The Sky's The Limit

This episode focuses on the entrepreneurial journey of Kirill Bigai, co-founder of Preply, detailing the challenges and growth of his language-learning platform.

1. Resilience in business is crucial, as evidenced by Preply's navigation of multiple crises while continuing to grow.
2. The importance of a strong company culture that evolves with the company's growth and challenges.
3. Strategic pivots, such as changing the business model and targeting international markets, can significantly drive a company's success.
4. Building strong relationships with early users or clients can lead to sustained growth and loyalty.
5. Continuous innovation and adaptation are key to maintaining relevance and competitive edge in a global market.

1: Introduction and Background

Overview of Kirill Bigai's journey with Preply and the early challenges faced by the company. Key topics include the founding vision and initial business model pivots.

• David Cohen: "Today on the Give First podcast, it's my friend and amazing founder Kirill Bigai of Preply."

2: Evolution of Preply

Discussion on the strategic decisions that led to Preply's growth, including the shift to a recurring payment model and global expansion.

• Kirill Bigai: "We started doing recurring payments. Before that it was lead generation."

3: Overcoming Adversities

Kirill talks about the challenges during geopolitical crises and the pandemic, highlighting the resilience needed in entrepreneurship.

• Kirill Bigai: "At that time, the war broke, so Russia invaded Ukraine."

4: Building a Culture

Focus on how Preply builds and maintains its culture, including the adoption of core values and principles.

• Kirill Bigai: "Today we have ten principles that are grouped by three big categories."

5: Future Directions and Closing

Kirill discusses the future of Preply and the potential paths forward, including technological innovations and market expansion.

• Kirill Bigai: "We are very focused on language learning today."

1. Be Adaptable: In rapidly changing markets, the ability to pivot and innovate can define your success.
2. Foster Resilience: Building a culture that can withstand external pressures and crises is vital.
3. Emphasize Culture: Invest in a strong, evolving culture that aligns with your business goals and values.
4. Engage Your Base: Develop deep connections with your initial user base for long-term loyalty and feedback.
5. Plan for Scale: Prepare your business to scale by continually evaluating and enhancing your operational and strategic frameworks.

Kirill Bigai, Preply CEO and co-founder, launched the company’s first set of values back in 2015, while participating in the Techstars Berlin program. But as the team has changed, so have the values.

“It’s an evolution,” said Bigai, who involves his 650+ staff members in their development and incorporates the values into hiring, performance reviews, and operations.

David Cohen agrees that fine tuning and articulating values is smart for business and for company culture. In this edition of Cohen’s Give First Podcast, he and Bigai dig into values, hiring practices, stubbornness and how, when the company expanded outside of the Ukraine, Bigai would call every single customer himself.

People

David Cohen, Kirill Bigai

Companies

Preply

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Kirill Bigai

Content Warnings:

None

David Cohen

Today on the Give first podcast, it's my friend and amazing founder Kirill big eye of Preply. He's going to talk about building preply into the pretty large company it is today. About 700 employees. They raised $170,000,000. More importantly, they built an amazing product that I'm a huge fan of.

We're going to tell you the story and some of the challenges in building the company right now here on the Give first podcast. You.

Brad Feld

Hi everyone, this is David Cohen and I'm here with my amazing co host, Brad Feld. Hey, Brad. And this is the Give first podcast. And in the startup world, give first means simply trying to help anyone, especially entrepreneurs, without any expectation of getting anything back. So we'll be talking to mentors and founders about what give first looks like in action and how it makes great entrepreneurship possible.

David Cohen

We polled everyone and they said consistently that their favorite part of the show. Was the legal mumbo jumbo. So here it is. The following discussion is an expression of personal opinion and does not represent the. Opinion of Techstars or any company.

Unknown

We discuss our conversations for informational purposes only, including any mention of securities or funds. This is not legal, business, investment or tax advice and is not intended for use by any investor. Certain of Techstar's funds own or may. Own in the future. Securities and some of the companies discussed in this podcast.

David Cohen

Got it.

Kirill, thanks for joining us on the Give first podcast. Really excited to talk to you today. Thank you for having me, David. It's exciting when you're a customer. I'm a customer on preply.

I've done, I don't know, 40 or so spanish tutoring sessions. It's really fun to be able to do a podcast with someone you met a long time ago. Techstars Berlin, 2015 if I have it, my memory serves correct. And then watching you build this incredible business at Prepley and then reconnecting again and telling you, hey, I'm a customer and I love your product. So this is really fun for me.

