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Two entrepreneurs named Adrian with completely different approaches to building companies.
One bootstrapped his way to success, the other raised venture capital and navigated the high-growth startup world. Each episode, they share raw, unfiltered conversations about the realities of entrepreneurship from opposite sides of the funding divide. Get insights you won't find anywhere else about what it really takes to build a business.
[00:00:00]:
Hi, this is Adrian and I'm a Bootstrap founder.
[00:00:09]:
Hi, this is Adrian and I am VC backed founder and we are "Two Adrians Walked into a Startup."
[00:00:17]:
So today I did an oopsy doopsie. So last night I slept over at Adrian's place and it was late, I was traveling and like, hey, can I sleep at your crash at your place? Yeah, sure, no problem. And I like to do meal prepping, so I like to prepare my breakfast at least ahead of time or at least have the ingredients. So every morning I know what I eat. And normally I like to make like protein oats. So it's basically some oats with some Greek yogurt and various things. But all the ingredients I couldn't really find. And I tried to find substitutes for some of these ingredients.
[00:01:01]:
Well, normally it should taste. What I do is like it's oats, but tastes kind of like a cheesecake. Adrian, could you describe what I've made you this morning?
[00:01:11]:
Something so really good that I have to prepare another breakfast to eat.
[00:01:16]:
Exactly. So it tastes like cardboard. And it was horrible. And I was shocked to myself because I felt like small adjustments would have minimal effect. The only reason why I'm telling you the whole story is because today we're talking about failures and now this was a tiny failure. But in business you do slightly bigger failures than just, you know, fucking up your oatmeal. Adrian, what is failure to you?
[00:01:46]:
Failure to me means right now because in the past had a different meaning. In the past, failure for me was more like something not really good, something that I feel bad about, something that I feel. Failure as a person, failure as what I am doing, failure as what I try to learn. So that was in my past, but today failure for me, it's more like a journey, more like a way to learn things, a way to identify what I have to master better. Because if I failed, probably I'm not good enough. So it's a signal, it's a strong signal for me to improve something because that's, it's what I failed.
[00:02:46]:
Interesting. So like when you start your business, what would you say was your first failure or, you know, thing which fought at least as a failure in that definition.
[00:02:59]:
I, I had multiple failures at my beginning of the business. But one of the most important failure for me at that time was when I tried to raise our first investment round. That was over five years ago. We had nothing at that point. We had just an idea to build a better speech to text algorithm for the Romanian language, but nothing else. So we made some mathematics to understand, okay, how much money do you need to label the data? How many hours of audio data you have to label in order to train a good enough algorithm to release the first version. So after the entire process, we understand, okay, we need a lot of money to implement that version of the algorithm. So we have two options.
[00:04:02]:
Keep our job and invest our salaries into developing the algorithm or try to raise money from investors and accelerate the process. Of course we choose to accelerate the process, but the process doesn't choose us. So I start to go and enter in multiple discussions with vc and every time I was rejected by the same reason. I, I try. The reason that they gave me was I try to sell their story, not a product, because I don't have anything already implemented. So for me, in that moment was really, really difficult because what I understand was, okay, I'm not a good salesman because probably if I had better sales skills, I can convince, convince the investor to give me the money, but instead I have zero money for the investor. So we have to invest our own money, our own salaries, we have to work after the main job. And was really painful because you know what you have to build, you know exactly the process to build the product, but you don't have resources and you don't know how to convince people to, to invest in your idea.
[00:05:35]:
So for me, that was one of the first big failure that was painful back to that days. But what I learned from this failure, and that was the moment when I tried to change my mindset, was, okay, so you have to better understand how to convince people how to sell your story, how to sell your vision. Because to be honest, probably if I was put in that situation as my first investor that I talked to, probably I will give the same answer. Okay, guy, sounds really interesting, but I want to view a first version of your algorithm. You have don't, you don't have track records, you don't build business before. You don't have anything to, to show me just a simple story.
[00:06:36]:
But, but Mr. Investor, I have passion. Please, don't you see? I have passion. Is that not enough?
[00:06:43]:
No, it's not enough. It's not enough.
[00:06:45]:
Love is not enough. It seems like in business.
