An entrepreneur's road from bankruptcy to a venture studio, with Pavel Osokin
No Bullsh!t, March 28, 2025, 68 min, 124 views. The guest is Pavel Osokin, a serial entrepreneur with nearly twenty years of experience, founder of a venture studio and formerly co-founder and chief executive of a voice AI startup.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 68 min |
| Views on YouTube | 124 |
| 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
The conversation is built around three large failures of his career: an employee who stole cash instead of taking a bank payment, while a business partner moved a key client into his own company; a crypto startup in Silicon Valley that collapsed along with the price of bitcoin, where Pavel took personal loans to keep the team instead of setting himself a deadline and clear criteria for stopping in advance; and a voice startup that lost focus after raising money, spreading into new niches instead of developing what already worked. Pavel also compares business and networking culture in Silicon Valley with what he knew before.
Key ideas
- The dead horse rule: set yourself a deadline in advance, for instance three months, and write a clear checklist of metrics by which you will decide at that point whether to close.
- The founder effect, attachment to what has already been invested, stops you letting go in time: the more effort, money and belief you have put in, the harder it is to admit it is over.
- If a niche already produces results, do not multiply the success into new directions right after raising money: losing focus on new niches and new client types dilutes what worked.
- Five typical startup mistakes seen from a venture studio: positioning on the website that does not match what is actually sold, unit economics nobody has calculated, and more.
- Sales should come before the product: if you cannot persuade at least part of the audience to pay or press buy without money and without a finished product, building it is premature.
- A narrow niche and clear positioning beat a product for everyone: in the United States business is highly segmented, which makes it possible to become the top expert in your category.
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