics, especially at the early stages.
(14:52):
You're looking at dynamics to make sure that the team has worked together before. It's very difficult to find that match if it's two or three, co-founders where everybody has the same energy level, the right type of knowledge. They, they think about problems the same way they think about stress, the same way. That's a very tricky thing. I do go into that in detail in the book on, and it's actually a kind of first section of the book that you're looking at, kind of building the team and why it's important, what to look for.
Kevin Horek (15:22):
Very cool. Any advice for getting into any of the accelerator programs? I know you cover getting the top accelerators, but I think just getting into one can be tricky.
Vitaly Golomb (15:32):
Yeah. I mean, with accelerators, I would say it's a, there are a lot of different kinds of XR just like universities, right? The first ones were Y Combinator and Techstars, I think officially first. There's this kind of top tier the Ivy leagues of the accelerators, where if you get in there, they have a well-rehearsed program that will set you up pretty well for success. There are hundreds of other accelerators that will emphasize different things. It could be of a blind leading the blind. My advice is, I mean, certainly if you can get into Y Combinator or Techstars or 500 startups or 500 global, they call themselves now, any of these top tier programs, you'll be well on your way. You'll be surrounded by experienced people that are going to give you kind of, they're going to help you fill the knowledge gaps that you have.
(16:22):
For most people, if they're going to go through an accelerator by definition, it'll be kind of a lower tier program. What I like to emphasize is it's very important. They're going to do their diligence on you. They're going to interview you and ask you should be doing the same thing. You should be talking to founders of startups that went through their programs in previous cohorts. You should ask them if they got what they were expecting out of it. If the support was there, if it was valuable and make sure it's also matched. If you're, I have a company that I advise, that's an aviation, that's working on hydrogen technology and they were invited into an accelerator because it's a woman led startup, but the other companies, there are really software. So there's no support network for aviation. They realized that really that's not the right match for them, for example.
(17:09):
It's really important to find that match and make sure that you're not just going through the motions, but if you're going to invest three to six months of your life, give away a bunch of equity that you're getting the right type of help that you need. No,
Kevin Horek (17:19):
I actually think that's really great advice. And, and some of those accelerators can actually help you get funding customers. If people maybe don't go that right route, do you have any advice for people to get their first customers and maybe some publicity around their startup?
Vitaly Golomb (17:39):
I customers are easy, right? Because you should be working on something that you already understand, or at least did some research. It's not just, you're not, I like to say if you go on stage or some kind of pitch competition, and you don't really know your industry and investors in the audience, know it better start asking you technical questions that you can't answer your sunk. You do need to know what you're talking about and where you're going. I would always say, chase customers, not investors. You'll know when it's working, when we need to raise money, a lot of startup founders get obsessed with, let me go out and pitch and start raising money. But, it's kind of the opposite what you should be doing, because if the business is working, go forget that you're trying to build a business. You're trying to prove out a thesis and say, there's money here.
(18:22):
If that's working, the investors will come to you, right. You will get noticed. Publicity, you also have several different audiences that you're playing, right? First of all, you do want to get kind of the echo chamber publicity. If you're trying to go raise money, if you're trying to attract great engineers, you do need to build your profile in the startup community. Again, you have also your customers, which will likely not be the startup community, unless you're making a startup for startups, right? You want to have a public face and you want to understand how to reach your potential customers, what they want to hear and what the language, what language they speak. I built a startup in the printing industry. They don't speak startup. They speak printing industry on the, my average customer was a 57 year old white male with a high school education.
(19:07):
That was my customer profile in the U S so completely different posture on the marketing side. No,
Kevin Horek (19:12):
That, that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious, obviously you wrote this book and, I think it's a very good resource and a bunch of accelerators and universities and stuff are actually using it in their curriculum. There any other books that you would recommend or you've found very useful along your journey?
Vitaly Golomb (19:32):
Yeah, I have. I mean more recently, I, I, I read about a book a week, audio books or what have you, and try to really sponge it up. That's awesome. Probably about 80% non-fiction, but I like to mix in some biographies and some fiction here and there that just to cleanse the palate, but I would recommend, and I found myself recommending recently, Reid Hoffman's blitz scaling and masters of scale. Great books, there's a lot of startup books out there that don't, that are very difficult to relate to because these are like multi-billion dollar successes. There's a lot of books that are difficult to relate to because they are characterizing an experience that most people won't have. When you talk about books like scaling or founders at work, which is older, Jessica Livingston wrote that she was a co-founder with her husband of Y Combinator. You have these real stories and you understand kind of behind the scenes, it's almost biographical of what they went through.
(20:34):
That's a really great way to learn from their experience.
Kevin Horek (20:38):
Interesting. You've also working on a course called pitching, like a boss. Do you want to talk about that? What are you covering in that course?
Vitaly Golomb (20:50):
Yeah. Sometime next year, we're going to launch it this fall, but we ended up pushing it out because it's been a very busy year in my day job with the MNA world. Right. The course is really it's, it comes off the book and also a workshop that I've been doing for many years. I, and I've taught this to, I don't know, thousands of founders, but it's really a systematic way of laying out and building the story arc of your pitch, to be able to explain the most complex business in a very short period of time and get people's attention and get them to do what you want them to do with that call to action. We're going to launch a cohort based online course, which is going to be about five weeks, several different modules, where somebody should be able to go through this material and not just watch a YouTube video or get a sample deck out there, but really go through the process in the realistic amount of time that it does take to build a solid pitch and really think through all the different parts, which would also help them think through their startup idea.
(21:46):
Presumably, if they're just starting on their pitch, they're very early. As you go through each section, you will start thinking much more about each section and that will help you formulate the business idea more.
Kevin Horek (22:00):
Very cool. Do you maybe want to dive into some of the topics that you're going to cover?
Vitaly Golomb (22:06):
Yeah. I mean, one of the most important things, and it's more of like a lens to think about your business, your startup through is something that my friend and mentor and former investor Dave McClure taught me, which is the customer problem framework. Who's your customer and what is the problem you're trying to solve for them? There there's a concept out there that's kind of a more business academic concept of jobs to be done that was studied at Harvard business school, et cetera. It's a really good way of thinking about your product because you have a customer that's hiring your product to solve a particular problem. Oftentimes you have people who are very technical, they will come up with some invention, and then they're going to try to shoehorn it into a business. It's much easier to find a success. If you look for a market problem that you can then build a solution for, right.
(22:54):
That's really all, most software is sure. And, and that's really the right way to think about it, but that's really where we start with the scores is going to thinking through that whole framework and how you're going to position them through that lens, your entire business. There's of course, things like body language, we've covered that as well. That's very important. Nonverbal communication is most of what people perceive when we speak to each other. We don't have video right now, but I am making hand gestures because it's just a habit. And, those kinds of things are very important. Also how to talk about financials, how to talk about the team, when's the right time to bring up these different themes that are very important to kind of frame the business and really get that point across. But really it's an arc, right? You're trying to build context throughout the entire process, whether it's a 32nd, verbal elevator pitch, or if it's a three to five minute pitch on stage at a startup competition, or that accelerator demo day, you're building context, and you want them at the end to understand what is it that you're doing?
(23:54):
Why is it you're doing it? How big is the market? Is it really working? What kind of, what stage are you really at and really get excited about it to talk to you more about it?
Kevin Horek (24:04):
Nope. It makes a lot of sense. Any advice or tips for pitching remotely? I think a lot of people are probably doing that at this point right now.
Vitaly Golomb (24:12):
Yeah. I mean that's actually also kind of a bonus section that we're covering, considering that so much of that happens online these days, who knows how long that's going to continue. I suspect some form will continue for a very long time or forever, but yeah, I mean, it's really important to be able to get that body language across of non verbal communication. Even though you're talking to a little camera and you see people on the screen, so standing up and presenting for a lot of people, moving around, gets their brain flowing in a different way. I know for me, that works. When I'm on stage, I, I walk around and use that energy to kind of feed what I'm talking about. And, it's very different when you're sitting down. I recommend, anybody listening, stand up and, pick something that you heard about a piece of news that you heard about this morning and start just talking about it versus sitting down, doing the same thing.
