Lifeselfmastery's podcast I Startups I Venture Capital
00:00:00 · S0, S1, S2, S3
[00:00:00] S0: When you're running a growing business, the right systems can unlock your full sales potential and make fulfilling every order effortless. Switch to ShipStation before peak season so you're prepped and ready before the rush hits. ShipStation connects Shopify, Amazon, TikTok shop, and over 200 more marketplaces with one platform that does it all. You can manage orders, sync inventory, track returns, all automatically. Everything your operation needs, all in one place. Upgrade your shipping operations to stress proof your biggest sales days and capture every bit of potential revenue. Go to shipstation.com and use code audio and get thirty days free. [00:00:30] S1: Welcome to the Life Self Mastery podcast where we bring in entrepreneurs who have created online businesses and improved their lifestyles. Here's your host Rohit Malhotra. [00:00:51] S2: Hi everyone, this is Rohit from Raisel Mastery, and I'm to have Ilya Droshtov who's the CEO of Dwelly, an AI enabled lettings and property management marketplace that boosts three x margins of letting agencies in two months only. He's previously co founded the largest tech enabled letting company in Eastern Europe that managed 10,000 properties and reached $550,000,000 in GMV in three years. As a former GM at Uber, he grew the regional GMV to $200,000,000. Welcome, Michel, Ilya. [00:01:20] S3: Thank you, Rohit, for inviting me. Thank you.
00:01:20 · S3, S2
[00:01:20] S3: Thank you, Rohit, for inviting me. Thank you. [00:01:23] S2: Awesome. So, you know, you have an interesting journey. Just like me, I'm I'm an immigrant, but you hired... You know, build up Uber. You build up your own startup. But how did you, you know, get your start in startups, what inspired you from your role at Uber to find your own company in Russia? [00:01:44] S3: Yeah. I think I always wanted to build my own company. And even after graduating from the university, I had couple attempts of building startups. Unfortunately, both of them failed. And at that point of time, I decided, okay. It's time to get kind of knowledge. It's time to learn how to build companies. And I got a job at Uber, was one of the first employees on the market, built a career there. And at certain point, it was just kind of, you know, a moment when you realize you studied enough and let's back let's get back to building pretty much. And this is how I get back to building my own company. [00:02:22] S2: Interesting. And, you know, I mentioned earlier in the call, I was part of a couple of marketplaces, most notable being OU rooms. And that time, you know, we were a big fan of what Uber was doing. In fact, their playbooks were pretty much copied across different markets. And Travis was a bit of a hero, you know, he still is a of a hero in the marketplaces era. But now how was your experience as general manager at Uber? And, you know, how did that influence your decision making?
00:02:54 · S3, S2
[00:02:54] S3: Yeah. I think general management... General manager role at Uber, by nature, was an entrepreneurial role because you were covering a particular market and having pretty much 360 overview of that market. Yes. You had an extensive support from the headquarters, especially in everything that relates to product, but everything locally, legal, finance wise, operations, marketing, all that was done by the team managed by general manager. So this is a great foundation to learn how to manage your own company. Yes. To a certain extent, there are limitations, but it's a very, very nice simulation of doing that. And to even kind of add on top of what I just said, I think uber cultural values were designed to foster entrepreneurial culture. Even one of them that I love the most, it was from the Travis times, Uber Cultural Values Evolved Over Time. But the one I loved from those days was make big bold bets. And effectively, this is what entrepreneurs should do because you cannot do small incremental steps and build something great and something big. And, I mean, yeah, amazing lesson from the Uber times. [00:04:17] S2: Yeah. Very very interesting. And, you know, obviously, you build out in Russia, but but what really, you know, at at Uber? And how were you able to expand from five people to thousand people in less than, you know, eighteen months?
00:04:36 · S3
[00:04:36] S3: Yeah. First of all, we... When we started kind of launching Uber back in Russia, I think the the market was developing quite significantly as a whole kind of market. We had a strong competition from a few local companies, and the kind of industry growth in a particular country was astonishing. But from my personal perspective, I think kind of growing team from five people to a southern team is not kind of a main achievement that I kind of remember from those days. Because eventually, team count is not what you are aiming for because you are aiming to grow your market share. You are aiming to grow your revenues. And we were looking at numb... At numbers rather to monitor kind of new driver acquisitions and cost per new driver, number of trips, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And at the end of the day, as a general manager, you still manage a team of a handful number of people, five to 10. And the rest of the team goes kind of on the levels below your direct reports. So long story short, it's not that a big difference of managing kind of a southern team than kind of a team of five to 10 people. And what allowed us to grow that fast and effectively that kind of transferred to the business numbers that we were achieving is our ambition, first of all. Second of all, trust of our higher management. They have noticed that the market has enormous potential. And my direct manager as well kind of had an immense trust in myself, and I'm... I cannot be more grateful than I am for that. I think that's pretty much it. Yeah. I mean, definitely, everybody at over... At Uber was working twenty four seven, but that goes without without saying anyway.
00:06:42 · S2, S3
[00:06:42] S2: Yeah. Absolutely. And would it be right to say, you know, Moscow and Saint Petersburg were the two biggest cities for for risk function? [00:06:51] S3: Yeah. Definitely. Moscow was the biggest city for us, but Uber was operating, I think, in 17 or 18 cities across Russia, and it was quite a strong presence there as well. [00:07:03] S2: Right. Right. And, yeah, you know, before the call, you also mentioned about, you know, it was later acquired by Yandex. So what... Was Yandex also competing with Uber during that time? Like like, how Lyft was doing that in in The US and Ola was doing that in Southeast Asia with them?
00:07:03 · S2, S3
[00:07:03] S2: Right. Right. And, yeah, you know, before the call, you also mentioned about, you know, it was later acquired by Yandex. So what... Was Yandex also competing with Uber during that time? Like like, how Lyft was doing that in in The US and Ola was doing that in Southeast Asia with them? [00:07:22] S3: Yes. Yandex was our main competitor, and the team was super strong and quite amazing there. I think they had two main advantages compared to us. That's why kind of competing with them was a very difficult job. But we, anyway, ended up merging the businesses with 40% going to Uber and 60% going to Yandex, which was a far better play than in China where Uber get less than 20%. But I think two main advantages of Yandex in our competition were, first, they had a local product and engineering team. So they were developing a product dedicated to our market. And our market compared to US was a fleet market instead of a peer to peer where individual drivers were partnered directly with Uber. In Russia, it was a fleet market where you partner with large taxi companies, large kind of taxi fleets. And the second second key advantage of Yandex was that they have the whole kind of product ecosystem already. It's a kind of Russian Google, in fact. They have maps. They have navigation system, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So there there is a lot to leverage, basically. But, anyway, it was a a good fight. And then we joined forces and, yeah, build a great company going forward.