[00:06:47]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was the moment when I start to learn how to reframe the failure in a different way. I start to reframe the failure in a way to look at me, at my skills, and understand what I have to improve at myself for the next time to be a little bit failure that I was in that moment mean little less failure.
[00:07:23]:
Okay, so fail a bit less. Okay, fine. I mean, so it's interesting to see what we see as failure because sometimes there is a clear outcome, like, oh, you failed or not failed, right? Yeah, as I do you want to invest? I don't want to invest. Oh, you know, like. Or you approach a girl like, hey, what's up? Not interested.
[00:07:46]:
Right.
[00:07:47]:
So it. Sometimes you have like these clear boundaries, sometimes not. And. But before going into that, I just want to say, as a Bootstrap founder, I didn't have any funding, so I could. I just asked myself, hey, Adrian, you have not many savings. Would you like to invest all your savings in your business? Yes, man. I'm so ready to invest in my own with my own savings, but for some idea which maybe will work. So I had the easy conversation with my investor, but I think my.
[00:08:22]:
I'm trying to think about what was my big failure. And I'm thinking about less about the business failures, and I'm thinking about the failures before the business. And one thing which, like, while you're telling your story with like the VCs, etcetera, one thing came in mind is my journey of learning chess. Now, before you skip this and like, oh, chess, boring, bro. Like, wait a sec. Yeah, okay, I get it. It's maybe for a lot of people who don't play chess, they think like, yeah, just moving some horsey around and pretend you're Andrew Tate, right? Smoke a cigar and do some chess moves. So I think I started playing chess at 16 and my only goal was to beat my father first, right? Like, oh, I need to beat that old son of a bitch.
[00:09:10]:
I lost my game first game. And then I watched a lot of YouTube tutorials and learned then to beat my dad, right? I learned how to beat. There's even a book, I think, how to beat your dad. I didn't read that book, but yeah, there's something like that. Yeah.
[00:09:23]:
Okay.
[00:09:24]:
Which is. It would have been amazing. That was a perfect product market fit back then, if I knew. Anyway, I then tried playing online. And of course people online are a bit better, just a teeny bit better than my dad. And that meant I lost a lot of games. And it was really like, we all be straight here to tell, like, yeah, okay. Oh, you said you change your mindset.
[00:09:51]:
I mean, failure fucking sucks, right? If you lose, you hate it. It's miserable. But it's first time is always bad. Whatever it is, like, you're gonna hate it. I'm saying my ma. My mindset is a bit more positive. This the first time failing in the, let's say, a new thing. It's super painful.
[00:10:10]:
And I played, I kid you not, over 100 online games. About 100 games. All of them lost. Some drew. And then after my hundred one game, I won my first game.
[00:10:26]:
With your father?
[00:10:29]:
No, online. Online. And my dad was easy, as mentioned, 10 minutes of YouTube, it was fine. But playing online with other people, 100 games I lost. And then my 101, like you, like very dramatic way, actually won the game. And then I actually start winning and winning and winning. And when I was winning, it felt good, amazing, like, oh my God, I'm winning. Oh my God, I crushed that guy.
[00:10:50]:
But later on, like, I'm not getting better, right? All those failures were teaching me something. Like, I did this, I did this, I this. Like, you know, I, I was reflecting every game what happened, you know, like, I played game, I lost. Oh no. But I was learning from my mistakes. Like, I failed. Why the fuck did I fail? Yeah. And most of the time it's because of me.
[00:11:11]:
And in chess, there's no like, oh, you know, the investors had a bad, you know, they had maybe a very spicy taco and they're have their stomach ache and they were not in mood or they were hangry and they want to hear any like, you know, there's a lot of factors we can assume they're external, which unfortunately are out of control. But in chess, it's all you. You lost because you suck, right? Basically. And that experience of like just constantly failing and like learning from like your failures, I think is my secret of my, let's say mediocre success as a startup founder. Because you learn, it's not necessarily you, as mentioned, you're changing perspective. Like, okay, I lost. But I want to say very clear, even though I changed my mindset, okay, what could I do better? Etc, it still sucked, right? It's still like in like maybe every time when you lose, it's the pain is less and less like, but it's still present maybe to a certain point where you stop caring then. And then it's like just learning every.