(25:06):
You'll find that your brain works in a different way. So that's important. Also, dressing up and, even though you might be sitting in pajamas five minutes before at home in front of your computer, you should really dress up and take it seriously. People do, whatever little window they see on screen, they will make a judgment call based on your body language, how you look, how you present yourself, your tone of voice, et cetera, very important that you pay extra attention to that because it's such a small little narrow door that you're talking to and they see such a small portion of what you really are like.
Kevin Horek (25:40):
Interesting. I I'm sure the behavioral economic stuff that you study in the past plays into all of this that we've talked about so far, but is there any other things that you've learned from that or other experiences that you see entrepreneurs do all the time that you'd maybe say, like, keep doing that or on the flip side of that stuff, you're like, you guys really need to stop doing that.
Vitaly Golomb (26:07):
Yeah. I mean, the science of behavioral economics is fascinating to me because, you have classical economics where, in the economics world, you'll have people be described as econs and humans econs are people who follow the rules, who don't have any emotions. And, largely communism and libertarianism are based on the expectation that people will react in a certain way or in a way that's economically beneficial to them. In reality, people react emotionally to everything and you can induce certain emotions. Unfortunately Facebook and Instagram know exactly what they're doing, and it's not an accident that they built in kind of these gambling mechanics into their applications, right? Adam Alter's book called irresistible is a fantastic read. I highly recommend that you turn on the screen-time functions for your kids, iPads and iPhones, and keep that to a minimum because it really does change the chemistry of the brain.
(27:10):
Behavioral economics is really important factor, especially when you're a product designer, you're trying to induce certain habits. Hopefully, you're not using this knowledge to evil for evil purposes, but you're trying to get the user or customer to do certain things that are good for them. And, and that's what you'll use behavioral economics for. That's really important, factor in a lot of consumer applications, but also in the way you present your business, the way you negotiate deals, you really have to think, you have to understand the human factors in all of this.
Kevin Horek (27:45):
Interesting. No, I think that's really good advice. So you also have a podcast. What made you decide to do the podcast? And what's it called in about.
Vitaly Golomb (27:56):
The podcast? Assault is called accelerated. I started during COVID because that was the thing to do. I, I actually interviewed lots of good friends and talked about very important topics. That was kind of, if you remember, the mood was very different total a year and a half ago. And, and we talked about both social aspects and we talked about business topics, but, and then kind of news of the day and discuss that. We launched a second season of accelerated this year, and we focused on the future of mobility. We're interviewed a number of leaders across the mobility space, Matira mats, Andres Dilley, own Hyperloop CEO, lots of other folks like that. Stefan Krauss, who used to be a CEO of canoe, former CFO BMW. Folks had just talk about kind of what's happening in mobility and hear it from the leaders who are in it, day in and day out.
(28:52):
And I've been in it for decades.
Kevin Horek (28:54):
Very cool. Any other podcasts that you listen to and recommend to our listeners as well?
Vitaly Golomb (29:02):
I'm a fan of Scott Galloway, so I listened to pivot and I listen to his podcast and then I kind of intermingled between podcasts and audio books. Okay. That's my listening diet. I would say, recently more on the audio books because I'm trying to really stick and do 52 books this year, one for every week.
Kevin Horek (29:22):
That's awesome. Any tips for basically finding what's next? Because I think that's challenging in itself. If you're reading that much content in a year,
Vitaly Golomb (29:33):
I mean, look, if your history and you're keeping track and looking at industries, you will get a better sense for what's down the road. For sure, with mobility. I mean, few things surprise me these days. I do know what's coming down the pipe. I do know that, I mean, the only thing that's surprised me is how gullible people are and think that autonomy is just around the corner and reality we're years away, but there are other things happening, there's a different battery chemistries that will make electric vehicles cheaper, faster charging, et cetera. There's hydrogen, that's coming into long distance freight via trucks into air, into aviation. There's really exciting, cool things coming down the road. And, if you study the industry and you keep in touch and you read the news and see what the companies are developing, those dots are going to come together.
(30:26):
We actually publish a quarterly update on mobility sector. Okay. The most interesting transactions, M and a deals funding, SPACs certainly spec transactions taking the companies public. We publish a big annual report. The last one was 160 pages just going kind of exhaustively through everything that's going on out there and who's doing what. Do you want to dive deeper into what you guys uncovered in that mobility report? Well, I mean, I, I touched on that . Autonomy is really much further away than most people expect a if they're not paying attention, but they're kind of seeing the tweets and what have you out there. And, and a lot of hype, there'll be disappointed, but the Gartner hype cycle is very much real. There's a lot of hype. There's kind of the trough of disillusionment. We come back with a more realistic expectations. The other part of it is we have really interesting second order effects happening with a lot of this, there's, in aviation, we're going to see a lot of things coming about, as I mentioned, that are very interesting.
(31:30):
We're going to see, Hyperloop out there in the next half decade that you'll be able to ride. There's all sorts of things happening in micro mobility, in electric charging, the infrastructure plan that's making its way through Congress, very painfully and slowly right now, that's gonna be a huge deal, right? Is, is to move our energy production to renewables more, to have the infrastructure that will for electric charging that will allow people to not be so worried about ranging society and actually go in and buy electric vehicles. All those things are really important. Two biggest factors in electric vehicles, for example, in adoption are government regulations and government incentives. Right? There you go with the, again with the behavioral economics, and the incentives are really that's where it comes from. It's from behavioral economics science to understand, okay, we're going to give you a tax deduction, or we're going to give you a credit or some other benefit that you can use for, to kind of tip the scales and they could get away from your internal combustion vehicle to electric vehicles.
Kevin Horek (32:38):
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. It's actually quite fascinating. I'm curious, is there anything that you've learned outside of business that you've been able to apply back into business? I think one of the best examples you gave is like, you taught yourself how to be a designer when you played in a band, and then you turned that into a job. There any other things like that in your life?
Vitaly Golomb (33:02):
I mean, honestly, I've changed my career technically several times within my career found myself, if you asked me 10 years ago, if I'd be an investment banker, I'd probably laugh, but, I got attracted to it because I like deal-making. That's where it's really about the soft skills, right? That, that you have. It's not so much on the technical financial side. I have a great team that will produce the valuations to the moon or financial modeling, whatever we need, but really the emphasis on being able to have that human connection and find a way to come together and find a win-win. That's really something that I learned by doing business. By, I never thought of myself as a sales person until I started building my own businesses and had to be the salesperson and then realize something that many entrepreneurs realize is that the best Salesforce is going to be the founder always, right.
(33:52):
You're not gonna be able to hire some magician. That's going to come and sell your product. That's not that you're not able to sell. That's something that, the salesmanship skill, this ability to explain complicated concepts, to anybody, to kind of break things down, all those things come together in the ability to get deals done and get people to come together.
Kevin Horek (34:11):
Interesting. You cover sales in the book in the course, but is there any advice you would give to people that are struggling with sales or how do they get into sales? Especially as a founder?
Vitaly Golomb (34:24):
Yeah. I mean, it, in sales, there are plenty of people that are a lot more technical about it than me, I would say, but, okay, you need to be organized, right. And you to understand your conversion ratio. If you're in business to business sales, right, you're selling, you're not just doing conversion on the website, but you're selling expensive things that take a personal touch, a human touch. You need to understand how to generate leads, where to find potential customers, how to qualify them, right. Are they really a potential customer? It's likely that you will only qualify for lucky 20, 25% of the potential customers out there. How do you take them through that journey to actually close them and get them to sign up and then get them to be happy and to bring their friends. Right. It's really active listening throughout the whole process.
