Vadim Rogovskiy discusses his journey building and exiting multiple companies, including lessons learned from scaling to $13.
Vadim Rogovskiy discusses his journey building and exiting multiple companies, including lessons learned from scaling to $13.5M ARR and the challenges of knowing when to sell. He also shares insights from his pivot into AI and his current venture, EVE.
a Founder fails only when he stops building it's not about even outcome it's not about sios of the exits and even exits at all it's the path it's the journey and if you continue your building you're always going to be happy and [Music] fulfilled all righty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show so today we have a Founder that has done it multiple times been on both sides of the table we're going to be talking about switching Industries switching sides of the table you name it you know building scaling financing exiting you know he had a really nice exit that we're gonna be discussing but again without further Ado let's welcome our guest today badim rovski welcome to the show uh hi everyone happy to be here so originally born in Ukraine so give us a walk through Memory Lane how was life growing up for you well I was born in uh in Odesa Ukraine it's a a city actually pretty
similar to San Francisco I realized that when I first visited San Francisco a long time ago but it's a um small City on on a Black Sea Coast uh also located on hills with all the trams going up and down and very diverse uh people lots of cultures uh from different countries and lots of uh like lots of influence from different countries and uh yeah very cosmopolitical a career in uh um in Telecom uh and uh and then and now he's actually he's a professor in at Poly Technic University still there actually he's still in Ukraine and my my mother is a uh a music teacher so she teaches kids to play piano know uh and yeah and I had a business management degree in one of the most well-known Ukrainian universities back then well in your case you know talking about the early the early years for you I mean when you were 18 you know that's when you started experimenting with startup so how did the
whole startup world come knocking to you oh that's that's a good question because I never before I was 18 I I I never actually had anide had a clear conviction that I wanted to become a a Founder because my dad he was like a care he he he he was he has been building like a career his entire life and that's why I always thought I'm going to be I like him and I tried so I mean I just I had some a few early jobs when I was a a freshman or I think where I was in second grade in University I I I went to so I worked at a couple software companies I worked at online casino I and I worked at at a software development shop uh but I didn't like it I uh I was probably I I was fired a few times because I was I I disagreed with my bosses but uh and then I just got fascinated like what if I have some pet projects because internet was lots of fun and it just I didn't even think of money or some
monetary outcome etc for me it was more like CL because it was so cool so interesting and that's how I started to play with it and treating it as a game before I even realized it could be something serious well I mean it became serious with ad Center so uh tell us about what happened with that Center yeah so I uh um so I actually so one of the software companies I worked for they they they were uh they were actually doing uh uh one of the projects I worked on it was like an ad network uh like U basically advertising advertising network uh that connected um advertisers with with websites they wanted to place their ads on and and I was responsible for like I had to create a like the basically like all the how to say uh to cover the functionality to to to describe the functionality or all the all the documentation for development team and yeah I became an kind of an expert in in add and in
all this auctions uh I mean like ad placements Etc dyamic pricing Etc and yeah and then I I started to learn more about the that industry in general and I identified and and and in in my search and and while I was there I already had a few businesses so one of them was social media marketing agency called face Toof face media was a small agency like my pet project uh they we were helping Ukrainian local businesses to promote on uh Twitter um Facebook and also local social media Network vk.com and and then I became an expert in Social networks and how do you how do you kind of promote your business there and then I realize that there is an opportunity to actually help businesses to use uh basically ad networks that are implemented inside this social media platforms like Facebook ads right or LinkedIn ads and it was early years early days when they only added apis that you can uh pull to
to to run ads remotely and the faes were very bad if you remember interface of Facebook ads or you know like or on vk.com ads uh like almost like 14 years ago it was really I mean there was super primitive and that's why so I decided to so I I went to first of all we started with vk.com I went to the I was uh so so I went to their headquarters we had a deal that I basically we we we got their API and we were resp we were we committed to bring some revenues to them because I already had some access to small businesses locally yeah we built a platform started to uh promote local businesses there uh we tried to scale with outside of Eastern Europe but uh I at that time I didn't have enough experience there and from that and actually uh and at that time also started to explore different things where where else we can run ads and we also found a niche that smartphones started to to just
become something sub something meaningful and there were smartphone smartphone apps like iOS like iPhone apps Android apps and we also decided what what if we run ads there and it basically gradually it evolved into a separate company that was later we called it clicky so at some point of time I realized actually work on two companies and clicky actually Center was doing kind of fine but we we we were not able to scale it outside of the outside of Eastern Europe so and I decided to sell it and luckily uh basically that uh I was work one of the companies I mentioned I was working on it was a before I started ad Center as an employee I was working for a us-based company verto media that then became ateligence so basically when I decided to sell the company I went just a few people and one of them was actually the owner of of V media and he ultimately agreed to buy the company because uh uh
they needed they had they had uh display ads they had uh paperclick they had contextual ads but they didn't have anything on social and it was a good basically it was like a uh pretty much very relevant add-on in terms of their product uh and also the team so yeah that's how it's uh uh and for me when I was 25 it was very meaningful I was I bought a house I bought um uh a Porche of course and a few other things and I was having fun uh and uh then I switched to click yeah so maybe maybe you have any question I mean probably the the the listeners are wondering what Porsche did you did you buy uh I I I bought cayen Sport and I also upgraded It upgraded it was one of the it was the loudest Ken in inessa good choice good choice now now now for you the next company was clicky uh you kind of like started on clicky you know even before you know the company at Center had wrapped up so so tell us
about clicky uh and and and what was that Journey like with with clicky because clicky also you guys tried D m&a but the timing was off so so tell us about clicky and before I guess you know even we get to the m&a what were the origin story of clicky and how did you guys go about really building the AR because you stayed off from raising money until you know you had like a bunch of uh Millions already in annual recurring Revenue yeah so so like um yeah so the idea was that so clicky didn't use any of the apis but clicky it was specifically like a Marketplace for for Publishers and advertisers and we started it again we started it not even in in in Mobile in Mobile it really took off but before mobile we started it in uh like when when I was still working on Art Center the same team did experiments and we and we and we tried to place ads in side social media applications gaming
applications on Facebook and on vk.com it went well uh but the market was small at that time very small so at first we it was growing very fast but then when we hit I don't know like 20 30,000 a months uh we're like uh we got stuck and there was a lot of competition then because we were probably one of the first but I didn't know how I didn't feel I didn't know how to scale and when I need to I I didn't feel market then Dynamics at that time I couldn't zoom out and have a helicopter view like I can do now and at that time I was just like basically in a in a race without zooming out and looking at the opportunity holistically so um and then we saw a mobile opportunity that okay there were some of these app developers started to launch apps on mobile like okay there it's even on earlier stage even than social apps because social apps started to become something big so yeah so we so we went
to on so we…