From Wall Street to crypto venture: having a baby and launching a startup two weeks apart
No Bullsh!t, February 5, 2026, 62 min, 2,238 views. The guest is Karina Kostina, an angel investor, early stage advisor and fintech founder with fifteen years as a trader at a European bank in Russia and Vienna, where she rose to senior vice president and led a team of quants and analysts.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 62 min |
| Views on YouTube | 2,238 |
| 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
In 2021 her life changed twice within two weeks: she learned she was pregnant and almost simultaneously agreed to co-found a DeFi startup, which she ran for nearly three years before parting ways with her partners. She now works in venture and angel investing and in fundraising advisory for early stage startups. In the conversation she goes through her own failures, from a deal missed because of a late reply to a phishing attack that took her first crypto, and explains why a founder who has been through mistakes builds a better protected product. The talk then moves to the artificial intelligence bubble, the cost of compute and energy, and the future of agents.
Key ideas
- Founders lose money and time polishing a product in isolation instead of showing it to users early: there is no perfect moment for a demo, and if the product feels perfect the moment has already passed.
- A first serious failure, a mistake in a deal, lost money or a scam, shapes a founder well: it prevents arrogance and teaches double-checking, which lowers the risk of larger failures later.
- A crypto founder who has never been targeted by a scam risks leaving typical attacks out of the product architecture: personal experience of fraud makes the future product safer for users.
- The investment thesis: infrastructure projects that the market needs regardless of the cycle are the most resilient, both when money is cheap and when it is expensive, by analogy with selling shovels in a gold rush.
- The rising valuations of AI giants require trillions in energy and compute. If the technology does not become genuinely mass market, the extra funding turns into new issuance and dilution of current shareholders.
- Three recommendations to her past self: make networking part of the profession, do not be afraid to show a raw product to the market, and do not be greedy with equity for a strong team and advisors.
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