(35:10):
It's not getting stuck on trying to educate your customer. If you find yourself, I've made this mistake before. If you find yourself trying to say, well, they just don't know what's good for them. And I need to educate the customer. You're probably in trouble. You're probably over-complicating things you really need to listen to your customers. They will tell you what they're willing to buy. That's probably my kind of generalized tips, but, there's certain ways of kind of doing this multi-tiered process where generate leads, qualify, leads, do the demo, and then work on whatever closing functions to get to the finish line.
Kevin Horek (35:45):
Interesting. There any tools you recommend for some of that stuff, because it seems like some of the stuff can be automated. Others have it, other parts of it, can't be,
Vitaly Golomb (35:55):
There's certainly tools out there that will help with the process, right? These days, I'm sure everybody listening has experienced this, where you go to a website and you'll give them your email to get a 10% discount. That's probably, you're going to probably regret that pretty quickly because every day you're going to get a reminder, email, this drip marketing that really works for consumers, but you don't want to necessarily automate, a really human driven process, the more expensive the product, the bigger, the decision, the more a human touch it usually needs. And, and you need to be able to respond to the customers and listen to them again, listen. They will tell you what they want. If somebody is really looking to get into a career of sale into a sales career, and they want the training go find a company that is known for a great sales organization and a great sales training program, all the best sales organizations have training programs to improve, however, talented somebody coming in the door.
(36:51):
You can always improve them with the experience with the frameworks, with the tools that they had developed internally.
Kevin Horek (36:57):
That that makes a lot of sense. You've been obviously on kind of all sides of the spectrum. There any other advice you would give to people, especially in the space that Drake stars in that basically it's long to develop these products and services, any advice to getting into the space and maybe getting investment? Okay.
Vitaly Golomb (37:21):
Yeah. I mean, just understand that if you're starting a startup and you're kind of making those decision, my advice is always really think about this idea that you're getting into. Right. I saw a funny meme the other day that somebody had, six different browsers open because they're picking out a sweater and then they just randomly pick their career. That's gonna, they're dedicating, years of the non-refundable lifetime and picking a trajectory in their life. If you're making the transition from, a corporate career or you're just out of college and you decide that you're in love with the startup thing, make sure that you spend at least some time researching what you're getting yourself into the industry, the opportunity, make sure that everything's aligned before you pull the trigger and go because you're dedicating your life. It's non-refundable lifetime. It takes a year to build any kind of prototype.
(38:10):
It takes two years to really figure out if anybody cares what you build. It takes, if you're successful, it's going to take, three to five years of your life. Well, if you're not successful, it may take three to five years of your life. If you're successful, it's going to take even longer. All of a sudden you start at 22, you're gonna turn around and be like, oh, wow, I'm 30. What do I have to show for this? For these last eight years that I've been working? You know, maybe mom was right. Maybe I should just go get a nice job, a good job. So very important. My advice is just really be careful and really present of mind when you're thinking about that, you're going to dive into this kind of new career.
Kevin Horek (38:46):
Interesting. What are your thoughts on pushing through and how have you in the past, or how do you help the companies you've worked with in the past push through the low points? Because that can be really challenging to not give up at any point during that three, five plus years that you're grinding it out.
Vitaly Golomb (39:05):
Yeah. You will find that every successful founder will tell you that the number one trait that is kind of consistent throughout is perseverance. It's, it's very rare for something just to be like up into the right, you tap right into the vein of whatever you're trying to do. It's, overnight success, usually overnight successes are years and years in the making. Sure. They're usually a lot of, you're going to get more nos than yeses. You're going to get a lot of setbacks. You need to be able to persevere through that. At the same time, you also need to know, it's a really fine line between pushing through the naysayers and being counterintuitive or the biggest companies. The biggest, most successful companies were kind of counterintuitive ideas to begin with. That's why they were the only game in town, but you also have to be counterintuitive and right.
(39:54):
Beating your head against a wall for years. The market's telling you, this is stupid and you're getting no traction. You also need to know when to quit and when to save that non-refundable lifetime and go do your next idea.
Kevin Horek (40:07):
Interesting. It's also interesting that you said go to your next idea, because I think some people just can't like they're willing to pivot until they hopefully hit something and become successful, right?
Vitaly Golomb (40:21):
Yeah. I mean, you can, oftentimes you can pivot your idea into success. Most times, you will have 40, 50 different iterations. Until you get this from go from this raw concept and DCIS to a final product that has happy customers, you're going to be iterating a lot of the nuance there, but sometimes you get into a business that's for example, shrinking, right? If that whole industry is huge, but it's shrinking, that means that you have to, for every customer you're going to get, you have to fight a more established company with a brand, with trust, with money, and you have to take customers away from them. If you're getting into a fast growing industry, and this is why VCs will track trends, that's growing 50% a year on its own. You have an equal chance or better than the equal chance with a large established business that was doing it the old way per se, to get those customers.
(41:15):
It's really important to understand what sandbox you're playing in. If you're really beating your head against the wall, or there's some opportunity there that you're chasing and you will figure out a way to.
Kevin Horek (41:26):
Interesting, any advice or thoughts around sticking with your kind of roadmap compared to feature requests from current customers and requests from potential customers,
Vitaly Golomb (41:41):
I would say, yeah, this is actually a really interesting quicksand kind of situation. If you listen to your customers too much, you're going to become a services company. They're gonna become a consulting company. You're gonna customize for every customer. You do need to synthesize the feedback from multiple customers and see which direction you should be taking, but you should be thinking about every feature and not just for that one particular customer. Oh, well, if we do this, every sales guy is going to come to you and say, Hey, if we add this feature, I'm going to sign up this customer and you have to resist that urge because that's going to set you back. You need to have a clear path that you're going on and consider this feedback in the next iteration. You have to have a product roadmap that's really independent of any one particular customer.
(42:22):
It should be kind of a good idea for everybody. There's a really good story in a masters of scale, actually we'd offer the book with the team from Airbnb. By the way, this one, I really recommend as an audio book because they record the interviews with the founders. You get to hear their voice rather than somebody reading it. And, and they talk about, they went and they took photos, they offered photography. They, they realized that professional photos were blocker for a lot of their early hosts. They went and offered to do that. It was actually the founding team going out there on location and shooting those pictures of those hosts. While they were there, they were asking him, Hey, is there anything that we can improve in a system? They have one guy that, very early hosts that gave them like a long list of a document of how to improve the product.
(43:09):
First of all, they realized that they were onto something. If they have so much passion in somebody in their community, customer or vendor, however, you want to think about a host, but also they took that feedback and they synthesize it with others feedback too, to figure out, okay, which direction should we push this? That's really, that's really kind of the right way to think about it is you kind of, you listen to your customers while you synthesize the feedback. You don't become a consulting company because otherwise it's going to completely slow you down. Sure.
Kevin Horek (43:37):
Well, and it also makes it really hard to raise more money around, right. And keep up your product.
Vitaly Golomb (43:42):
Yeah. I would agree with you. It's very difficult to fund the, if you're saying, oh, well, we're getting all the services, revenue we're customizing for every customer. We're 80% of our revenue is from, hourly fees. Well, congratulations, you start a consulting company and no VCs are going to fund that on the other hand, you have to balance it with this idea that at first you're going to be doing a lot of things manually, right. To make sure that's the right approach, that's the right model. You're going to automate those things with time. It's a balance of, okay, am I doing this repetitive thing in my onboarding customers in a certain way, or doing certain things that we're doing manually well. Okay, great. That's, we figure out that's the way to do it. That means let's start automating that and reducing the cost of that particular function or process within our product.
Kevin Horek (44:30):
No, I, that makes a lot of sense, but we're kind of coming to the end of the show. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about Drake star, the book, the course, the podcast, and any other links you want to mention?
