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hey guys welcome to Silicon Valley girl I'm about to go on that stage in five minutes and you're gonna hear me talk about 14 lessons that I've learned on a journey from 0 to 75 employee so if you're interested in starting companies starting a blog making money continue watching this video she is a founder of manga manga Capcom which is an all I'm with the platform for child setting language or Tom is like life I'm gonna start our class by other startups and it is also backed by other prominent Silicon Valley investors as well along with that she also manages 75 global employees worldwide as well as combined with her businesses she gets about 10 million in revenue and I'm very happy to present her today thank you so much cool thank you so much for coming everyone yeah my name is marina I run three companies now language rivers our main company with 75 employees I have a second company called fluent Express where we help people with their English texts we're native speakers instantly correct your text in English and I have three blogs which looks like a separate business because I have already like 2.5 million powers anyone has seen my blog yay awesome that's amazing yes so one is lingua marina where I teach people languages Silicon Valley Girl is about like life here in Silicon Valley in San Francisco and another one is in Russian and today I'm gonna talk about lessons that I've learned on my journey from 0 to 75 employees quick question to you guys anyone here is thinking of starting a company raise your hand almost half starting a blog I expected more but ok I'm mostly gonna talk about starting businesses I started my first company language rip which had a different name back then because we started it in Russian I was 21 I always had this idea that in order to start a company you need to work for a bigger company to get this culture maybe get an MBA but when my he's my husband now but we were just dating her back then 321 Dmitry he approached me in the university he said your English is so good how did you learn it and I told him the story that from 14 years old my parents would send me to the UK to practice English he was like wow you know the industry maybe we should start a company I was like no no no wait I need to go work for a bank first I need to work for a big corporation I need to learn how everything functions and then we're gonna start a company and he said ok but when you do that like 10 years ago and who knows like when time passes when you're in this corporate culture with all the salaries and all the benefits you grow up you get a family like it's harder and harder to start a business so the lesson number one that I've learned start right away if you think that an MBA would give you a bright idea or teach you how to make a business 90 percent you're wrong because a lot of MBAs they end up in the corporate world and you know without getting any good ideas so I would say if you have an idea started it's not like I wanted to do an MBA I'm gonna talk about it later but again if you have a bright idea I would start acting on it now because ideas don't cost a lot your action is everything listen to your gut and stop worrying about a retirement plan the first call I got after studying a business was from my grandma and her question was who's gonna pay for your retirement you're not making any money I was like grandma only 21 and don't worry about that but you know those thoughts started coming in and then my dad was like oh my god he is starting a business in Russia that means that in three years he's gonna end up in prison but you know what drove me those days we've already started a company we've already had two clients they come back from their from their trips and they told me wow my English has improved dramatically I saw different opportunities and this is what drove me all of those reviews and I realized I want to continue so all of the prison fears and retirement fund fears just faded away lesson number three be ready to work for free for at least a year because some people would start a company and they would expect some profits in two months we made our first profits that we reinvested in the website was like three hundred dollars and I lived off $100 for the first let's say four years so it's a lot of investing and this is why I told that the earlier you start the better because you don't have those obligations towards your family and stuff but yeah if you work for free for at least a year there's a good chance you're gonna continue you're gonna grow because 90% of businesses fail in the first year unfortunately another mistake that a lot of people make they invest a lot of time into building a product and they're like oh in order to you know drive it out in the market I need this finished product I need this platform so my idea with linguae trip was a booking platform for the whole study abroad industry if I didn't roll out anything before that I wouldn't have known that there is a demand so what we've done we paid like I think it was like $100 to a programmer to code the page and just to test that the demand is there because yes you can code for years you can invest hundreds of thousands of invest your money or your own money and then end up on a market where there is no demand so start as early as you can once you start you're gonna get some money you're gonna get some coders and if your core products is a platform like in our case never outsource the coding because you're gonna end up paying a lot more money to agencies who's gonna charge you for fixing bugs judge you for any extra features but if you have a co-founder who's dedicated who has equity then it's a lot a lot easier then fundraising so basically 2013 we decided that we're gonna move from an offline company to an online platform we had enough money to hire developer and then we realized we need to raise the money because in 2014 the Russian crisis happens Russian ruble lost like 50 percent of its value towards the dollar and people stopped traveling this is when Dimitri had to get another job to support us because we were still living on a hundred dollars and we had to pay our new co-founder or CTO so yeah he got a job and we started fundraising and when you fundraise you hear a lot of notes and you know when we got our first note from well it wasn't the first no but it was like a first note from an accelerator we're good to know from Y Combinator it was a huge letter you know what we did we tried to like who actually replied with a huge I mean you know you're wrong this is wrong what you mean is wrong you didn't understand a business love of life they never applied of course this is one of the mistakes that you shouldn't make like only pay attention to what investor says if it's a yes or no if there is like a reason behind no.19 well 90% is generic and doesn't have anything to do with your business just don't pay attention to move on and Beach more people because it takes around 50 meetings to hear the first yes because we heard 50 knows the hardest moment in my start of Korea was when I was standing on a similar stage in Russia we had a lot less people we had like I know 15 pastors in that conference and I was pitching wing with trip and there was a Q&A session investors turns up and says hey you know the best thing you can do right now is shut down your company cuz we had a similar company in our previous batch and it failed and I was like I'm standing