This week at Opora we held a business dinner with Vladimir Makarov, a person with 3 successful exits and experience raising $5.5 million in investments.

Below I want to share a few personal insights from the meeting:

You need to regularly communicate with founders who are several times more experienced than you. This will constantly expand your worldview and allow you to see opportunities that you would never see when communicating with founders at your level. By the way, I made a big post about how to find such people, right here


Why start a business in the shrinking Russian market if you can immediately do the same globally but get much more output? Lack of experience in building a business in a foreign market can actually be just an excuse and an internal fear of going there — in reality, everything may be easier or the same as in the Russian market


To test a hypothesis, it's enough to do outreach of 200 messages per week on LinkedIn or Gmail, and through communication with foreign founders, immerse yourself in the market context and make the first sales. Vladimir built his first international company this way, closing clients with checks of $350,000+ using this method


Previously, I automatically ruled out building a business internationally. I had a belief that until you build a huge company in Russia, there's no point in going abroad. It's great when such limitations are removed in one evening 🟢

My channel: Ilya Kramnik