Vitaly Golomb (44:45):
Sure, sure. You can learn about Drake star.com. You can find lots of content from us on LinkedIn on Twitter. You can find me on my personal website, golem.net. And that really covers pretty much everything. Everything that I do, the book is on Amazon. It's called accelerated startup. There's an audio book. There's a hardcover softcover whatever flavor ebook as well that you like. And, and it's translated into a couple of different languages, although you probably won't find those on Amazon.
Kevin Horek (45:16):
Very cool. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time into your day to be on the show. I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good,
Vitaly Golomb (45:23):
Thanks, Kevin. Always a pleasure to be at your shows. Perfect.
Kevin Horek (45:26):
Thank you. Okay. Bye. Well, John and Greg, what did you guys think of that.
Gregg Oldring (45:31):
Metallic delivered? That was awesome. It was difficult. I've got some definite books to add to my reading list after this, the, what was it? Jessica Livingston founders at work. That was it. No, as he was talking about behavioral economics, which I was super excited that he was into Bayview, behavioral economics. Cause I love that stuff, but talking also then about like how, Facebook and the social media sites out there. They, they know so much of what we're what's in our mind and our emotions around that. Adam Alter's book, your resistible seems like such an interesting read. So yeah. I want to grab that one and dive in John, you.
Jon Larson (46:21):
Great wide range you'd interview that did not disappoint. Like you said, behavioral economics, and then his views on how mobility will change. That was fascinating. How as new technologies and mobility come up, it's going to change where we live, where we work, how we look at every, the way we set up cities on that fast.
Gregg Oldring (46:45):
It might not do any pitches in my pajamas anymore. That's another thing, another good takeaway.
Jon Larson (46:51):
I'm also going to check out his podcast, the accelerated podcast. I for.
Gregg Oldring (46:56):
Sure.
Kevin Horek (46:57):
Very cool. Well, thanks for listening and check us out next week.
Intro/Outro (47:04):
Thank you for tuning in to the learner.co show. If you're looking to be a guest, try out our app or want to get in touch, please visit learner with two L's at www.llearner.co. The music for the show is by electric mantra. Thanks for listening and keep on learning.
Welcome to the learner.co show hosted by Kevin horic and his fellow learner co-founders listen in is groundbreaking leaders discuss what they've learned, discover the books, podcasts, presentations, courses, research articles, and lessons that shaped their journey to listen to past episodes and find links to all sources of learning mentioned. Visit learner.co that's learner with two L's dot co.
Kevin Horek (00:26):
Welcome back to the learner.co show. Today we have Vitaly Golem. He's a partner at Drake star in the San Francisco office, and he leads the global mobility and energy transition team. Greg and John, what are you guys looking forward to hearing from Vitaly today?
Jon Larson (00:43):
Yeah, I'm really interested in our interview with Vitaly he's an investor, he's been an entrepreneur and he's also a podcast host and an author. I'm interested to hear what he has to say on various topics.
Gregg Oldring (00:59):
Yeah, I think this is going to be pretty cool because Vitaly is one of those people who is a truly a lifelong learner. He has started from the bottom and worked his way up in a really indirect path. I think those kinds of stories are super inspiring and super interesting. And so I'm ready to dive in. Very cool.
Kevin Horek (01:18):
All right. On with the show, Vitaly, welcome to the show.
Vitaly Golomb (01:22):
Thanks for having me, Kevin. Yeah, I'm.
Kevin Horek (01:23):
Excited to have you and talk to you again. I think what you are doing in the startup entrepreneur electric vehicle mobility space is actually really innovative and cool, but maybe before we get into that, let's get to know you better and start off with where you grew up.
Vitaly Golomb (01:43):
So I was born in ADESA Ukraine. It was Soviet union then, and my family immigrated to Silicon valley San Francisco first. And then I grew up in Cupertino. I've been here since the age of eight in California.
Kevin Horek (01:56):
Very cool. You went to university and actually you have quite an extensive education. Do you want to maybe give us a quick overview of that?
Vitaly Golomb (02:06):
So I was a young self-taught designer. I was, I was in a band when I was a teenager and I design all of our flyers and all of our advertising. And that's how I learned Photoshop illustrator. I, I, I, I faked it till I made it. I showed up at Kinko's ended up being hired as a designer at 15. And that's awesome. I was the youngest employee of Kinko's before it was bought by FedEx back in the day. And I really got started with that. By the time I was 18, I was a just out of high school. I was working full time. The dot-com days running a team that was, everybody was about average twice as old as I was. I had no idea, a little mustache going on. At the same time, to please my mother, I finished my degree in computer and video imaging with a minor in digital audio.
(02:55):
That's kind of where it all started, but I really learned business by running companies for couple of decades now.
Kevin Horek (03:01):
Very cool. Walk us through your career, maybe some highlights along the way to what you're up till now.
Vitaly Golomb (03:12):
I like to call myself the Benjamin button of investment banking. All right. What that means is usually you have people that, they'll start investment banking right out of business school. Then, a decade later they'll learn kind of do deals and start leading transactions. Whereas I, as I just told you started as a designer, as an entrepreneur, I always had that bug in me that I probably got from my father, who was always a tinkerer and inventor and engineer who, became an entrepreneur. And, I kind of went through that whole process and, one thing led to another and, I learned business and I started my own companies. I B I started advising funds and startups later when I learned the hard way, everything that I know wrote a book that came out a few years ago, that's now used by accelerators in business as a textbook.
(04:07):
I actually joined HB after the company split into HP Inc and Hewlett Packard enterprise to help launch the corporate venture arm of HP tech ventures. That's really the corporate venture arm, Silicon Valley's original startup. That's when I got an opportunity to that. That was really the first time I worked in a large company in an enterprise in fortune 100 company. My career learned a lot there about, bureaucracy and in corporate politics and then took off and started my own with a partner starter, then a small investment bank. My practicing mobility grew quite substantially. I decided to last year emergency practice with Drake star, which is, a leading, number one cross-border investment bank and us and Europe.
Kevin Horek (04:52):
Very cool. So what exactly does Drake star do?
Vitaly Golomb (04:56):
Investment banking is quite different than investing, right? They both have the word investing in them, but investment banking, think of us as advisors to companies retain investment bankers to do more of a complex financial transaction. It could be a later stage capital raise where it's much more formal. Whereas, an early stage startups you're talking about, two guys, a dog and an idea, and you're really evaluating the team when you're talking about growth, capital 50 million, a hundred million plus type of raises. It's a much more formal process and you need advisors to help you with that. Of course, I'm an a, if the company wants to sell itself, or if it's a large company looking to buy a startup or a peer, or do some other more complex transaction, that's where we come in as advisors. Got it.
Kevin Horek (05:41):
Okay. You guys have done a bunch of really interesting stuff in the autonomy, electrical vehicle space. Do you want to talk about that and what you're kind of seeing and maybe some trends that you're, you've been seeing or things that are coming in this space?
Vitaly Golomb (05:57):
Yeah, absolutely. We, as a firm, we've done over 50 transactions in the mobility and energy transition category. What that means is, everything electric, autonomous shared and connected also the energy transition. That's, that's what we call charging networks and all that infrastructure that needs to go in to support these future electric vehicles and beyond, hydrogen, et cetera. We've done some real interesting transactions and I can talk about some of my favorite clients in the past. I advise a little company from Croatia called Remax Automobili okay. Mispronounced. It is now the company that owns or runs Bugatti in partnership with Porsche. I've been in the mobility space since, before it was cool right now, it's the last couple of years, electric vehicles have become kind of a foregone conclusion and everybody's will die. We have to invest in these great companies, but I can tell as short time back as maybe three years ago, it was very difficult to fund these companies because they have very high capital requirements and it takes billions of dollars to start a new car company with Remax.
(07:05):
We, I got to know the team. I met them first when they were eight crazy kids in Croatia in 2012, and they built a prototype, duct tape and toothpicks. They built the first electric HyperCard. That's awesome. Then, by the time I got really involved with the team and I'm still good friends with all of them in 2015, the company was a couple of hundred people and went out and raised the first, really substantial round. That's when Porsche came in later and they got set on a trajectory they're on now, very cool company, all over, just this month, Robert report wired covers, very hot now, but quite different. I, on my podcast interview with Matera rematch CEO, and we're just kind of laughing about how difficult it was now, then, and how much everybody wants a piece of them. Now, the other one, that's really interesting that I've been working with for several years now.
