How to lose everything and rebuild | Roman Kumar Vias on crises in business
No Bullsh!t, February 10, 2025, 80 min, 1,588 views. The guest is Roman Kumar Vias, a serial entrepreneur and musician who has been through several hard business crises: a shareholder conflict in his first business, a cash gap of around thirty million roubles during the collapse of the crypto hype at his advertising agency, and the bankruptcy of his own education project with the loss of all his personal money and public criticism in the media of several countries.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 80 min |
| Views on YouTube | 1,588 |
| 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
Roman describes in detail how he dealt with those crises: first by switching off his emotions entirely and working like a marathon runner, then through a silent retreat, and now through a regular practice of meditation and therapy. A separate large theme is managing state, energy and attention as a founder's key resources, including sleep. The second part turns to media as an asset.
Key ideas
- A founder's hard crises, a cash gap, bankruptcy, public criticism, are only understood once they are over; surviving them requires every resource you have.
- Working on your inner state comes first for a founder: sleep, energy and attention need the same conscious management as any business process.
- A regular practice of meditation and therapy helps to see which decisions were made from fear or fatigue rather than from the goal.
- Radical honesty and a retrospective review of your own decisions reveal that a large share of them were driven not by the goal but by emotion.
- A media asset, a personal brand and a content operation across several accounts, becomes a more valuable client acquisition tool than a classic brand.
- Luck is a function of how many of the right people and opportunities you can reach, and it can be increased systematically through choice of market and depth of contact.
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