I hope it'll be fun for you. Absolutely. Those are the best moments when someone is using your product and happy with that. This is really great. It feels amazing.

Terrific product. Life changing. Love the tutor I work with and I'm getting pretty good at Spanish. I have to say I'm ready to take my intermediate test and maybe I'll try another language or maybe in the future practice something else. On preply.

Tell us a little bit about the company. Just super high level where things are at today, and then we'll rewind and maybe talk about history a bit. But tell us about preply today. Preply today is the largest platform for live language learning, and we believe that language learning can be much more efficient than it is today. And we invest in building the largest network of tutors and support them with AI tools to help them to bring the best experience for learners and help them to learn faster.

The last time I read something as 35,000 tutors, is that about right, or probably more by now? Yeah, it's 40,000 now active tutors who are having classes monthly. And just so people understand the shape and size of the business, you're what, around 500 employees today? Is that roughly right? I think we have 650.

Kirill Bigai

Going to be 700 this quarter. That's the beautiful thing about startups. Whatever number you have, it's already wrong because you're just growing and growing. So amazing. So let's rewind maybe to around 2015 when you were applying to Techstars.

David Cohen

Talk about the business at that point. I know Simeon Dukach, who has been around techstars for a long time. A good friend of mine was already involved with the company. But talk about 2015, maybe the period of time getting into techstars and sort of where you were at that moment. Yeah, well, I now remember that it was still very challenging moments, I guess so.

Kirill Bigai

We were bootstrapping this business when we returned back from the US, and for a few years we've been in Kiev, three co founders. We just hired our first engineer and it was 2015. 2014 was very challenging as well. So in Ukraine, we had revolution, then there was invasion by Russia, the first one.

In 2015, we changed a little bit our business model, and actually we started seeing revenue growth and. Very good one, and we were quite excited about it. And I remember we met with Simeon and Evelyn, who was also another early advisor of ours in Kiev. We had a breakfast and Simeon suggested that we should go to techstars because he feels the company is on the right level and we need to have a boost to get it to series a. And we really like that idea.

We applied to Dexter's Berlin and in some period of time, we were selected to go for the final interviews. And I remember that I received an advice that one thing that can strengthen our admission. Is it the right word? Admission? Application.

Yeah, application. Yeah. I still improve my English. It's pretty good. Kuro, I think you're doing all right.

Yeah, you haven't heard me. In 2015, when I was applying, it was much worse. But, yeah, I think one advice was that a good referral can help. And I asked one of our early investors, Dan Pasco, to write something about prepley. And he wrote a very long email to Jan Slopinsky.

At that time he was working private equity and what he wrote was basically about our stubbornness that we refused to give up a few times when we already kind of had a bad business, but we still decided to pivot and go to another idea. And now we see a growing business. And I remember through the program with Jens on one of the Thursday, Thursday when we had drinks, Jens shared with me that that email really helped. He really liked the company. He would invest anyway.

But that email actually made him even more confident. Yeah, it's amazing when somebody goes out of their way not just to send a basic recommendation, but to actually share in detail why they think you're such a great company. And that, by the way, is one of the traits I've learned is just, these are unstoppable founders. You're one of them, right? Like, they're going to do this and they're going to be really resilient and get through all the hard times, which we'll talk about a little bit here on the show.

David Cohen

But what was the pivot in that moment? What was the change in the business right around that time? I think one of the largest change of the business was changing the business model. We started doing recurring payments. Before that it was lead generation.

Kirill Bigai

And I think even more important change was that we decided to go global and we decided to scale internationally. Before that, majority of customers were in Ukraine. And step by step we started launching new markets and new language versions. And I think during Techstars and after Techstars, very shortly, international revenue became basically the majority of our revenue. That was interesting moment for us, for sure.

David Cohen

And I imagine sort of a marketplace, right. You're connecting tutors with learners. Right. And you had to figure out, how do I. You have 40,000 of these tutors today, but you had to figure out, how do I get all these people?

And they're probably not the easiest people to reach, right. They're all working locally and maybe have their own clients. How did you build up this amazing community of tutors to then attract the students? You've got so many of them. How did you do that over time?