[00:12:15]:
Time will still suck when you fail because you face emotions. So emotions are there. Emotion doesn't disappear. Well, the single thing that you can control is just how you interpret that emotions and how you understand. It's a temporary state. So it's not permanent.
[00:12:37]:
Would you say, well, okay, so we talked about failure. You could say, okay, it's maybe just like, bro, it's your mindset. That's why you're not getting better. Because failure is good and you. But not everything is binary. Right? It's like when you go to, like, go to investors, it's yes or no. If you play a game of chess, you either win or lose. You can actually also draw.
[00:13:01]:
But okay, let's say, you know, yes or no. Let's keep this simple. What about things which are not quite clear? Let me give you one example. So let's say you're doing something, you're learning a new skill. You didn't really fail because you're just like trying to learn the skill per se. Right. Like, for example, you're trying to maybe understand, like marketing. Oh, I opened, I read the book, I tried to do marketing.
[00:13:36]:
I failed. And it's not quite that it's not binary. Like, you fail. There's sometimes when you're trying to learn skill, there's no objective feedback. It's good or bad. Is that also failure? Like, is this feedback? You know, because here I see this is the same idea of a feedback loop. Like you do something, maybe you get some feedback, but it's not always like yes or no because you didn't really fail per se. How do you see that?
[00:14:00]:
Yeah, in that kind of situation, when you don't have a clear outcome.
[00:14:10]:
Still.
[00:14:10]:
You can feel like a failure because probably in your mind you have an ideal outcome. So I started to learn marketing. I started to learn marketing because I want to make more money with my business. So I want to make more money with my business. What means more money with my business? I don't know. X amount of money. And if you don't reach that amount of money, probably you feel, okay, I failed. I don't.
[00:14:37]:
I didn't learn marketing. But so still I think you can translate into a binary decision. It's yes or no, it's failed or it's not failed. It's probably the same, in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. Despite of the fact that at the first glass can be, I don't know, more vague, more generally, more abstract, that if you try to break down in multiple steps, I think you can identify a yes or no reason to. To fail or not.
[00:15:23]:
Well, if what you say then is true, one could say that failure and learning and just growing as a person is the same.
[00:15:32]:
Yeah, it's the same. And I feel on my own journey, because I had multiple failures in personal life, starting from dating or interaction with other people in business, starting with raising money, starting with hiring people, developing the product, understand the customers. So I had A lot of failure in my life and in the beginning was really painful to as an entrepreneur. Especially if you enter the journey of entrepreneurship and you start to build a business, you fail exponential than an average person that I don't know, keep just the job and have the comfort zone and probably do the same thing. So for an entrepreneur, the failure journey, it's more painful because you have multiple opportunities. But every time when I failed and I try to learn something from that experience, the next time I feel a little better. And every time when I ignore the failure from different reasons, doesn't matter, I repeat the same mistake and I repeat the same mistake and I repeat the same mistake because I don't look at my failure. I don't understand.
[00:17:06]:
I didn't understand. Okay, what happens here? So the things repeat. Yeah. It's really correlated with your personal development.
[00:17:18]:
I agree. And I think that's why entrepreneurship is great for anyone who wants because it's not necessarily business in beginning. Maybe you start for doing money.
[00:17:28]:
Yeah.
[00:17:29]:
Which is fine. Right. It's nothing bad about that in money inherently. It's not bad by itself. But I think if you see it as, look, I'm trying to become a better person. Like though I. We know entrepreneurs which are, one could say, you know, evil or I don't know. But at least for us, I think it was a very good personal development.
[00:17:53]:
Because the point is like hey, it's. It's about growing very quickly. And I think like you're sure there is some macroeconomic things like where your background where you're starting, you know, where you're doing your business. Also like if you're, I would assume like if you have kids and you know, depending on your socioeconomic status and we're current phase in your life, it might be harder, etc. But whatever station you are, you can still. You're forced to grow as quickly as possible. And if you can do entrepreneurship, it's one of the 1 Ways to like grow as a person quickly because you're forced to confront your failures. Failing to do so failing will result in poor business decisions.
