Gurski: Building a startup requires the non-fakeable deferred gratification of farming
Dmitry Gurski · Dmitry Gurski: From Potato Farm to $200M in Revenue: The Never-Before-Told Story of Flo Health|E1205 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Sep 23, 2024 · at 2:18
Dmitry Gurski is the co-founder and CEO of Flo Health. Reflecting on growing up in post-Soviet Belarus, he draws an analogy between startup risk management and potato farming.
0:00 / 0:58exact quote · 58.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“You just can't fake farming. It means that you should take potato, not eat it immediately, even if you're hungry, and you should put this potato to ground, and then you must not eat this potato next day, and even one month after, you should wait, and then you should work hard, and you should, you can't fake this job. And then it's like, you never have 100% of chances that you would get your potato back, because, I don't know, it may be hail, it may be froze, it may be bugs, but then, if you're lucky and you work hard, then you will get your harvest. But also, it's a lesson of diversification, because you should have not just potatoes, you also should have vegetables and the garden, because, like, if it's, like, bad harvest of potatoes and vegetables, or apples, or something, and like something you will have to eat, but you can't fake that.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Dmitry Gurski
Gurski: Conducting layoffs is emotionally easier for founders than venture fundraising
“Even layoffs are simpler, because layoffs is like computation. Cut, and you're just in two or three weeks, and you continue your work. But fundraising, it's like, just like, it's each day you're getting no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and you're starting to lo…”
Gurski: VC junior screeners favor elite Harvard and Stanford alumni profiles
“Investors, they, especially in big funds you usually start your conversation not with, like, partners or mentioned partners, but with analysts or with principles. And this people usually have profile kind of Graduated in Harvard, MBA in Stanford, or graduated …”
Gurski: App retention depends on underlying use cases, not product quality
“What many people don't understand is that retention is not about product. Retention is about user case. It means that you may create the perfect app for gym and you'll have terrible retention. Why? Because gyms themselves have terrible retention.”
Gurski: Acquiring early mobile app users organically is no longer realistic
“In our case, we got them organically, but in new reality, probably you must buy them. It's less realistic nowadays to get initial audience organically.”
Gurski: Most VCs misevaluate consumer subscription startups by applying SaaS metrics
“Most investors, they just don't understand this business model. They confuse it with SaaS, and they're making very wrong conclusions because of that.”
Gurski: Five or more $10B+ consumer subscription companies will exist by 2029
“I think we will have them because this business model is growing, and you might just check numbers of Apple, and you may see that Apple got from consumer subscription in 2017 and five billion, and it's projected that we'll get maybe one hundred billion or so n…”