Kirill Bigai

Yeah, I like the story about the times when we started. So we basically had two products before and we failed them. So we decided to return back to Kiev, start from scratch. And the way we started was very different from the previous times. Instead of building a full fledged product, what we decided to do, we decided to launch a landing page.

We built it in a day and there was a simple form, if you want a tutor, give me your phone number and I'll call you back. And I just started calling back to every single customer. We run Google Ads for that. We didn't look at unicornomics. For us it was important to talk to real customers.

And when I understood what customers needs, I would go to the Internet and would manually look for different tutors, would call them and would explain that they have potential customer in a period of months. We get our first hundred tutors to platform and we basically manually facilitated those relationships in the beginning. And then we started step by step improving the platform. We create registration for tutors, then tutor profile, then search of tutors. So it was very interesting process and I would definitely, I mean these times it's called concierge mvp, like a fancy name.

At that time we didn't know this term. We were just doing because we thought would be the fastest way to reach customers. Right? You invented that? Yeah, I don't think so.

David Cohen

But you practiced it before it had a name. And I find that look, it's really just talking to customers, listening to customers. I love one of the stories I've heard about sort of when you were early on talking to these tutors and trying to build relationships, really trying to be helpful to them and kind of give first to them, maybe talk about what you thought you could bring to them rather than just trying to convince them to be a customer. Yeah, well, I think the whole motion in the beginning was really give 1st. First of all we were calling to tutors by ourselves and we were offering them a customer.

Kirill Bigai

So straight away, take the customers, pay us later. That was type of relationships. But also very early we decided to invite, we were quite inspired by Airbnb example when they went to different houses in New York and actually make photos of their apartments. And we started inviting our tutors to our small office and we actually did a photo shooting for them and video shooting so they can put this on their social networks and on preplay platform as well. And we built quite good relationships with them.

I gave them my personal phone number so they would call me, they would complain about the product or some customer and it really, really helped because those relationships were super valuable. And over time we were able to very quickly iterate on the platform. I love when I hear stories of building your customer base, your marketplace using these sort of give first tactics. People always ask know how do you do this? And they you know, we have freemium software, right?

David Cohen

We give it away for free, and there's real value. Yeah, that's a form of give first. But I think what you're doing, what you're describing sort of the Airbnb example or taking their headshots so they look more professional in their ad or bringing them their first customer, those are even better examples of give first because it sort of creates a loyalty. Right. Because one of the challenges you have with marketplace platforms is people going off platform, right.

The platform has to provide enough value for them to want to keep those relationships on the platform. And I think the better relationship you have with them, the more you give to them, the easier it is for them to stay. So I assume that's been a big part of the formula. It sounds like it has for sure. I think in the beginning, we built a very good relationship with many tutors.

Kirill Bigai

Over time, we, of course, evolved and we built our marketplace to make sure that tutors are incentivized to build ratings on preply. And this platform represents them. And the better rating they have, the more customers they will have, the more exposure. And I think that's the right way to build a marketplace, to incentivize your supply to be on the platform. Well, I take your word for it because it's obviously doing great.

David Cohen

Growing like crazy. You've attracted a large amount of capital from investors, you've got a large employee base, and it seems like the sky's the limit. What's the future? I mean, right now you've been pretty focused on language, and I know you think practice makes possible for any kind of learning. Where will it go from here?

Kirill Bigai

We are very focused on language learning today. We are going much deeper there, and we started introducing AI tools for tutors and learners to actually help them during their learning process. And, yeah, we believe that we can significantly improve how people learn languages and make it the most efficient way to learn. And, yeah, I think that we closed Serac extension this year.

As of now, we don't have plans for the next fundraising, and our goal is to go public at some point of time, which we are very excited about, and we are working towards that goal or milestone, let's say. Awesome. Well, you mentioned the series C. I think it ended up being $120,000,000 or something, so hopefully that lasts you a little while. I know it was originally a $50 million round, and I know you have some sort of an interesting thing was happening, sad thing as well.

David Cohen

During that fundraise, that created some challenges, maybe talk a little bit about what was going on during your series C when you set out to raise the 50 million that eventually turned into 120. So it ends well, but what were the challenges in that fundraise? Yeah, I think series C round was an interesting one. So we had quite a lot of demand from investors and everything was going very well. And we had know two weeks before signing all the final documents, so everything was done, due diligence was done.