[00:18:40]:
And you just do not grow as quick because you're just repeating the same mistakes all over again. Yeah. So now I want to tell one more story. And because this is a bit more fuzzy, I think like modeler for the about 1/2 year I've been working on a new algorithm called Studio sound. Basically you record with a shitty microphone and you will get something like this out. So like a microphone sounds like this. A different type of microphone, not of these fancy AKG, AKJ, AKGs or whatever they're called here. These are professional ones.
[00:19:23]:
But anyway, the point is it's an AI, right? And I've been doing a lot of AI research, I've tried a lot of models and the feedback look is not clear. As in like it didn't work right. Okay, I tried the idea, I tried the model, it didn't work. Maybe I figured out why it didn't work. But sometimes it was not obvious why it didn't work right? Like I tried to. So it was really like alchemy a bit. It was a bit like trying to find the path when there's no path and the feedback loop is a bit unclear because it failed. Nobody will tell you what to do next.
[00:20:05]:
It's not obvious what is the next step. And there's no direct feedback look. And for me it was very frustrating because I don't know why it wouldn't work. And I would have a guess why it wouldn't work. Okay, maybe not enough data, maybe the architecture doesn't represent that thing. But it was a lot of guessing and I think research in general is like, you know, it's guessing lot of experiments and it was very, I was, you know, pushing, pushing. Now I've got to, to give you the ending of the story actually. I'm very close to a great.
[00:20:41]:
I'm very happy with my results now and I will launch it soon. So it's really good now. I'm very happy.
[00:20:47]:
But yeah, it's really good. I, I saw a sample last night. It's really, really good.
[00:20:54]:
But before getting that phase, I've tried, I think over 50 experiments and yeah, I know I got maybe some idea, but it was soul sucking. One and a half year of doing constant experiments and feeling helpless. No one to share, like, hey, you know why this? Because like who the fuck is an AI researcher in audio around my friend group? Nobody, unfortunately. Only me and myself. So maybe the only best friend was getting schizophrenia and then. Or become bipolar and then have multiple Adrians to discuss with. But I don't know what is the lesson here? Because sometimes you're doing something for so long and you're just pushing yourself and there's like, it's just soul crushing and like, because there's no feedback, like, oh, I know to do this. It's like, yeah, you get sometimes, but it's very unclear and you're just searching a needle in a haystack, trying to become better in this.
[00:21:50]:
And I don't know how you, for me it worked out, but it's like, I. I would not blame anyone if they would drop off mid, you know, like, give up midway. Just to give you one more example, for more context, something more simpler. When I was younger, I was doing parkour and also skateboarding, and they're kind of similar here in this context, the pain part, not the fee, the feedback look was quite direct. So when you do parkour, you do some things which you put your health into risk, and you may hurt yourself while trying to learn a new skill. Like, for example, let's say you're trying to do a front flip. You do a front flip, you land on your back. The feedback is you didn't spin enough, maybe, or whatever.
[00:22:42]:
You did something in the technique. Not quite well, the warm up, etc. The run up. But it's painful. It's. You cannot be. Oh, you don't have the right mindset. My back is burning.
[00:22:54]:
I just hit myself. I'm. I'm dead on the floor. What is. You know, I'm in pain, I'm dying here. And you tell me. Yeah, but it's your mindset, bro. It's your mindset.
[00:23:05]:
It's like you just need to see this as a positive experience.
[00:23:08]:
Yeah.
[00:23:08]:
So you have pain there. It's there, real.
[00:23:10]:
It's physical.
[00:23:11]:
Exactly, it's physical. You do. Let's say you try to do ollie on the skateboard. The. The board goes between your. In your nuts. You're screaming out of pain. Oh, bro, you jumped so high, man.
[00:23:22]:
Like, I'm dying. I. I might be childless. I could, you know, I'll be childless now. Childless now. Lots more mma, right? Oh, you know, you do sparring, you get a jab in the face and very hard one. Oh, bro, you didn't focus. Yeah, I know, bro.
[00:23:39]:
I'm tired. Like, focus more. Yeah, I know, but I'm still third. Yeah, exactly.
[00:23:46]:
Yeah.
[00:23:46]:
So that's. What would you say in that regard? What do you think about that?
