Building an AI startup after 15 years in corporates: Dom.ru to Spellit AI | Oleg Kulakov
No Bullsh!t, October 22, 2025, 118 min, 3,424 views. The guest is Oleg Kulakov, CEO and founder of Spellit AI, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyse sales calls and turn them into concrete recommendations for sellers.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 118 min |
| Views on YouTube | 3,424 |
| 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
Before that came more than fifteen years of corporate work: ten years at a telecom company, from the innovation centre to running all of television, and then scaling an education company internationally from twenty countries to eighty. Oleg goes through his failures in detail: half a million dollars of advertising budget poured away, a story about work-life balance that in his view does not exist, and the emergence of pride as a value, the ability to judge yourself by your own criteria rather than by other people's reactions. A large separate block covers the real limits of AI today: hallucinations, weak mathematics and multi-step reasoning that breaks.
Key ideas
- Pride is the only durable source of energy in business: being able to take pride in how you acted at the time with the information you had, rather than in how others rated you.
- Work-life balance does not work as a concept: at any moment only one or two burners are lit, and balance comes from consciously choosing priorities rather than from spreading effort evenly.
- Speech transcription for sales is not a solved problem even for market leaders: the team lifted recognition accuracy from the typical 90 percent to 96, because in sales every word counts.
- Today's general language models have systemic weak spots: they hallucinate in 6 to 8 percent of cases, handle complex mathematics badly and break on multi-step logical chains.
- There is no universal sales analytics: the criteria for scoring a call, of which this product has fifty to seventy, have to be written for a specific business, its vocabulary and its maturity.
- The AI startup market is full of wrappers over someone else's interface with no defensible advantage: an investor's first question is how easily you can be copied.
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