As a native of Ukraine, he founded two multimillion-dollar companies in the USA - ForumDaily
The article has been automatically translated into English by Google Translate from Russian and has not been edited.
Переклад цього матеріалу українською мовою з російської було автоматично здійснено сервісом Google Translate, без подальшого редагування тексту.
Bu məqalə Google Translate servisi vasitəsi ilə avtomatik olaraq rus dilindən azərbaycan dilinə tərcümə olunmuşdur. Bundan sonra mətn redaktə edilməmişdir.

As a native of Ukraine, he founded two multi-million dollar companies in the USA

Alexander Sapov, an engineer from Nikolaev, always dreamed of having his own business and infected his son Misha with this desire. However, in the Ukrainian SSR, entrepreneurial people were suppressed, and in independent Ukraine, 90's honestly was impossible to earn. So when the boy turned 11, the Sapov family moved to the USA. There, Misha's father got a job in his specialty, and the boy took the name Allan Grant and plunged into entrepreneurship.

Photo: Natalie Kolomiets (for AIN.UA)

Today Allan is 35 years old, he built Talkable и Hired - two multi-million food companies with large investments that are growing rapidly, earning big money and are leaders in their markets. Allan spoke about his successes and failures to the publication AIN.UA.

My name is Mikhail Alexandrovich Sapov. I was born in Nikolaev in 1983, and lived there with my parents until 1994. When I was 10 years old, we moved to America.

My dad always talked about entrepreneurship, he was, so to speak, a capitalist in a communist country, and for this he was persecuted almost all his life. Therefore, he always tried to go abroad.

I remember I was five years old, I was playing with a ball and inadvertently threw it on the neighboring garden, crushing other people's flowers. Then my grandmother in my heart said: "Here you are a capitalist!". I asked dad what does this mean? And he replied that capitalism is not a bad thing, it was when you did something valuable and someone else did something valuable, you exchanged these things and both became better.

I exclaimed: “But this is awesome!”, And he says: “Yes, but here it is impossible.”

Nevertheless, he stood in line for a long time, and on the very first day, when Ukraine was allowed to register businesses, he created a company that he called “Allan Grant”. From there my name went. I was very proud of my dad, I also wanted to become an entrepreneur. And when we moved to America, both changed names to Allan Grant. It was a vision of what we both want to do business.

In the US, Dad tried to open a company, but he failed. Therefore, he worked by profession - an engineer. But I always remembered my plan, and when I was at university, I decided to try it - I didn’t know what to do and how, but I thought that I should try now while I was still a student and had less risk.

The first business did not work, and the second turned into my first company. Webmasters international. It was a full-fledged outsourcing company specializing in web development, although at that time this market in Ukraine was not yet formed.

When I graduated from university, we already had 50 people working for us: 40 in Nikolaev, 10 in Atlanta, where I studied and where we lived.

Photo: Natalie Kolomiets (for AIN.UA)

Everything looked very cool, and I thought business was easy. I did not understand why everyone does not open a company at all, I had a high opinion of myself. And then life, as they say, gave me in the face.

We had one very large client, for whom half the office worked. And he paid us with a delay. And since it was an outsourcing company, and I had to pay salaries to people, I found a third party who paid for the job right away, and then the client owed this third party. At the same time, I personally guaranteed that if the client did not pay, I would be responsible for this.

Gradually, the client began to pay everything later and later - first, he was late for a month, then two, then three. And one day just did not pay. Then I took all the money from all my credit cards to pay off debts and pay salaries. Half the state had to be fired.

When the business collapsed, I had half a million dollars in debt, which I then paid off for 6 years.

Then I realized that I have no other choice - I need to continue to do business, because with regular work I’ll never get out of this pit.

At that moment I was just participating in an entrepreneurship competition — my professor recommended me there, even when Webmasters international it was all cool. I went to the finals a month before, when the company started having problems, and when the competition was held, everything was already bad. I fired the 25 man right from the hotel before the show. Then I told the jury everything as it was and that I should not be here.

At that competition, I met two other entrepreneurs, with whom we launched together 3L Systemsthat jokingly deciphered as Three Losers starts a company, because neither of us won that competition. It was hotel automation software. We decided that we would not take money for software, but would give it away for free and take a percentage of all transactions.

For three years we tried to launch this project, but in the end we didn’t finish it. Software in development turned out to be more complicated than we thought.