(07:59):
You'll probably hear some news on at some point soon is Hyperloop, TT, Hyperloop transportation technologies. This was the first company organized to commercialize the Hyperloop concept back in 2013, about six weeks after that famous white paper came out and they ended up completely redoing that technology, doing something brand new there and from scratch. It took them about six, seven years to build the technology stack. Most people don't realize, Hyperloop is not this like a hundred year from now concept, but it's very likely you'll be able to buy a ticket and right in about two, three years,
Kevin Horek (08:35):
I think that's awesome personally. Like I, like I would, I'm tempted would fly wherever that starts happening and just go ride the thing. Like, I think that's probably one of the coolest maybe inventions of my lifetime. Maybe, I don't know if people would agree with that or not, but like it seems like such a cool technology.
Vitaly Golomb (08:54):
Yeah. I would say that, this is the biggest thing to come into transportation since the invention of commercial flight in the thirties. Wow. It's a really big deal. I'll give you an example why, well, first of all, the entire system is covered in foldable takes. It's actually net positive on the energy. It generates more energy than it uses. That's great. So that's a big deal. You have the fact that it's going to be city center to city center, right? It's on the ground at airplane speeds at full speed. It's actually faster than commercial air flight because it's at the speed of sound and you can't break the speed of sound with an airplane because you're gonna have a Sonic boom over the entirety of the path, right? That's right. We have the old, what's it called the old plane, the cross Atlantic, oh, the Concord, there we go.
(09:46):
One of those things, it doesn't get leaves your mind and you can't find the word, but the Concord, the reason it could only fly that limited path is because you have the Sonic boom, the, very loud, but you're talking about city center to city center, something like San Francisco to LA San Francisco downtown to LA downtown in something like 30, 40 minutes. Yeah. Which is crazy. Right. If I wanted to fly, from San Francisco bay area to LA the flight short it's under an hour, but for me to drive to the airport for me to go through security for me to take the flight, whatever delays, et cetera, you have to load 150 people on the plane. And then you fly to whatever. You sit there, sit around, waiting for an Uber to get to where you're going door to door. It's, at least four hours really shout words, we're talking about 30 minutes.
(10:32):
So, I mean, that's going to change things fundamentally because you're going to have people that will be able to commute. Really, you know, we have urban sprawl. I was talking to somebody earlier today. With urban small, we won't be able to get rid of these two car households that the us has kind of spawned from the 1950s because we have, most people live in the suburbs, but we, with Hyperloop those type of transportation modes, we're going to be able to live even further. You're going to be able to commute. You're going to be able to live in completely different metropolitan area and commute to work in a completely different city. Right. New York to Boston, or what have you in New York to Washington. That's going to open up the world in a new way. And, and everything else is changing too. I mean, we're going to have a really interesting things happening in aviation.
(11:16):
Probably about 10 years from now, things move really slow in aviation, but it's really exciting time to be in this sector. Just to know what's coming down the pipe and how the world's going to change. Sure. Could you, in theory, put a Hyperloop, like cross continent or like under the ocean somewhere? Or is it just not the technology is not really there. It's not really, it doesn't make really any sense to do it like that. That's technology is there, but it's not really practical. Right? Because you start looking at cost per mile. If you put the tubes at the bottom of the ocean, the problem is that, right now, the way it's designed for safety is that there's a escape hatch, right. So often, right. You can depressurize and escape. If this thing is at the bottom of the ocean is not going to work.
(11:55):
Yeah. You can go for short, relatively short distances. It can go under water in the lake. It can go through a tunnel through a mountain, but mostly it will be on stilts above the surface.
Kevin Horek (12:08):
Got it. Nope. That makes sense. I'm curious to dive deeper into the book because it's been very successful, but do you want to elaborate what exactly is in the book? What's it called and what made you actually decide to write it?
Vitaly Golomb (12:24):
Yeah. The book is called accelerated startup and very purposefully, it's called accelerated started because I, I, I traveled around the world and I've given a lot of speeches and workshops and worked with a lot of founders. Everybody has a different accent and the same problems. These first couple of years for startup founders, especially the first time are really confusing, stressful time. Sure. It could be a, somebody very young, a teenager that wants to do a startup and, like shark tank or it could be somebody who just graduated college with technical degree. It could be somebody switching mid career from the corporate world. Startups are really a, a pressure cooker and a different kind of environment, no matter what you've done before. Nobody can really prepare you for it, where you're going in. It's closer to a science experiment than building a business. I wrote the book because I couldn't find any books that kind of took the whole journey with the founder.
(13:21):
There are lots of books on, how to raise capital, how to do how to build products and test user testing and what have you all the different bits and pieces. The idea was kind of this one continuum from idea to product, to company and what to do and what to emphasize on where to invest your time and where to not waste time. It's a book that's used by a number of accelerators and business schools as a textbook. It's not laid out like a textbook per se, but it's really instructive and it's in order of how the journey really goes.
Kevin Horek (13:54):
Interesting. One of the things that you cover in the book that I get asked a lot of times, or I think it's really hard to find is like any advice for finding a co-founder and, or building out your team.
Vitaly Golomb (14:08):
That's a very important thing, right? Building a team and finding co-founders that's probably, you can argue at the early stages, it's probably the most important thing because it's unlikely that you will stumble onto an idea. That's, that's going to be, this genius idea that struck you in the shower and then you built it and everybody loves it and great, totally. It really doesn't work that way. You have to iterate and you're going to be, iteration number 40, but who's in the trenches with you and their creativity and knowledge to balance out your knowledge. You might be a creative or business person. You, then you need somebody that's more technical or vice versa. You really need to find people that you can work well with together. When I was on the other side of the table as a VC, I was looking at those team dynamics, especially at the early stages.
(14:52):
You're looking at dynamics to make sure that the team has worked together before. It's very difficult to find that match if it's two or three, co-founders where everybody has the same energy level, the right type of knowledge. They, they think about problems the same way they think about stress, the same way. That's a very tricky thing. I do go into that in detail in the book on, and it's actually a kind of first section of the book that you're looking at, kind of building the team and why it's important, what to look for.
Kevin Horek (15:22):
Very cool. Any advice for getting into any of the accelerator programs? I know you cover getting the top accelerators, but I think just getting into one can be tricky.
Vitaly Golomb (15:32):
Yeah. I mean, with accelerators, I would say it's a, there are a lot of different kinds of XR just like universities, right? The first ones were Y Combinator and Techstars, I think officially first. There's this kind of top tier the Ivy leagues of the accelerators, where if you get in there, they have a well-rehearsed program that will set you up pretty well for success. There are hundreds of other accelerators that will emphasize different things. It could be of a blind leading the blind. My advice is, I mean, certainly if you can get into Y Combinator or Techstars or 500 startups or 500 global, they call themselves now, any of these top tier programs, you'll be well on your way. You'll be surrounded by experienced people that are going to give you kind of, they're going to help you fill the knowledge gaps that you have.
(16:22):
For most people, if they're going to go through an accelerator by definition, it'll be kind of a lower tier program. What I like to emphasize is it's very important. They're going to do their diligence on you. They're going to interview you and ask you should be doing the same thing. You should be talking to founders of startups that went through their programs in previous cohorts. You should ask them if they got what they were expecting out of it. If the support was there, if it was valuable and make sure it's also matched. If you're, I have a company that I advise, that's an aviation, that's working on hydrogen technology and they were invited into an accelerator because it's a woman led startup, but the other companies, there are really software. So there's no support network for aviation. They realized that really that's not the right match for them, for example.
