A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:00:00 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya
[00:00:00] S0: Today I spoke with Ilya, the founder of VanHack. It was a really interesting story. I mean, he started this business 10 years ago. It's been actually a really – it's been a long haul, and I think that's the reality for most startups. It’s fun to dive into the biggest successes, and there's obviously a lot to learn from them. I think sometimes it's also, at least for me, good to mix in some of the most realistic cases. I mean, here's somebody who's built a startup for a decade, who actually had to bootstrap most of the time because VCs really didn't get it in the early days. He goes through how he started with a very niche idea and then expanded over time, and now he's helped 2,000 people immigrate and literally change their entire lives. In the meantime, he's built a business that's successful and just spits out cash flow every single year, which honestly, for 90%-plus of founders, that's really what success looks like, and so hopefully, you'll learn as much as I did from from this episode. Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada. I'm Pablo, I'm a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early-stage founders like you find product market fit. Ilya, welcome to the Product Market Fit Show. [00:01:18] S1: Thanks, Pablo. Excited to be here.
00:01:18 · Ilya, Pablo Srugo
[00:01:18] S1: Thanks, Pablo. Excited to be here. [00:01:19] S0: Really curious to understand how it all started and then how you got to where you are today, so maybe let's really start there. Let’s start at the beginning. I guess the first question and this is what I often ask is how did you come up with VanHack in the first place? Where were you at the time? What was happening, and what was Idea number one? [00:01:40] S1: Definitely. For me, it's a really personal business. It really connected to who I am and my background, so I think it's important to note or start with the fact that the first memory of my life was actually immigrating, was getting on a flight to – from the city I was born in Siberia, flying to Moscow, then fly to Tel Aviv to move from the Soviet Union to Israel in 1991. It's literally the first thing I remember in my life, so immigration and me moving… [00:02:05] S0: How old were you at the time?
00:02:05 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya
[00:02:05] S0: How old were you at the time? [00:02:06] S1: I was 2½ , so I was pretty young. I remember I've been an immigrant, and it's been a big part of who I'm and what I believe in. Fast forward two decades later, I got a – I graduated from university and got three job offers; one in Brazil; one in China; one in India. I ended up going with the one in Brazil because, that one, I had been there before. I really enjoyed my time there, and it also was the best paying offer. I went to live in Brazil and that turned into this four-year journey where I ended up joining a startup accelerator in Rio, the YC or Techstars of Brazil back in 2012, and was the token foreigner who was doing the sales and marketing and talking to investors while all the – most of the other guys were on the tech side, CTOs and software engineers. [00:02:57] S0: First of all, you mentioned, 2½ years old, you move from Siberia, ultimately to Israel. Is that right? [00:03:02] S1: Yeah, we lived in a little settlement in the West Bank, so it's timely now with everything going on in the world. [00:03:07] S0: Wild. [00:03:07] S1: Yeah, it's called Ofra. It's outside Jerusalem. [00:03:13] S0: Now you live in Vancouver. You also lived in Brazil. What's that story? Did you go from Israel to Canada? [00:03:18] S1: Yeah. When I was 5, we moved to Vancouver, '93, right before the Canucks Stanley Cup run. I remember the riot happening outside, anyway, so diehard Canucks fan ever since then.
00:03:18 · Ilya, Pablo Srugo
[00:03:18] S1: Yeah. When I was 5, we moved to Vancouver, '93, right before the Canucks Stanley Cup run. I remember the riot happening outside, anyway, so diehard Canucks fan ever since then. [00:03:35] S0: Did you say you'd been to Brazil before? I mean, it's not normal to get a job offer from – it’s more normal the other way around, right, than to go to Brazil? What was the tie there to Brazil? I think it's important with what you ended up building.
00:03:47 · Ilya
[00:03:47] S1: Yeah. I was doing undergraduate business at Cornell and a lot of my friends were going to work on Wall Street or consulting. I really wanted to get an international opportunity. I thought that'd be a differentiator in my career, and the time to go abroad is when you're young, at least for a short amount of time to try it out. I was part of this – I was on the swim team; I also was – worked, and I was part of some leadership groups. I got this scholarship called Cornell Tradition, which gave me $4,000 of credit towards any travel volunteer work that I did. Usually, people get that in their first year of university, and I got it in my senior year. Instead of having four years to spend, I only had one so basically did everything I could that year. On winter break, I went to Africa, and then spring break, I went to Brazil. I actually vividly remember in – I think it was December or January of my senior year. It was snowing outside, Upstate New York, freezing cold, and I was like, “Hey, I have this opportunity to travel abroad. Where should I go?” My buddy's like, “Dude, you got to go to Brazil. You got to go to Florianópolis. It's where all the supermodels from Victoria Secret are from. It's a great place and you'll love it. Then I realized later doing research that there's no volunteer jobs there because it's a pretty well-off part of the country, so I ended going to Rio de Janeiro and doing volunteer work there with an organization called Hillel.
00:05:11 · Pablo Srugo
[00:05:11] S0: Once you're in Brazil, you decide to join this accelerator. Did you have a startup idea at the time, or how did that even come about?