It was 2009 year. At that time, I stopped programming, although I was fond of it since 7 years. I just got used to the fact that I have a large development team that makes software, while he himself was engaged in negotiations with customers and sales. In the third year, when you just had to wait for the software to be ready, I decided to return to the coding.

I started to run different projects. I wrote a program for A / B testing and decided to tell everyone about this project. In order not to suffer from the distribution, I came up with Mailytics - smart newsletter that automatically generates a list of recipients based on your Emailcorrespondence. I collected the first version of this project in early December and decided to launch it for people, so that they could, for example, send everyone traditional Christmas greetings. But did not want to run a project without a logo.

There is such a service 99designswhere you can order a logo. And I started sending bulk emails to all the designers who were on this site, with a proposal to participate in the creation of my logo. By the end I was banned there. And then another company announced a product similar to mine, with which they got into Y combinatorwith cool investors. I decided not to roll out my project, because everyone might have thought that I copied them. Instead, I decided to find myself a cofounder, run another project and also go to Y combinator.

I found two cofounders at the event. Founder Dating. We decided to rent a house on the 3 of the month, all three of us move in there and try to figure out together what we can do. The result of these three months was Talkable.

Photo: Natalie Kolomiets (for AIN.UA)

At that time dropbox was one of the few companies that had a referral program: if I invited a friend, he would get 250 MB of free space in the cloud, and I will get 250 MB for him too. We decided to build a similar product, but for E-commerce-company. We made the first version and on the first day made the sale to one online store. During the first week we already had a lot of willing stores, and by the time we came to the interview Y combinator, our service flew - we did a lot of sales for different businesses.

In 2010, we attracted $ 1,3 million in investment and another $ 2 million last year. In total in the account Talkable approximately $ 3,5 million

Initially, we thought we would make an office in San Francisco. We had a bad PR story in 2012, when we first announced the launch of the product. We wanted to do an A / B test on our home page and copied the design of the home page. HighRisewhich the creator founded Ruby on Rails David Heinemeyer Hansson. And he immediately announced that we stole his design. Many people wrote about this, and when we tried to hire the very best Ruby on Rails developers, many of those who successfully passed the interview, then said they did not want to go to us, because we have a bad reputation.

Among opensourcedevelopers, I found a man named Bogdan Gusev, who today is my partner in Ukraine on Talkable. At that time, he was in the top 20 of the most active developers on Ruby on Rails and number one of all Russian-speaking programmers in the community. Bogdan is Ukrainian and lived in Kyiv. He and I started communicating and after about six months we decided to work together. And that Bogdan will build a team here and all our development will be entirely in Ukraine, and they refused to hire developers in San Francisco.

To build Talkable we succeeded thanks to a strong team. Her collection - a separate challenge. Fortunately, there is experience in hayring. Basically, we select people on five grounds: how much a person is willing to learn / ambitious, how well he does his job, whether he is in line with the company's culture, what references from other people, how he shows himself during a conversation.

Strict selection is not for fun. We do not want to recruit a lot of people, and then cut spending. On the contrary, they are ready to finance both people and the environment in which they work. We appreciate small autonomous teams, are ready to pay good salaries and are ready to look for the best people: the approach, when we collect everyone, and then we lower the salary, is not close to me.

Talkable works on this principle: we help online stores find buyers. This is usually done through advertising. But if you invest in advertising, then the money goes to the publishers who make this advertising. We help companies make the same money, but give it to their customers. If I have a loyal buyer and he has brought his friends, then it’s better that I pay the money to them - the clients, and they can therefore spend it on me than I just give Facebook or Google. This is the idea Talkable. It does not work for everyone. Our model does not work for companies that their customers do not like. We help good companies grow faster, and many are successful today. E-commerce- companies have grown with our help.

We reached the break-even point at 2013. Our income is much higher than the amount of capital raised. Usually in start-up companies the opposite is true.

We decided that we would make the company not unprofitable, and therefore took so little venture money. In fact, in Talkable we receive offers from investors regularly, but we do not need them, because the company is already growing well.

Photo: Natalie Kolomiets (for AIN.UA)

Another my startup Hired It was also the result of a case with bad PR when we tried to find good people.

