The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:50:40 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:50:40] S1: A lot of them do see dollar signs, and secondaries are a part of that. How do you think about doing annual tenders to retain people? [00:50:49] S0: Across our team, roughly 50 are in California. We're gonna get to roughly 50 remotes and over 300 in Kazakhstan. So look, I just hope we're gonna print more dollar millionaires in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, in this part of [00:51:05] S1: the world than any other company. What's the labor arbitrage on cost between Kazakhstan and The US?
00:51:05 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:51:05] S1: the world than any other company. What's the labor arbitrage on cost between Kazakhstan and The US? [00:51:12] S0: I I know that a lot of people, when they look at Higgs, they think about the arbitrage. Is that not true? Look. Like, Kazakhstan is top five in the world in physics. Like, you look at the recent International Physics Olympiad for high schoolers, like, they're top five in the world. It's on par with, like, The United States, China, India. And this is also the core of our team are people who won international competitions in math and physics. That's the first part. The second part is that about Kazakhstan is that they actually took the Soviet school of math, but really upgraded with Singaporean principles. Singaporean system of education is considered to be probably the best in the world. At least many people in Silicon Valley believe that. And the government basically subsidizes for thousands of high schoolers to study abroad, and many of these people come back. And so just the density of talents definitely got there. It's top 10 largest countries in the world, so over 20,000,000 population. And we are also actively hiring, bringing their talents from Europe, from other countries in Asia. And people just enjoy some benefits, like 15% personal income tax. Yeah, man, it's like... [00:52:19] S1: Don't even get me started. Fucking UK will tax you to breathe. Seriously, The UK, you get your, you know, paycheck, and then it's like, I don't know, a 100,000. And then you get the end, and it's kind of like 3,500.
00:52:32 · Alex Mashrabov
[00:52:32] S0: Yeah. But it's also English common law. So it's not like that bad as people think. You move here. Let's swap places. Do you have a mega pad in Kazakhstan? No. I don't. I don't own any property. What? Why? Remember that I come from Asian family. Whenever we sold the company, I made over $1,000,000, and I spent all this money buying apartments for my parents, relatives, my wife parents because this is just part of the culture. Wow. And the fam... Like, extended family is not small by any means. But look, it's just part of the culture to give back. And then when it comes to the family, especially to my parents, they obviously sacrificed a lot. So I felt like I had to give back at least things, like, mind three things, which I could do. But I drive Tesla Model three, and I sleep. So I'm not a guy who's gonna just show up with Lamborghini or Porsche. Do you invest? We mentioned solve intelligence. Before I did that, but now I spend roughly ninety hours a week, eighty, ninety hours a week on Higgs Field. I try to spend ideally at least three hours a week with my wife, at least five hours a week with my son. Sometimes I do the catch up because when I travel for a week, for two weeks, for three weeks, then I try to take Sunday off to spend the whole day with my son. And over the last three months, yes, I was able to find one day when I spent, like, end to end with my son without emails, without talking to without talking to
00:54:07 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:54:07] S1: the team members. I get in trouble for this, but I think there's no shortcut to hard work. The harder I work, the luckier I get. I meet more founders. I find more great companies. I do more shows. I have more success. Do you buy the bullshit of The Balance and, oh, it's okay. You can leave at five and be home for bath time and crush it? [00:54:28] S0: This is a good question. So look, obviously being an immigrant, I always have to prove that I belong, right? I feel like now people accept, people recognize that Hixfield is probably a top 10 application AI companies by revenue and probably number one. But I think when it comes to hard work, the people whom we know in common, we talked about, let's say, Peter Sellis, legend in consumer space, obviously Jack. I spent decent amount of time with them and the other product leaders at Stamp. Like, the density of product talent at Stamp was unprecedented. All of them work really hard. All of them are smart. Like, none of them just checks emails four or five hours a day and calls it work. Each of them is deeply rooted into their recent trends in product, product design, activation. They know data really well. So yeah, I don't believe that there is any shortcut to hard work. [00:55:24] S1: Three hours a week with your wife. I don't know about you, dude. Mine would dump me for three hours a week. How do you make marriage work on three hours a week?
00:55:24 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:55:24] S1: Three hours a week with your wife. I don't know about you, dude. Mine would dump me for three hours a week. How do you make marriage work on three hours a week? [00:55:35] S0: Yeah. Look, I'm very grateful for my wife for being patient. Know, it's also very different if that's Asian culture. It's just kinda more natural to try to do sacrifices for each other, sort of, and I'm deeply... Obviously deeply grateful her for supporting me. But, like, sometimes at this scale, I get invited to parties. I always send her and don't show up myself. I don't know if I piss people off, but this happens very frequently. So wait. Wait. You say yes, and [00:56:03] S1: then she goes. Yeah. [00:56:04] S0: I say maybe we both can come together. Then there is always some urgent fire last minutes, and my wife just goes, you know? What fire [00:56:13] S1: was most urgent? What was the... Oh, fuck. Yeah. Look.
00:56:13 · Harry Stebbings, Alex Mashrabov
[00:56:13] S1: was most urgent? What was the... Oh, fuck. Yeah. Look. [00:56:17] S0: I think, obviously, for all the things which we touch based earlier, whenever we are not very good in communicating the features or we felt like... I mean, now it's like team of 40, so now the life is way better. But early days, obviously, I was involved in all the fires. I think recently, all the types of attacks on AI companies, it's crazy. It's like LLMs are being used to hack companies. It's like new types of LLMs to do some frauds, basically bots using credits and then doing auto refunds, all of that. Since I have kind of machine learning background myself, data science background, I still can move a needle substantially when it comes to statistics and data. So yeah, I have to be involved somehow. But these LLMs, they amplify many types of behaviors, including various types of attacks and fraud, but we have to fight against that. [00:57:11] S1: We're gonna do a quick fire round. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. What have you changed your mind on most in the last twelve months? [00:57:20] S0: Oh, I was thinking that HubSpot is gonna get obsolete. Everyone is gonna build their own CRM. But when... Especially when we hire and scale B2B go to market, seems just having familiar interface matters a lot. [00:57:32] S1: Wow. I would still say they're gonna get fucked. You think that just stickiness is there with SMBs? [00:57:38] S0: Yeah. I I I do think so. And especially I see that when I hire go to market talents.