A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:05:19 · Ilya
[00:05:19] S1: No. That was another random thing. A friend of mine from university posted on my Facebook while I was back – dating myself, how old this is, about this accelerator. It's called 21212. They since shut down, but basically, it was 21 is the Rio area code and 212 is for New York. It was an American guy from New York and a Brazilian guy from Rio who started it, and it was connecting American investors with Brazilian startups. They're way ahead of their time, actually. Right now, lifetime investing is huge. Nubank, a lot of other startups have come out since. A friend of my sister told me that they're having their angel day on a specific day and gave me the address. I just showed up, and people just assumed that I was an angel investor. It was pretty funny because I was just broke college student who had just quit their job. I look like I'm a foreigner. I don’t look Brazilian, so people just assumed that I was one of those American investors that came to invest in their startup. They started pitching me, and then one of the guys there had done an internship in Vancouver or studied English in Vancouver. Him and I became friends over that. He's like, “Yeah, anytime you want to come by, just swing by the accelerator and hang out.” I was at the time volunteering for a nonprofit, and so I was looking for a real job. Then, one of the guys who’s an accelerator, I got wind by hanging out with them that he was going to get kicked out because he was just a technical guy and he didn't have any business acumen, at least at the point, not that – I shouldn’t say it like that, but he didn't have the strong business side. I actually randomly ran into him and a few of the other guys on Ipanema Beach on a Sunday, and I just turned to him and said, “Hey, I think what you're doing is really cool.” It was a social network to help students get jobs. I was like, “Oh, I think what you're doing is really cool. Could I join as a co-founder? Give me 10% equity.”
00:07:14 · Pablo Srugo, Ilya
[00:07:14] S0: Once you're in this accelerator, really what you start doing is, besides working on the startup, you start helping a bunch of different people who are more technical types that don't – certainly not strong, let's say, in English and so selling into and pitching into that investor audience, and you're helping them bridge that gap. Is that what… [00:07:32] S1: I was just focused on my startup. When I was in the accelerator, I was just like, okay, we got this – we have this company. Let's raise money. I remember learning what a pivot was and learning about Y Combinator and drinking the startup Kool-Aid back then when I got my exposure into the world, like what an MVP was, lean startup, Eric Ries, Steve Blank, all those, learning all that. It was like drinking from a fire hose there. People think you lived in Rio de Janeiro. You must just party on the beach all day, but it actually was the hardest I've ever worked in my life. One of the hardest times I've worked in my life was when I was living in Rio. I was in an office the whole day up until 10:00 p.m. or later, working on Saturdays. [00:08:08] S0: You’re doing Brazil wrong, man. [00:08:10] S1: Yeah. I had fun too. I won't lie, but it definitely was in the demo day. There's a countdown. I remember I was – they had a countdown on the wall, days left to demo, even hours left to demo day. I forget exactly what. [00:08:24] S0: Then you go to Canada. You're talking about, once you go back to Vancouver, you put up a landing page. What is this landing page about? What are you even pitching at this point?
00:08:33 · Ilya
[00:08:33] S1: Yeah. The original idea I had was to help people because I was really working in the tech space in Brazil. I didn't know that you can actually get paid to do recruiting. I knew of job boards and I knew of online schools. I really liked the online school model where you can create content once and sell it many times. We were like a unity model. I moved back to Vancouver Canada Day, actually, July 1, 2024, sorry, 2014. I just start getting a lot of messages on Facebook because I post pictures of – I’m pretty active on social media, and so I posted pictures on just saying I'm super happy to be back in Vancouver, really nice picture of the False Creek and stuff. People start commenting on those and be like, oh, this is a so beautiful. One day, I'd like to be there, like in Portuguese, and some people DMed me about it. I thought maybe if we can help people learn how to code – come to Vancouver, learn how to code, and then that way they can move here or improve their careers. That was the first idea of the landing page. I just threw it up on a lot of Facebook groups, and people started signing up. I think we got 50 signups on the first day. The pitch was come to Vancouver, learn how to code, something like that, and move to Vancouver. I originally thought the people who would first want to come to Canada to buy my course or take the program – actually, originally I thought it would be like an in-person course. People would fly here, which then we just realized it's super expensive. Getting a visa is a challenge.