The Accelerator That Never Ends (Lena Skliarova Mordvinova)

Full transcript

Welcome back to the podcast guys. Today we are joined by Elena, the co-founder of Goodface Project. Elena, welcome to the podcast. >> Thank you so much, Mikes. Just to add uh to that, at this point, I'm working on Perseverance accelerators. This is my primary child at this point, if you will. >> Could you share a bit about that? >> So, to start a little bit with my background, so my background is AI and data science. I've been in this since 2003. During that time for over 20 years I experienced and saw many changes in the technology evolution how things evolved and lately like for over a year ago I started observing a trend that pushed me to start thinking of writing a book and the idea of the book is information inflation and the death of business. The idea is very simple. The more information is available, the less it's valued, the more businesses will fall during the change of this data availability.

We have seen this before with newspapers, with books, with internets. And at this point, we're in the brink of totally new events where all the information is available like you can get pretty much any data. And the value of this actually goes down and with that value many companies will cease to exist. And that's why I started writing this book. For a while I only had the depressive vision of how many companies will fail during this transition of value of information. As the answer to protecting companies from this early disappearance, I came up with an idea of continuous accelerator for companies. This is where the idea of perseverance came from. It's a vision of the belief that every company deserves to be helped, mentored, deserves to get an advice. And being through many accelerators and incubators, I know it's hard to get into one. I know sometimes equity is a blocker. Not everyone wants to give up the equity. Unfortunately, all accelerators stop at some point.

You might not actually be in the right place to get into that accelerator first of all, but then when it ends, it expects you to be ready by demo day. But sometimes it's just not where your company is. Your customers did not sign up the agreement that you hoped they will. The engineers did not deliver or the manufacturer did not produce some part for your robots. As a company, it's hard to get really, really ready by that day. And then it leaves you with fortunately not enough resources to continue at the same speed because the program ended. You still have connections to mentors but of course it's less active. This is why we came up me and my co-ounders with this vision of an accelerator that never stops. It will take you whatever you're doing on any stage and it will just continue until you are ready to move on. And sometimes this move on will be actually between other accelerators. You are ready to get to white cominator for example. Great.

You evolve, you grow and then in a couple of years as a founder you find yourself lost again. You need mentors like a doctor you can visit. Doctor sees where you are like what is not hurting and tells you what to do and then you just can move on. It turned out that this concept is necessary for so many founders. So many people tried to get into accelerator as they never did. They're bright founders. They deserve help. They deserve mentorship. They just cannot get it. So this is the perseverance and this is what we're building at this point. There are many layers to this. There is of course AI that helps us scale. There is a system for ventures and funds where they can find interesting companies to invest into. Eventually it all comes down to helping founders. >> Interesting. And why did you pick a book? Most people make webinars and online courses. >> It mostly was a reflection of my own path because you know I always worked with data.

I always saw how the data was valuable and then it can bring this and that you can get information from it. There is was just a lot of reflection and webinars are great. You can teach them you can share them. I wouldn't say that book totally excludes them, right? It kind of puts everything into a good structure with a long perspective of history and not just my experience but actually what happened to let's say newspapers they weren't available at some point to many people and then they were available. So how did it change just the whole economy of Europe when people got access to those printed news? So that's just an interesting reflection on you know stages of evolution but many people on the webinars will be interested in that. >> And how long did it take to write this book? >> I did not finish it.

So I think it's uh still a work in progress and I think I finished it somewhere during making the perseverance although I I got the problem when I got the solution making sure that solution works ahead of describing the whole problem became bigger priority. So now my greatest focus is making sure that perseverance works. >> And what would be like a dream vision with your project? >> Well, the dream vision is for this to be a place to go to pretty much any kind of business where they can enter what they're doing, where they are, what their problems are. The platform is robust enough and has enough of connections, founders, vendors and everything to actually help a business to start, launch, figure out if their idea is valid and help to grow it fast to go place for any kind of business if they want to grow fast, effective, efficient on any dimension. >> So almost like a global network.

>> It's a global network where you are looking for customers. You can describe what you're doing. You can describe your services, your price, tears, and say, "I'm looking for founders, let's say, who have this kind of problem." And then if somebody on the other side says, "I have this problem. I realize I have this problem." Like there's basically a way to connect you guys. >> So, as I mentioned earlier, you are also co-founder of Goodface Project. >> Yes. With this project focuses on creating a platform where chemists and people from regulatory departments formulate products for personal care industry and uh it basically is a toz like from the idea of I want to make this kind of product what should I use for that product to uh how to push information to FDA which is a regulatory organ here in United States for personal care. It helps reverse engineering do analysis of ingredients can predict what ingredients are toxic. So uh that all runs on a very complex system of analysis of ingredients that go into formulas and that all basically is rooted into uh AI that digests information about molecules about plants and how all those components can be utilized in different kinds of products.

Was there any specific moment where you realized that this problem in beauty is big enough to actually build a company around it or what made you actually start this company? >> The problem was there, right? If you look at the back of uh any shampoo and try to pronounce the ingredients, well, maybe pronounce the first five, but then like then it gets worse and worse. We started eight years ago and at that point uh people were just not able to figure out what goes into their personal care products. So that was a problem enough big to solve to actually help too many customers and we went through multiple visions. So you know multiple pivots and it's typical for a startup you start with one idea and you sometimes end up with something very different. If you have a north star and it's leading you then it's startup. >> Was there any hard part of building it? >> Oh for sure. I would say that every startup just consists of different layers of hardship. You just think that you solved one layer and then the next layer comes. It's just never ending.

And uh this is something that founders should be ready for is coming your way every time depending of whether you are a solo founder or you have co-founders. So there will be different types of problems. Sometimes founders think I will raise money and I'm good. As soon as you raise you have responsibilities to shareholders, you need to report. You need to grow faster. Be responsible for the money you took. It just adds up to all the long list of responsibilities that found Andre has towards the company and employees. Back at your journey 8 years ago, is there anything that you would change with the things you know today? >> Oh, for sure. Yes, of course. I would change many things. Well, learning comes with time and some assumptions work out, some don't. And actually even if I would bring back that knowledge eventually it might not work out uh so it's just natural flow of things I would probably explore faster B2B options. We took some time before we got to B2B avenue. I would probably be more interested in a little bit different type of maybe branding or you know exposure to news because we had a great product long ago but know the exposure was not there.

So it's just something that uh adds up over years as a founder one of the things that you should not be afraid is to pivot. So pivoting is just fine and if you see that something is not working out just try another concept maybe it will work out. At the end of the day it's just a matter of how many pivots you are capable to do before you go down. >> Okay. Any advice that you would give to people that are in the same industry as you that are starting out? >> We are currently very heavily looking into the psychology side of starting a company. and what has to be in place for under to be successful while growing the company just because the challenges keep coming and having the basis is very important which basis consists of many things and they just add up if you know the mass pyramid there is a similar thing for founders and uh we are having webinars about it like basically dedicating a lot of time to helping people figure out who they are why they are doing and what they're doing what is their Northstar and what will help them get up in the morning even if the stress comes their way even if sometimes things don't work out what helps them move on the next day and it's like at the end of the day it's perseverance that's the name of the accelerator that we're building >> awesome Lenard thanks again I will add links in the description so people can check you out and thank you guys for watching we'll see you in the next one >> and Masha