Failures are predictable, success is unique | Alexey Borisov, Co-Founder Rocketech
No Bullsh!t, December 4, 2025, 95 min, 3,196 views. The guest is Alexey Borisov, co-founder of the Singapore company Rocketech, which has spent eight years looking for a working model of startup support: from classic IT outsourcing and outstaffing to an MVP in two weeks with payment tied to a service level agreement.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 95 min |
| Views on YouTube | 3,196 |
| 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
Alexey describes his path: three jobs while still a student, first startups, an MBA in Singapore, and the decision to focus entirely on Rocketech. Through his own failures he explains why infrastructure and product-led startups usually do not take off, why a real business starts with sales rather than with a product, why high gross margin and either a long lifetime value or a high ticket matter, and why hired executives rarely save a project if the founder is not involved in operations. A separate large theme is the real price of the venture path, from zero cash-outs on paper millions to the toxicity of the first-time-founder cult.
Key ideas
- A real technology business starts with sales rather than with a product: it almost always worked when they sold first, and almost always went to zero when they invested in development first.
- A business that does not earn 60 to 70 percent gross margin should not exist: it is a hard filter that immediately cuts most ideas built on infrastructure or product-led logic.
- Sustainable economics rest either on a very long, ideally endless lifetime value or on a high ticket: everything in between works neither in software nor in real estate.
- Hired executives almost never save a project: their real function is managing risk rather than the business, and without a founder involved in operations ninety percent of such projects end up without users.
- The startup industry rests mostly on first-time founders: people who have actually had a large exit rarely come back to build from scratch, and that is an honest signal about the real statistics of success.
- A paper venture valuation almost never converts into cash: even after raising a hundred million a founder may get nothing, so any partial exit that genuinely changes your financial position is worth taking at once.
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