AI foodtech startup: how to win America, with Kirill Sizyumov, founder of Foodoo.ai
No Bullsh!t, May 14, 2025, 97 min, 1,112 views. The guest is Kirill Sizyumov, a serial entrepreneur, who describes the path from engineer in 2008 through launches in Peru and Nicaragua, a travel accessories brand and the first parcel lockers in Moscow, to a project of smart fridges built together with a restaurant group.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 97 min |
| Views on YouTube | 1,112 |
| Language of the episode | Russian |
| Where to watch and listen | YouTube, Spotify, Telegram |
Date, length and view count according to data from the episode page on YouTube, as of the page update date shown in the footer.
In short
After moving to the United States in 2021 he brought that technology to the American market, spent a year and a half on patents and regulatory certification, and then moved to a new product based on freezing, with first contracts at several universities. The role of artificial intelligence in the product, in his words, is to replace the category manager: the system decides which menu goes into each location and when, based on sales data. A separate block covers how trust and deals are actually built in the United States.
Key ideas
- Americans almost never say a direct no: you have to learn to read the real signal behind phrases like this is a great project, or politeness gets mistaken for interest.
- Trust and deals in the United States are built first through informal events involving family, birthdays, graduations and closed clubs, rather than through cold outreach on professional networks.
- A personal visit sometimes beats any digital funnel: when correspondence and calls led nowhere, driving to the universities in person produced results.
- Regulation and compliance in the United States take priority over speed: institutions take your word at the entrance, but one proven deception makes them re-examine everything you said.
- At early stages American investors bet above all on the team and its resilience, and past failures told honestly tend to raise trust rather than lower it.
- Dragging out the decision to part with a partner or employee who is not strong enough costs a founder more time than anything else.
The full transcript
The episode is recorded in Russian, and the full transcript of the conversation is on the Russian page of this episode. English and Spanish subtitles for the strongest episodes are rolling out on YouTube in waves.
Open the transcript