Kirill Bigai

And at that time, the war broke, so Russia invaded Ukraine and, yeah, it's the most challenging times in my life because it was a lot of things happening on a personal level, a lot of things happening in business as well. We had 150 employees in Kiev and we had to recreate them from Kiev to a safer location. And there were some investors who decided to not invest, so we had to replace them very quickly. We had high confidence in majority of the investors in the round, so in the end it was quite good. But those two weeks were quite stressful and everything was happening at the time.

Evocation of family, evocation of preppers, personal feelings about everything that was happening and still happening and closing the round. It followed by global crisis. And before that we had Covid.

David Cohen

Yeah. Difficult period of time, personally and professionally. It's, as you said, ongoing and so wishing, obviously, the best for family and everyone involved with the company, the tutors, the employees, that I'm sure are still very connected to what's happening there. But somehow you got through that and you ended up replacing those investors, closing that 50 million, and then you just mentioned the extension. So there's been so much demand in the company, you've been able to sort of grow that and really have, I would expect, plenty of capital now to sort of keep building and keep doing great things.

So that's an awesome ending to a story that I'm sure had its ups and downs. Yes, absolutely. I'm very lucky to already, at that time, having a very senior leadership team who were extremely helpful on all the matters. And, yeah, I feel we only became stronger through challenging times as a team, as a company. Well, let's talk about the culture of preply a little bit internally with your team.

I think recently you had culture days internally where you sort of get everybody together and sort of hype them up and share the message, talk a little bit about building the culture. I think it's one thing founders are always really interested in when things work. Usually it's about more than money, it's about changing the world in some way. What are the values over at preply and how have you been able to attract such great people and how do you keep promoting those values over time? Yeah, I think we were lucky to start thinking about our values quite early in the kinder journey.

Kirill Bigai

So back in 2015 when we were in tech starts, we introduced our first values and recently we did an upgrade. So we probably would upgrade values every like two to three years as company evolved and as we understood ourselves better, as we understood what we are lacking better, and what would help us to be successful. Today we have ten principles that are grouped by three big categories. And the categories are being ambitious, being bold and collaborate. And each of the groups have a few principles.

So in ambition principle, we have principles like care to change the world. It's really care about the craft that you are doing and that's what helps you to change the world. Via preply, we do it for learners really big focus on our tutors community and together with them we want to improve the experience for learners and keep perfecting, basically being ambitious in how we perfect every single piece of our journey. By being bold, we mean that now is the time. So there is a lot of urgency and speed.

Discipline, execution is basically what we say we are going to do. We are going to do it and we want to do it in a very disciplined way and try to focus and not do anything that is not our goal. And deep dive, which means being able to dive deeper and connect details to a more high level strategic level. And collaboration is about growth mindset, being able to continuously raising the bar for your talent, for talent around yourself and hiring a new talent challenge, disagree and commit, which basically incentivize everyone to speak up and challenge anyone in the organization. But at some moment when we need to make a decision, we should disagree and commit to the direction and one preply that we prioritize collaboration, inclusion, and we move as a one team.

David Cohen

Awesome. I love the disagree and commit. We use that one at techstars as well, because as you get bigger, not everyone is going to agree. You want to make sure people are heard, but the real keyword is commit. Even though you didn't get the way you wanted it to be, you commit to the decision that is made and there's no I told you so.

That's one of my favorite ones. You mentioned that they've evolved, you sort of changed them. And a lot of people think, oh, no, values. When a company is born, they have to be set and they can never be changed. And I don't think that's true.

I see them evolve a lot and they usually are evolutions. They're not typically, we threw out our values. They're really fine tuning them and articulating them better. Is that what you felt like happened at preply? How are they different from kind of the values you started with?

Kirill Bigai

Absolutely. I think that they evolved over time, mainly because we also, as founders and as a team, way moving. And I think what also happening is it's not only driven by founders. In the beginning, yes, but as you grow, you hire very good professionals, you enhance your leadership team, and they each bring something new to the company. And then you suddenly see, okay, that's what we were missing.

Right. And that's what should become our new values. And I am going to commit to this value as well. So it's also evolution of every founder and trying to see best treats and what works for the company and company mission. And how does that show up?

David Cohen

I know a lot of people listening are values. Yeah, we have our own values, and it's so hard to get everyone on the same page. You had this culture days. What are the tactics you're using? How do you drive these values into people and reinforce them?