on the stage and I don't want to say cuz I can't just tell them hey you should shut up I always like and the tears started coming to my eyes and I was like okay thank you for his feedback but that broom brought me down a lot and there was like yeah one of the hardest moments but then the bright moment happened in about like maybe a month we got introduced to 500 startups and I was talking to Purnima who was a mentor back then and it was 3 a.m. in Russia I was singing my pajamas in the kitchen because it was the LA time the the meeting so 11 hour difference and then she tells me how she just came back from Chile she was learning Spanish there she couldn't find the right school she had to go through TripAdvisor call the school and I knew I'm talking to the right person because she understood the problem and in two days we got a letter from 500 startups that they invested they want to invest $100,000 in her come and imagine how much money that was for us like living on a hundred dollars a month to getting a hundred thousand dollars investing in a company via that happens after all of the things that have told you something that keeps me going like still through the hardest parts of business or clients reviews and if you've already started if you have some reviews bring them out stick them somewhere where you can see them and in the darkest moments just look at them because this is the goal this is why you're doing business this is why you started everything you were helping others another advice from marina as a blogger start building your community today like if you can post something from this event if you can write a face it's like whatever you've learned just one idea share it with other people because having a community so so so much problem like if we want to roll out a product I just talk about it on my Instagram or YouTube and we see how people react if they don't react well we just don't launch it so you know if you even don't have an idea for a company start building something around you because it's gonna make everything so much easier hiring marketing everything lesson number ten at some point learn to delegate and is the earlier you do it the better my advice here is to give your employees a chance to make a mistake but give this mistake value so what I tell them you can make mistakes that are worth two hundred dollars if it's more you come to me for an advice but you come to me with three proposals like how you're gonna solve the problem don't just come to me with the problem because it's not gonna work and this gives you a lot of discipline and your employees as well and yeah a lot of us are immigrants and hiring teams remotely is great so we're seventy-five people and we have people in San Francisco LA Boston London Russia Ukraine WIC everywhere and the key here is setting the right KPIs and having good heads of departments and I never talked to all of the 75 people because I'm gonna go crazy if I do that I only talk to heads of departments they have their KPIs and you know numeric value to make everything so much easier even like prioritizing the tasks like how much does the task cost how much money is gonna bring us even like mugs how much money does this bug take from us one more thing about vlogging sorry though there was a slide I think has gifted if you want to start a blog give people value like nobody cares about your dog and a nice filter and really cares about you and I stress yes sometimes they do but mostly they care what they get from you what kind of value is that so if we're talking about Instagram text matters a lot like if you're posting a picture from this event tell them what you've learned if you're making a video on YouTube they don't care about production they don't care if you're filming with an Alexa camera red camera they care about personal stories so share that international growth our clients come from 86 different countries and that happens thanks to YouTube because yeah when you have like 2.5 million followers internationally clients come from everywhere if you are trying to build something internationally I would let it grow organically and then figure out which country is the most active and then start investing in the marketing because sometimes people like oh we're gonna go to China like uber invest so much money and they fail have some organic growth and then figure out if you want to invest in that country the last but the most important lesson you're doing everything for your happiness for the happiness of your clients you're not doing it to get depressed you know what's doing it to wake up every morning and feeling that you want to go back to bed and do nothing everything we do in life is for us to be happy is to make people around us happy and this is something we could have realized up in December last year which I should have realized a lot earlier but my resolution for this year is to enjoy every single process in my life if I don't enjoy it I either delegated or I stopped doing that at all because if I do something that I don't enjoy that I'm wasting my energy and if I invested that energy and something else that I enjoy I would get 2x 3x more results so this is something I want you to take away with you from my today's talk thank you so much it was great talking to you guys [Music] I want to describe the moment when they knew they were going to see whether her business anyone I guess started I think for me was actually testing the product myself when I was 14 years old and my parents sent me to the UK to study English the day I arrived I try to speak English to people but I didn't understand what they were talking about they didn't understand me because I spoke fresh in English but then by the end of two weeks I got some British accent people started to understand me and I really saw the progress and when I came back to Russia I would tell like all of my friends why are you going to this vacation to Turkey or Egypt like invest a little more money and go to England and brush up your English this is when I realized like people just don't know there is this thing and I knew if they had a chance and went there they would realize how powerful it is to travel and learn has hard time asking for help so I was wondering what is the biggest healthy huge fee that you are so many ask for me I'm gonna do a non business example but it was so influential for both me and my followers so new year I think it was the year 2017 I shared a resolution that I wanted to sing with my favorite singer who's like number one singer in Russia millions of followers and stuff and I was trying to work on the planks I'm not a singer I was trying to work in a fund how to get on the same stage with him and I couldn't figure out anything and then he had a concert in LA and I was like deeming all of his team no one responded so it just during the concert I just came to him and he said can you please sing a song with you he was so confused he was like yeah let's do it and I sang a whole song with him on the stage and we recorded everything and then I shared with my audience and people are like well marina if you could do that I could do anything and that was so inspiring for everyone because everyone before that they would be like it's impossible you won't be able to do that but yeah just go ahead and ask sometimes weird things amazing things happen [Music] if you like the concept of this video don't forget to Like 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