Win-win in business: the secrets of long-term deals from a top manager at payment service A3
No Bullsh!t, April 4, 2025, 61 min, 194 views. The guest is Alexey, an entrepreneur, athlete and traveller, co-owner and one of the leaders of a payment service that has spent fifteen years building a large system of recurring payments and works with sixty of the hundred banks in its market.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 61 min |
| Views on YouTube | 194 |
| 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
The conversation runs through real business problems without decoration: an early mistake outsourcing the core of the system and the later move to microservices, a data centre failure and recovery from backup, a philosophy of firing fast and hiring slowly, a personality typology used as a tool in negotiation and team selection, the principle of a paid contract from day one with no free pilots, investment in coaching and training, and an annual strategy session as a way of managing uncertainty.
Key ideas
- The main management mistake, in the guest's words, is not letting go of people who cannot carry the load in time; the usual self-justifications hold the whole team back.
- Technical debt from early outsourcing, a monolithic core, stopped the system scaling for years; the move to microservices several years ago removed the chronic constraint.
- A personality typology is used both in negotiation and in hiring: partners and the team should between them cover different types rather than duplicate one.
- Every contract is monetised from the moment of signature regardless of technical integration: the positioning of a premium partner with round-the-clock support makes that possible.
- An annual strategy session on a five-year horizon with monthly checks on progress is used as a risk management tool under uncertainty.
- Coaching for the executives responsible for sales, six months of weekly sessions with an external coach, produced a gain in effectiveness visible to the team and to partners.
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