Crisis is what makes an entrepreneur | Pasha Khegay on 35M in debt, networking and balance
No Bullsh!t, March 3, 2025, 71 min, 344 views. Pasha Khegai, entrepreneur and founder of a Russian-speaking business community, tells Sergey Kuznetsov about his first startup, a coupon service launched in 2010 on a well-known model.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 71 min |
| Views on YouTube | 344 |
| 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
Two years later the business hit a crisis: the market collapsed, bridge financing did not work, the company took on 35 million roubles of debt, 150 people had to be let go, and his personal life fell apart at the same time as the business. He describes how his partners took over crisis management while he was a passenger, how a piece of advice from his father changed his attitude to decisions under pressure, and how the company not only survived but bought 11 competitors and was eventually sold. The conversation then moves to finding co-founders by role rather than by friendship, and to the phenomenon of indiscriminate networking.
Key ideas
- A founder's first serious crisis, in his view, defines the rest of their career: how you go through it, whether you give up or fight to the end, sets the pattern.
- You usually cannot escape a crisis caused by one co-founder's decisions at that same level of thinking, which is why swapping roles between partners can save the company.
- For a first business, look for co-founders with complementary roles, an analyst, a seller, a manager, rather than friends with similar skills.
- The community grew out of his own practice of indiscriminate networking: during the pandemic he did 16 to 24 calls a day and held around a thousand conversations.
- Three typical problems of new founders: weak product expertise, around two out of ten; fundraising used as a substitute for product development; and burnout.
- Tolerance for entrepreneurial failure is higher in the United States than in Russia and Europe, because the entrepreneurial culture there is older and more mature.
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