(17:09):
It's really important to find that match and make sure that you're not just going through the motions, but if you're going to invest three to six months of your life, give away a bunch of equity that you're getting the right type of help that you need. No,
Kevin Horek (17:19):
I actually think that's really great advice. And, and some of those accelerators can actually help you get funding customers. If people maybe don't go that right route, do you have any advice for people to get their first customers and maybe some publicity around their startup?
Vitaly Golomb (17:39):
I customers are easy, right? Because you should be working on something that you already understand, or at least did some research. It's not just, you're not, I like to say if you go on stage or some kind of pitch competition, and you don't really know your industry and investors in the audience, know it better start asking you technical questions that you can't answer your sunk. You do need to know what you're talking about and where you're going. I would always say, chase customers, not investors. You'll know when it's working, when we need to raise money, a lot of startup founders get obsessed with, let me go out and pitch and start raising money. But, it's kind of the opposite what you should be doing, because if the business is working, go forget that you're trying to build a business. You're trying to prove out a thesis and say, there's money here.
(18:22):
If that's working, the investors will come to you, right. You will get noticed. Publicity, you also have several different audiences that you're playing, right? First of all, you do want to get kind of the echo chamber publicity. If you're trying to go raise money, if you're trying to attract great engineers, you do need to build your profile in the startup community. Again, you have also your customers, which will likely not be the startup community, unless you're making a startup for startups, right? You want to have a public face and you want to understand how to reach your potential customers, what they want to hear and what the language, what language they speak. I built a startup in the printing industry. They don't speak startup. They speak printing industry on the, my average customer was a 57 year old white male with a high school education.
(19:07):
That was my customer profile in the U S so completely different posture on the marketing side. No,
Kevin Horek (19:12):
That, that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious, obviously you wrote this book and, I think it's a very good resource and a bunch of accelerators and universities and stuff are actually using it in their curriculum. There any other books that you would recommend or you've found very useful along your journey?
Vitaly Golomb (19:32):
Yeah, I have. I mean more recently, I, I, I read about a book a week, audio books or what have you, and try to really sponge it up. That's awesome. Probably about 80% non-fiction, but I like to mix in some biographies and some fiction here and there that just to cleanse the palate, but I would recommend, and I found myself recommending recently, Reid Hoffman's blitz scaling and masters of scale. Great books, there's a lot of startup books out there that don't, that are very difficult to relate to because these are like multi-billion dollar successes. There's a lot of books that are difficult to relate to because they are characterizing an experience that most people won't have. When you talk about books like scaling or founders at work, which is older, Jessica Livingston wrote that she was a co-founder with her husband of Y Combinator. You have these real stories and you understand kind of behind the scenes, it's almost biographical of what they went through.
(20:34):
That's a really great way to learn from their experience.
Kevin Horek (20:38):
Interesting. You've also working on a course called pitching, like a boss. Do you want to talk about that? What are you covering in that course?
Vitaly Golomb (20:50):
Yeah. Sometime next year, we're going to launch it this fall, but we ended up pushing it out because it's been a very busy year in my day job with the MNA world. Right. The course is really it's, it comes off the book and also a workshop that I've been doing for many years. I, and I've taught this to, I don't know, thousands of founders, but it's really a systematic way of laying out and building the story arc of your pitch, to be able to explain the most complex business in a very short period of time and get people's attention and get them to do what you want them to do with that call to action. We're going to launch a cohort based online course, which is going to be about five weeks, several different modules, where somebody should be able to go through this material and not just watch a YouTube video or get a sample deck out there, but really go through the process in the realistic amount of time that it does take to build a solid pitch and really think through all the different parts, which would also help them think through their startup idea.
(21:46):
Presumably, if they're just starting on their pitch, they're very early. As you go through each section, you will start thinking much more about each section and that will help you formulate the business idea more.
Kevin Horek (22:00):
Very cool. Do you maybe want to dive into some of the topics that you're going to cover?
Vitaly Golomb (22:06):
Yeah. I mean, one of the most important things, and it's more of like a lens to think about your business, your startup through is something that my friend and mentor and former investor Dave McClure taught me, which is the customer problem framework. Who's your customer and what is the problem you're trying to solve for them? There there's a concept out there that's kind of a more business academic concept of jobs to be done that was studied at Harvard business school, et cetera. It's a really good way of thinking about your product because you have a customer that's hiring your product to solve a particular problem. Oftentimes you have people who are very technical, they will come up with some invention, and then they're going to try to shoehorn it into a business. It's much easier to find a success. If you look for a market problem that you can then build a solution for, right.
(22:54):
That's really all, most software is sure. And, and that's really the right way to think about it, but that's really where we start with the scores is going to thinking through that whole framework and how you're going to position them through that lens, your entire business. There's of course, things like body language, we've covered that as well. That's very important. Nonverbal communication is most of what people perceive when we speak to each other. We don't have video right now, but I am making hand gestures because it's just a habit. And, those kinds of things are very important. Also how to talk about financials, how to talk about the team, when's the right time to bring up these different themes that are very important to kind of frame the business and really get that point across. But really it's an arc, right? You're trying to build context throughout the entire process, whether it's a 32nd, verbal elevator pitch, or if it's a three to five minute pitch on stage at a startup competition, or that accelerator demo day, you're building context, and you want them at the end to understand what is it that you're doing?
(23:54):
Why is it you're doing it? How big is the market? Is it really working? What kind of, what stage are you really at and really get excited about it to talk to you more about it?
Kevin Horek (24:04):
Nope. It makes a lot of sense. Any advice or tips for pitching remotely? I think a lot of people are probably doing that at this point right now.
Vitaly Golomb (24:12):
Yeah. I mean that's actually also kind of a bonus section that we're covering, considering that so much of that happens online these days, who knows how long that's going to continue. I suspect some form will continue for a very long time or forever, but yeah, I mean, it's really important to be able to get that body language across of non verbal communication. Even though you're talking to a little camera and you see people on the screen, so standing up and presenting for a lot of people, moving around, gets their brain flowing in a different way. I know for me, that works. When I'm on stage, I, I walk around and use that energy to kind of feed what I'm talking about. And, it's very different when you're sitting down. I recommend, anybody listening, stand up and, pick something that you heard about a piece of news that you heard about this morning and start just talking about it versus sitting down, doing the same thing.
(25:06):
You'll find that your brain works in a different way. So that's important. Also, dressing up and, even though you might be sitting in pajamas five minutes before at home in front of your computer, you should really dress up and take it seriously. People do, whatever little window they see on screen, they will make a judgment call based on your body language, how you look, how you present yourself, your tone of voice, et cetera, very important that you pay extra attention to that because it's such a small little narrow door that you're talking to and they see such a small portion of what you really are like.
Kevin Horek (25:40):
Interesting. I I'm sure the behavioral economic stuff that you study in the past plays into all of this that we've talked about so far, but is there any other things that you've learned from that or other experiences that you see entrepreneurs do all the time that you'd maybe say, like, keep doing that or on the flip side of that stuff, you're like, you guys really need to stop doing that.
Vitaly Golomb (26:07):
Yeah. I mean, the science of behavioral economics is fascinating to me because, you have classical economics where, in the economics world, you'll have people be described as econs and humans econs are people who follow the rules, who don't have any emotions. And, largely communism and libertarianism are based on the expectation that people will react in a certain way or in a way that's economically beneficial to them. In reality, people react emotionally to everything and you can induce certain emotions. Unfortunately Facebook and Instagram know exactly what they're doing, and it's not an accident that they built in kind of these gambling mechanics into their applications, right? Adam Alter's book called irresistible is a fantastic read. I highly recommend that you turn on the screen-time functions for your kids, iPads and iPhones, and keep that to a minimum because it really does change the chemistry of the brain.