[00:23:53]:
When you told me that story, I remember me in different situations when I feel kind of the same, especially in. I think it's in entrepreneurial life, but probably in real life, it's applicable to when you try to do something new to you, for example, learn marketing or, I don't know, other type of skills. In my experience, I had multiple times when I don't have other people to, I don't know, brainstorm or exchange ideas or a playbook to apply step by step. Okay. What I have to do in order to master this skill and this process, it's scary from a point of view because you, you are aware you have a lack of these skills. You don't have a playbook or know exactly what to do. You don't have other people to brainstorm about. Okay, bro, how I can improve my marketing stills or whatever.
[00:25:18]:
And you have to figure out yourself doing by yourself. And this is something that I also experienced recently with Vatis. From the point of view of business, we have almost the same revenue for six time mounts. So I try to discuss with multiple people. Basically nobody can give me an accurate advice about how to move the business beside the current mrr.
[00:25:54]:
Basically you plateaued and you know how to overcome the plateau, right? The SaaS plateau.
[00:25:59]:
Yeah. And advice that I received was okay, hire a salespeople, I don't know, do more marketing or something. Really, really. Basically. But this type of advice doesn't help you. So what I learned from here, it's the fact that multiple times the journey, you multiple times during the journey probably will feel alone because yeah, experience entrepreneurship, it's not for everyone. And how many friends entrepreneur do you have? So yeah, the journey, you'll feel lonely in multiple situations. So you have to figure out by yourself.
[00:26:50]:
Maybe that's another episode idea about mental health.
[00:26:54]:
Yeah. Because it's really hard. It's really hard to run a business. Manage your mental health, also manage your people and keep them up. So make some good oats as well. Make some goods. Oh so well. Yeah.
[00:27:13]:
Yeah.
[00:27:16]:
Now on the positive side, after a while, I don't know how you feel about it, but making a lot of mistakes sets you free. You stop caring. It's like the pain maybe becomes more dull and it's like stop caring. Maybe sounds bad, but I think in this case it's like a quite positive effect because it just do shit, man. You just, you have a thought, you just do it. You don't think about OH1 if it's gonna happen. What I don't care, I just don't have time. I'm gonna do it now.
[00:27:52]:
Doesn't matter what does the outcome. Right. You just do it without thinking too much about the outcome. Because you'll be like, I'm gonna fail anyway. I'm just gonna start now. Start the fail process now. And you just move quicker somehow. And I think that's by doing that because first of all, nobody cares.
[00:28:10]:
Right? I think that's one of the things. Because you're lonely in the process and realize nobody gives a shit, which is okay. Right? Like we are not all, we are not the main Characters of the world. We are the main characters of our own movie. So there's no need anyone else to, you know, care about necessarily. Maybe they will be intrigued, but that's not a given. So if nobody cares and failure is for sure, it's certain. It's a really freeing thought because you can do whatever you want to do and if you keep it long enough, he maybe won't be, what? Expert.
[00:28:53]:
But he won't be bad at it. Right. At least. And that's quite motivating. I think like you do this and if you ignore the emotional part, etcetera, you'll be good at it eventually.
[00:29:05]:
Yeah.
[00:29:06]:
As mentioned, world class. It's, you know, like, oh, I'm going to be a world class guitarist. Ah, nah, I will be okay. You know, I could play maybe some chords, maybe play some songs. We'll be decent about it. But I'm not. Most likely I won't be world class. It's first of all, you know, business, you know, you focus on other stuff, on your life.
[00:29:27]:
But yeah, and most, most cases in life you don't need to be the world class. You just be good enough. And if you have a lot of skills which are good enough, that is at least from a business perspective, enough to make money. Right. So yeah, I feel it. Free and freeing.
[00:29:42]:
Yeah. Yeah. As entrepreneur, you don't master a skill or really, really good. You master multiple skills at a medium level because that's, it's your, your job to master multiple things, to handle multiple things, but in an average way.
[00:30:00]:
Maybe not using the word mastering. Maybe we learn things good enough because mastering implies, you know, mastery. But. Yeah. So what is failure for you? Would you, how would you sum it up for you?
[00:30:18]:
Failure for me right now, it's a signal that I have to improve something at me.
[00:30:28]:
For me, failure means freeing yourself. Okay, thank you for listening and see you next time. Bye bye.