With one of my cofounders on Hired I met in 2010 at a conference. In 2012, he came to San Francisco to talk at a conference about how to run Marketplace-company. Another speaker was Doug Firstin, legend of Silicon Valley, founder of the multi-billion company LiveOps - today he is our third partner in Hired. And when we came together in a bar after the conference, it turned out that the main problem for all of us was always to find good people and build a team.

And here we are three of us brainstormili in the bar, and I told that I am writing to people who work in Google facebook and companies of this level, but they just ignore my letters, because every day such a person receives 5 different job requests. And we came up with how this can be solved.

Since programmers are so in demand now, what if we created an auction for developers, in which cool startup companies that have attracted venture capital can make offers, outbidding their competitors? And if I am a developer who works in the top 5 largest companies (at the very beginning we decided that these would be Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Zynga), but interested in new opportunities, I get to the closed marketplace, where they will see me.

Further, if companies want to communicate with a person, they should immediately send a proposal and indicate what salary they are ready to offer even before the person comes in for an interview. And when they make this offer, it can be seen by other companies that also want this specialist and after that can change their offer. It turns out that companies literally compete with each other to invite a person to an interview.

Photo: Natalie Kolomiets (for AIN.UA)

When we came up with the concept, I said that I could write a platform over the weekend - from a technological point of view, this is a very easy thing. Then my goal was to hire developers for Talkable, but this system has worked so well since the first days that we decided to launch it into a separate company.

Initially, we sent invitations to developers via LinkedIn and told the idea that they say we understand that you get a lot of offers every day, we want to give you the opportunity to do it more efficiently and understand what your value is in the market.

For a month, we recruited 88 developers, after which I suggested to investors Talkable of Y Combinator and 500 Startups try our auction. Doug talked with friends of venture capitalists, they wrote to their companies, and we registered 120 companies in a couple of weeks. At this time, the site was still unfinished - we decided not to do it until we had enough users.

When everything was ready, in 36 hours of non-stop programming I wrote the first version of the site, launched it and left for Burning Man. And when he returned a week later (all this time the site was supported by Bogdan), it turned out that through our website the companies made offers in the amount of $ 30 million. It was “wow.” We realized that we made a demanded thing.

Now Hired expanding in cities - we started only with San Francisco, then added New York, Los Angeles, but today Hired already presented in 15 so cities. These are key cities in America, as well as Toronto, London, Paris and others.

I now have a controlling stake in Talkable - here I am the only director. AT Hired we have a lot of investors, there are people on the board of directors of 7, and no one has a controlling stake there.

В Talkable I served as CEO, and in Hired was CTO. I drove the entire product team until December 2016 of the year - then we hired a team of managers, after which all three co-founders were able to move away from daily management. All last year I traveled the world, traveled to more than 30 from different countries - I decided that I needed to rest and do things that I never had time to do - write music, read classical literature, do yoga, etc.

But I got tired of it very quickly, and I started to go to IT conferences, various industry meetings. At some point, the code I was on IT Arena in Lviv, I realized that it was time to return to the business world. There I found two tops for Talkablewhich we have been looking for over a year.

Since the beginning of this year, I began to participate more daily in the leadership Talkable. Now my role is Executive Chairman. Together with the CEO, we are building a strategy and development plan for the company, and I also lead the product team in Ukraine.

Photo: Natalie Kolomiets (for AIN.UA)

Last year, I spent 60 days in Ukraine and 80 days in San Francisco. And this year I'm going to be even more in Ukraine.

Last year, we had 30 people in Kiev, now 49, we moved from a small office to a bigger office, and here we already have a place too. The expansion plan is very aggressive.

Ukraine for me still remains the birthplace. I changed my name when I was 10 years old, but I still Misha. I speak Russian, because when I was born my parents spoke Russian to me, but now I learn to speak Ukrainian. I am very proud of the country and I love it very much.

The first time I returned to Ukraine was when I was 18 years old. I thought, why should I go there, I'm an American, but we so wanted to leave here. But when I first came to Ukraine, I immediately felt how close everything was to me. And the people, and the atmosphere.

I am very surprised when I communicate with people here, and they tell me that it is better in the USA. In many ways, it’s actually better here — the food is tastier, the quality of life is higher, the standard of living is well.

Maybe it’s harder to make money and learn some things, but there are a lot of prospects here and it’s very good to live here.

So for me, Ukraine is the place where I want to spend more time. I consider myself a Ukrainian. Well, it is also a great place for business development.

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