(27:10):
Behavioral economics is really important factor, especially when you're a product designer, you're trying to induce certain habits. Hopefully, you're not using this knowledge to evil for evil purposes, but you're trying to get the user or customer to do certain things that are good for them. And, and that's what you'll use behavioral economics for. That's really important, factor in a lot of consumer applications, but also in the way you present your business, the way you negotiate deals, you really have to think, you have to understand the human factors in all of this.
Kevin Horek (27:45):
Interesting. No, I think that's really good advice. So you also have a podcast. What made you decide to do the podcast? And what's it called in about.
Vitaly Golomb (27:56):
The podcast? Assault is called accelerated. I started during COVID because that was the thing to do. I, I actually interviewed lots of good friends and talked about very important topics. That was kind of, if you remember, the mood was very different total a year and a half ago. And, and we talked about both social aspects and we talked about business topics, but, and then kind of news of the day and discuss that. We launched a second season of accelerated this year, and we focused on the future of mobility. We're interviewed a number of leaders across the mobility space, Matira mats, Andres Dilley, own Hyperloop CEO, lots of other folks like that. Stefan Krauss, who used to be a CEO of canoe, former CFO BMW. Folks had just talk about kind of what's happening in mobility and hear it from the leaders who are in it, day in and day out.
(28:52):
And I've been in it for decades.
Kevin Horek (28:54):
Very cool. Any other podcasts that you listen to and recommend to our listeners as well?
Vitaly Golomb (29:02):
I'm a fan of Scott Galloway, so I listened to pivot and I listen to his podcast and then I kind of intermingled between podcasts and audio books. Okay. That's my listening diet. I would say, recently more on the audio books because I'm trying to really stick and do 52 books this year, one for every week.
Kevin Horek (29:22):
That's awesome. Any tips for basically finding what's next? Because I think that's challenging in itself. If you're reading that much content in a year,
Vitaly Golomb (29:33):
I mean, look, if your history and you're keeping track and looking at industries, you will get a better sense for what's down the road. For sure, with mobility. I mean, few things surprise me these days. I do know what's coming down the pipe. I do know that, I mean, the only thing that's surprised me is how gullible people are and think that autonomy is just around the corner and reality we're years away, but there are other things happening, there's a different battery chemistries that will make electric vehicles cheaper, faster charging, et cetera. There's hydrogen, that's coming into long distance freight via trucks into air, into aviation. There's really exciting, cool things coming down the road. And, if you study the industry and you keep in touch and you read the news and see what the companies are developing, those dots are going to come together.
(30:26):
We actually publish a quarterly update on mobility sector. Okay. The most interesting transactions, M and a deals funding, SPACs certainly spec transactions taking the companies public. We publish a big annual report. The last one was 160 pages just going kind of exhaustively through everything that's going on out there and who's doing what. Do you want to dive deeper into what you guys uncovered in that mobility report? Well, I mean, I, I touched on that . Autonomy is really much further away than most people expect a if they're not paying attention, but they're kind of seeing the tweets and what have you out there. And, and a lot of hype, there'll be disappointed, but the Gartner hype cycle is very much real. There's a lot of hype. There's kind of the trough of disillusionment. We come back with a more realistic expectations. The other part of it is we have really interesting second order effects happening with a lot of this, there's, in aviation, we're going to see a lot of things coming about, as I mentioned, that are very interesting.
(31:30):
We're going to see, Hyperloop out there in the next half decade that you'll be able to ride. There's all sorts of things happening in micro mobility, in electric charging, the infrastructure plan that's making its way through Congress, very painfully and slowly right now, that's gonna be a huge deal, right? Is, is to move our energy production to renewables more, to have the infrastructure that will for electric charging that will allow people to not be so worried about ranging society and actually go in and buy electric vehicles. All those things are really important. Two biggest factors in electric vehicles, for example, in adoption are government regulations and government incentives. Right? There you go with the, again with the behavioral economics, and the incentives are really that's where it comes from. It's from behavioral economics science to understand, okay, we're going to give you a tax deduction, or we're going to give you a credit or some other benefit that you can use for, to kind of tip the scales and they could get away from your internal combustion vehicle to electric vehicles.
Kevin Horek (32:38):
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. It's actually quite fascinating. I'm curious, is there anything that you've learned outside of business that you've been able to apply back into business? I think one of the best examples you gave is like, you taught yourself how to be a designer when you played in a band, and then you turned that into a job. There any other things like that in your life?
Vitaly Golomb (33:02):
I mean, honestly, I've changed my career technically several times within my career found myself, if you asked me 10 years ago, if I'd be an investment banker, I'd probably laugh, but, I got attracted to it because I like deal-making. That's where it's really about the soft skills, right? That, that you have. It's not so much on the technical financial side. I have a great team that will produce the valuations to the moon or financial modeling, whatever we need, but really the emphasis on being able to have that human connection and find a way to come together and find a win-win. That's really something that I learned by doing business. By, I never thought of myself as a sales person until I started building my own businesses and had to be the salesperson and then realize something that many entrepreneurs realize is that the best Salesforce is going to be the founder always, right.
(33:52):
You're not gonna be able to hire some magician. That's going to come and sell your product. That's not that you're not able to sell. That's something that, the salesmanship skill, this ability to explain complicated concepts, to anybody, to kind of break things down, all those things come together in the ability to get deals done and get people to come together.
Kevin Horek (34:11):
Interesting. You cover sales in the book in the course, but is there any advice you would give to people that are struggling with sales or how do they get into sales? Especially as a founder?
Vitaly Golomb (34:24):
Yeah. I mean, it, in sales, there are plenty of people that are a lot more technical about it than me, I would say, but, okay, you need to be organized, right. And you to understand your conversion ratio. If you're in business to business sales, right, you're selling, you're not just doing conversion on the website, but you're selling expensive things that take a personal touch, a human touch. You need to understand how to generate leads, where to find potential customers, how to qualify them, right. Are they really a potential customer? It's likely that you will only qualify for lucky 20, 25% of the potential customers out there. How do you take them through that journey to actually close them and get them to sign up and then get them to be happy and to bring their friends. Right. It's really active listening throughout the whole process.
(35:10):
It's not getting stuck on trying to educate your customer. If you find yourself, I've made this mistake before. If you find yourself trying to say, well, they just don't know what's good for them. And I need to educate the customer. You're probably in trouble. You're probably over-complicating things you really need to listen to your customers. They will tell you what they're willing to buy. That's probably my kind of generalized tips, but, there's certain ways of kind of doing this multi-tiered process where generate leads, qualify, leads, do the demo, and then work on whatever closing functions to get to the finish line.
Kevin Horek (35:45):
Interesting. There any tools you recommend for some of that stuff, because it seems like some of the stuff can be automated. Others have it, other parts of it, can't be,
Vitaly Golomb (35:55):
There's certainly tools out there that will help with the process, right? These days, I'm sure everybody listening has experienced this, where you go to a website and you'll give them your email to get a 10% discount. That's probably, you're going to probably regret that pretty quickly because every day you're going to get a reminder, email, this drip marketing that really works for consumers, but you don't want to necessarily automate, a really human driven process, the more expensive the product, the bigger, the decision, the more a human touch it usually needs. And, and you need to be able to respond to the customers and listen to them again, listen. They will tell you what they want. If somebody is really looking to get into a career of sale into a sales career, and they want the training go find a company that is known for a great sales organization and a great sales training program, all the best sales organizations have training programs to improve, however, talented somebody coming in the door.
(36:51):
You can always improve them with the experience with the frameworks, with the tools that they had developed internally.
Kevin Horek (36:57):
That that makes a lot of sense. You've been obviously on kind of all sides of the spectrum. There any other advice you would give to people, especially in the space that Drake stars in that basically it's long to develop these products and services, any advice to getting into the space and maybe getting investment? Okay.
