How to build a strong community | Katya Kurasheva on building R-Founders
No Bullsh!t, March 17, 2025, 64 min, 656 views. Sergey Kuznetsov talks with Katya Kurasheva, founder of one of the largest Russian-speaking entrepreneurial communities, a conference speaker and a digital nomad who visits around 20 countries a year.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 64 min |
| Views on YouTube | 656 |
| Language of the episode | Russian |
| Where to watch and listen | YouTube, Spotify, Telegram |
Date, length and view count according to data from the episode page on YouTube, as of the page update date shown in the footer.
In short
Katya describes the two hardest crises of her career, in 2020 and in 2022, when the business model was destroyed almost to nothing, and explains what keeps her motivated: positive thinking, reflection and the ability to see a growth point in difficulty. She recalls being a closed introvert as a child and deliberately learning to talk to other children, while today networking and community building are her main professional skill. The conversation covers the evolution of her management style from hard micromanagement to a model with a strong operational lead.
Key ideas
- Crisis as a growth zone: both of her hardest crises destroyed the business model almost to zero, yet each time the experience, the skills and the people stayed with her.
- Weaknesses worked on systematically turn into a superpower: a childhood as a closed introvert who deliberately learned to talk to peers became the basis of her main professional skill.
- The management style evolved from sole micromanagement to a model with an operations lead, weekly checkpoints on metrics and results, and clear zones of responsibility.
- A fifty-fifty co-founder model is risky in her view: the key rule is to check at the start whether the partners' areas of responsibility overlap even hypothetically.
- The main marker of a good community is sharing: people come not only to take but to give; the choice of community should follow a specific request.
- Effective networking runs on two tracks: warm chance meetings inside a good community, and targeted search through people who are hubs of expertise.
The full transcript
The episode is recorded in Russian, and the full transcript of the conversation is on the Russian page of this episode. English and Spanish subtitles for the strongest episodes are rolling out on YouTube in waves.
Open the transcript