Know Thyself

Two companies, both built mostly with the same friend, and it took me both of them and the years since to see what really set them apart. For a long time I reached for the usual explanations, talent or effort or luck. What I had actually missed was quieter. I was not honest with myself, going in, about what I was really trying to build.

Paris

The first was PushPullMe, and it began in a conversation in Paris. Artem Kozin and I were talking about how hard it is to learn something and adapt to a new city at the same time, the particular loneliness of being an international or out-of-state student, and we wanted to build the thing we would have wanted ourselves. Coaching and psychological support for students far from home, something close to what InsideTrack was doing in the United States. This was 2012, in Russia, years before Yasno or Zigmund made that kind of support ordinary. We did not know the first thing about building a company. We knew the problem because we had lived it, and that felt like enough.

We never made money. I probably lost a little of my savings. And still, those were some of the most beautiful days I have had in any of this. We loved the building, the talking to people, the small thrill of working out automated scheduling before Calendly existed to do it for us. What I could not see then, and would not admit for a while, is that PushPullMe was never really a venture, only a social project wearing a venture's costume, with a real need behind it and a market always too thin and too poor to carry a company. None of that made it a waste. It made it the wrong thing to measure with a venture's ruler.

Clearer eyes

ProctorEdu came second, built again with Artem, and this time with clearer eyes. By then we had some feel for what makes a company grow and what only looks like growth. We were not chasing a cause so much as watching for a real market. When a cheating scandal at one of the Moscow universities put the need for serious, curated proctoring out in the open, we built for it, and the universities came on their own. For the first six months our outbound sales were close to nothing. The pull from the market was doing the work, and within a year it was the largest proctoring platform in Europe by tests run, on very little money raised. That pull is the cleanest sign I know that the corner is the right one, and it is the thing PushPullMe never had.

What I had slowly learned to look for, partly from the years I later spent in ridehail, was whether a market would ever let you become its only real answer. A marketplace that reaches real density in a city stops being one option and becomes the option, and the first to get there tends to keep it. It is a city-level question more than a country one, and the moat is rarely the product, it is the operational know-how that does not travel from one city to the next. Proctoring had that shape. Student coaching never could.

Impact

Everything since, I have tried to do with that distinction held out in front of me. Geeklama, where I am an angel rather than a builder, is a social bet at heart, and so are the others I have backed: a Montessori school in Ghana, Japaguys, a re-skilling platform in Nigeria, an engineering outfit called Form and Forge. I do not hold any of them to a venture's clock. I went in knowing the purpose was impact, and impact keeps its own time.

The same honesty decides the money. Raise venture capital and you have promised venture outcomes, round after round, the valuation climbing and your share thinning, until the upside you were chasing can belong to other people even if you reach it. That game is a fine one where the field can genuinely carry it. Where it cannot, it is more honest to bet on yourself with a smaller stake, build something that pays for itself, and keep the whole of the smaller thing you made.

That, I think, is what Know Thyself finally asks. Not who you are in some grand sense, but which game you are actually in. When the game is building, what counts is competence, the market, and velocity, and a little honesty about all three early saves you years. When the game is impact, you keep those and you add patience, because the returns are real but they come on their own schedule. The boy from Saki had to learn he could play at all. The harder lesson, the one these years keep teaching me, is to know which game I am in before I start keeping score.