Kirill Bigai

Yeah, I would say that it consists from a few things. So, first of all, when we work on values, we create different focus groups and we also ask all the organization. So it's not me alone thinking about what the next value should be. We actually crowdsource quite a lot and involve a lot of people. I think the second part is to be able to really do it very well on copy and really crystallize what you mean by every single principle.

We recently invited a very nice speaker, Erin Mayer, who wrote a book, no rules. Rules, together with Riz Hessing. And one of her advice was to always see the dilemma behind the principle. Each principle should have a dilemma that gives you kind of a compass, a direction, what direction you should go, left or right. And I think that's another good advice.

And if you can articulate it very well for your company, that would be very good. And I think the last is just operationalizing it, including it into hiring process, into performance review, do. So. Basically, older organization needs to evaluate each other regularly, every quarter. And based on that, there would be promotions, salary raises.

So it becomes a part of the company Operations, and you cannot really escape it. Yeah, so that's what I would say, inspire continuous talk about values and better understanding them. Right. Works better than some posters on the wall, I imagine. Just say the values and people walk around and see them.

David Cohen

They live them in their everyday work, and they'reinforced by the people they're working with. I know you also have a unique philosophy about interviewing people. You've interviewed a lot. So 7800 people now on the team. When somebody comes to preply and they want a job and you're interviewing them, how do you think about that?

Kirill Bigai

First of all, I think that the very first part that I would like to do is to, in a way, give first and explain what the company is about, what is our history, what we stand for, and answer any question from potential employee that I'm interviewing. And only after that I start asking my questions. And yeah, I really like to understand first what's going to be the goal of this role for the next two years and what are the key, let's say key traits and experiences that this person needs to have and try to understand how I can check them through the interview process. There's also a very nice book that I remember, I follow quite a bit. I think it's called a team.

David Cohen

It was a really good tv show that we had here in America. But maybe this is a different book, I think. Yeah, I think it's a different book. I need to remind myself about the name. We'll put it in the show notes for people so that they have it.

I'll follow up with you and we'll put it in the notes that we include. One thing I get asked all the time is how people can best take advantage of being in techstars. Do you have any advice as someone who went through it years ago? Yeah. My advice generally to everyone who would ask is that you have to be super active.

Unknown

It's up to you to take everything techstars can offer. And I remember our mentor madness days when we met so many mentors. And I think it's up to you to follow up and build those relationships. And through those relationships, preppy was able to build a very good network in Europe and us, but it was up to us how to build them. And yeah, I would just say that you need to commit to the program and really be very proactive trying to take maximum payments.

David Cohen

Awesome. Super helpful. I was actually just on a different call, teaching angel investing to a bunch of people and I said the commitment and consistency is what matters. Right. If you want to be a great angel investor, you need to be committed to it.

So same thing. Taking advantage of what techstars offers. Show up and really take advantage of it. Good advice, but look at a high level awesome to catch up with. You hear the story, hear how the give first sort of mentality of the Techstars program still lives on.

And preplely, that's really cool. And I have to admit, as I listen to you talk, I do what a lot of language learners do. Apparently I'm translating what you're saying into Spanish as best I can because that's a way that I learn and I find that I'm doing that all the time now and I'm really enthusiastic about learning Spanish. I think a big part of that is just the tutor and prepley helping me do that and the way that you learn on there. So anybody that wants to learn a language, I'm a huge fan.

I encourage you to check it out and go use it if you're not already. Great product, great value. And Kirill, it's awesome to catch up with you, to hear how far you've come. And I know you have a long way to go. Still so excited.

Maybe to read about an IPO someday, to read about you crossing, I don't know, 5100 thousand tutors. It's all going to happen. It's been really fun being a part of the story and thanks for sharing some of it with us here today on give first. Thank you very much, David. It was incredible to be with you on the show.

Kirill Bigai

Textors played a huge role in our journey and it was definitely a game changer for us. So we are very grateful to be part of this community and yeah, would be very happy to help in any way we can. Thanks. Always fun to hear when people like your product, as you said earlier. So thanks for everything.

David Cohen

Thanks a lot for listening to the show today. We'd love to hear your feedback, ideas or who you'd like to hear next on Give first. And please leave a rating and review. Ideally a good one, and reach out anytime to podcasts@techstars.com or on Twitter. I'm at David Cohen.

Unknown

See you next time. Don't forget, forget give first.