Vitaly Golomb (37:21):
Yeah. I mean, just understand that if you're starting a startup and you're kind of making those decision, my advice is always really think about this idea that you're getting into. Right. I saw a funny meme the other day that somebody had, six different browsers open because they're picking out a sweater and then they just randomly pick their career. That's gonna, they're dedicating, years of the non-refundable lifetime and picking a trajectory in their life. If you're making the transition from, a corporate career or you're just out of college and you decide that you're in love with the startup thing, make sure that you spend at least some time researching what you're getting yourself into the industry, the opportunity, make sure that everything's aligned before you pull the trigger and go because you're dedicating your life. It's non-refundable lifetime. It takes a year to build any kind of prototype.
(38:10):
It takes two years to really figure out if anybody cares what you build. It takes, if you're successful, it's going to take, three to five years of your life. Well, if you're not successful, it may take three to five years of your life. If you're successful, it's going to take even longer. All of a sudden you start at 22, you're gonna turn around and be like, oh, wow, I'm 30. What do I have to show for this? For these last eight years that I've been working? You know, maybe mom was right. Maybe I should just go get a nice job, a good job. So very important. My advice is just really be careful and really present of mind when you're thinking about that, you're going to dive into this kind of new career.
Kevin Horek (38:46):
Interesting. What are your thoughts on pushing through and how have you in the past, or how do you help the companies you've worked with in the past push through the low points? Because that can be really challenging to not give up at any point during that three, five plus years that you're grinding it out.
Vitaly Golomb (39:05):
Yeah. You will find that every successful founder will tell you that the number one trait that is kind of consistent throughout is perseverance. It's, it's very rare for something just to be like up into the right, you tap right into the vein of whatever you're trying to do. It's, overnight success, usually overnight successes are years and years in the making. Sure. They're usually a lot of, you're going to get more nos than yeses. You're going to get a lot of setbacks. You need to be able to persevere through that. At the same time, you also need to know, it's a really fine line between pushing through the naysayers and being counterintuitive or the biggest companies. The biggest, most successful companies were kind of counterintuitive ideas to begin with. That's why they were the only game in town, but you also have to be counterintuitive and right.
(39:54):
Beating your head against a wall for years. The market's telling you, this is stupid and you're getting no traction. You also need to know when to quit and when to save that non-refundable lifetime and go do your next idea.
Kevin Horek (40:07):
Interesting. It's also interesting that you said go to your next idea, because I think some people just can't like they're willing to pivot until they hopefully hit something and become successful, right?
Vitaly Golomb (40:21):
Yeah. I mean, you can, oftentimes you can pivot your idea into success. Most times, you will have 40, 50 different iterations. Until you get this from go from this raw concept and DCIS to a final product that has happy customers, you're going to be iterating a lot of the nuance there, but sometimes you get into a business that's for example, shrinking, right? If that whole industry is huge, but it's shrinking, that means that you have to, for every customer you're going to get, you have to fight a more established company with a brand, with trust, with money, and you have to take customers away from them. If you're getting into a fast growing industry, and this is why VCs will track trends, that's growing 50% a year on its own. You have an equal chance or better than the equal chance with a large established business that was doing it the old way per se, to get those customers.
(41:15):
It's really important to understand what sandbox you're playing in. If you're really beating your head against the wall, or there's some opportunity there that you're chasing and you will figure out a way to.
Kevin Horek (41:26):
Interesting, any advice or thoughts around sticking with your kind of roadmap compared to feature requests from current customers and requests from potential customers,
Vitaly Golomb (41:41):
I would say, yeah, this is actually a really interesting quicksand kind of situation. If you listen to your customers too much, you're going to become a services company. They're gonna become a consulting company. You're gonna customize for every customer. You do need to synthesize the feedback from multiple customers and see which direction you should be taking, but you should be thinking about every feature and not just for that one particular customer. Oh, well, if we do this, every sales guy is going to come to you and say, Hey, if we add this feature, I'm going to sign up this customer and you have to resist that urge because that's going to set you back. You need to have a clear path that you're going on and consider this feedback in the next iteration. You have to have a product roadmap that's really independent of any one particular customer.
(42:22):
It should be kind of a good idea for everybody. There's a really good story in a masters of scale, actually we'd offer the book with the team from Airbnb. By the way, this one, I really recommend as an audio book because they record the interviews with the founders. You get to hear their voice rather than somebody reading it. And, and they talk about, they went and they took photos, they offered photography. They, they realized that professional photos were blocker for a lot of their early hosts. They went and offered to do that. It was actually the founding team going out there on location and shooting those pictures of those hosts. While they were there, they were asking him, Hey, is there anything that we can improve in a system? They have one guy that, very early hosts that gave them like a long list of a document of how to improve the product.
(43:09):
First of all, they realized that they were onto something. If they have so much passion in somebody in their community, customer or vendor, however, you want to think about a host, but also they took that feedback and they synthesize it with others feedback too, to figure out, okay, which direction should we push this? That's really, that's really kind of the right way to think about it is you kind of, you listen to your customers while you synthesize the feedback. You don't become a consulting company because otherwise it's going to completely slow you down. Sure.
Kevin Horek (43:37):
Well, and it also makes it really hard to raise more money around, right. And keep up your product.
Vitaly Golomb (43:42):
Yeah. I would agree with you. It's very difficult to fund the, if you're saying, oh, well, we're getting all the services, revenue we're customizing for every customer. We're 80% of our revenue is from, hourly fees. Well, congratulations, you start a consulting company and no VCs are going to fund that on the other hand, you have to balance it with this idea that at first you're going to be doing a lot of things manually, right. To make sure that's the right approach, that's the right model. You're going to automate those things with time. It's a balance of, okay, am I doing this repetitive thing in my onboarding customers in a certain way, or doing certain things that we're doing manually well. Okay, great. That's, we figure out that's the way to do it. That means let's start automating that and reducing the cost of that particular function or process within our product.
Kevin Horek (44:30):
No, I, that makes a lot of sense, but we're kind of coming to the end of the show. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about Drake star, the book, the course, the podcast, and any other links you want to mention?
Vitaly Golomb (44:45):
Sure, sure. You can learn about Drake star.com. You can find lots of content from us on LinkedIn on Twitter. You can find me on my personal website, golem.net. And that really covers pretty much everything. Everything that I do, the book is on Amazon. It's called accelerated startup. There's an audio book. There's a hardcover softcover whatever flavor ebook as well that you like. And, and it's translated into a couple of different languages, although you probably won't find those on Amazon.
Kevin Horek (45:16):
Very cool. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time into your day to be on the show. I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good,
Vitaly Golomb (45:23):
Thanks, Kevin. Always a pleasure to be at your shows. Perfect.
Kevin Horek (45:26):
Thank you. Okay. Bye. Well, John and Greg, what did you guys think of that.
Gregg Oldring (45:31):
Metallic delivered? That was awesome. It was difficult. I've got some definite books to add to my reading list after this, the, what was it? Jessica Livingston founders at work. That was it. No, as he was talking about behavioral economics, which I was super excited that he was into Bayview, behavioral economics. Cause I love that stuff, but talking also then about like how, Facebook and the social media sites out there. They, they know so much of what we're what's in our mind and our emotions around that. Adam Alter's book, your resistible seems like such an interesting read. So yeah. I want to grab that one and dive in John, you.
Jon Larson (46:21):
Great wide range you'd interview that did not disappoint. Like you said, behavioral economics, and then his views on how mobility will change. That was fascinating. How as new technologies and mobility come up, it's going to change where we live, where we work, how we look at every, the way we set up cities on that fast.
Gregg Oldring (46:45):
It might not do any pitches in my pajamas anymore. That's another thing, another good takeaway.
Jon Larson (46:51):
I'm also going to check out his podcast, the accelerated podcast. I for.
Gregg Oldring (46:56):
Sure.
Kevin Horek (46:57):
Very cool. Well, thanks for listening and check us out next week.
Intro/Outro (47:04):
Thank you for tuning in to the learner.co show. If you're looking to be a guest, try out our app or want to get in touch, please visit learner with two L's at www.llearner.co. The music for the show is by electric mantra. Thanks for listening and keep on learning.
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