The story of Andrey Krylov, founder and CEO of Hiberty

We’ll talk about how to choose between a corporation and your own business, how not to get into fights with partners, and why a perfect credit history isn’t always an advantage for an entrepreneur.

Who is Andrey Krylov and what is Hiberty

Andrey Krylov is a commercial entrepreneur, and the founder and CEO of Hiberty. He was a manager at TechnoDiasoft, a business systems analyst at Kaspersky Lab, and a technical director at Darit Legko.

Hiberty is an HR system for accelerating personnel recruitment and flexible talent development. The platform helps solve problems of recruitment, adaptation and development, and improves personnel involvement.

“That’s where I understood that I did not need to go down the difficult path and make a product for everyone.

A business should bring in money. At Silicon Valley, I realized that I need to think up a service for one solvent market segment. That’s how the idea of Hiberty, a service for automating recruitment for corporations, was born. Large companies deal with a large flow of candidates, and spend a lot of time and resources searching for applicants.

On proving hypotheses

Hiberty has somewhat of a romantic origin story. At the time, I had a lot of friends who were looking for work. What people often do is set a filter to sort jobs in descending order of salary and click on the first openings they see. In 95% of cases, managers don’t even see their resumes. And if they do, then most often the recruiter will realize the person isn’t suitable for the role within the first 5 minutes.

I wanted to create a service that would help people close to me. A service that would have made it possible to realize that you aren’t suitable for a given position right away. Or, even better, prove your level using online tools such as tests.

On issues encountered in the beginning, and initial success

When we decided on the target audience and product, the market wasn’t ready yet. The service for automating hiring was compared with job boards, and we had to explain what an ATS system was needed for.

We failed with the first pilot versions. HR managers didn’t understand what they were buying. In the first year, we were perceived as lead generators, even though we’d never talked about that. We did hit a few snags. One of the functions was automated answers to responses on the job board. Our employee set up a notification that would go to the HR director’s personal telephone, which meant his phone would always run out of charge. It was difficult for us to move on from that, but this error helped us become better overall.

But then the banner we purchased really hit it off. We made a sort of slanted design, put our phone number on it, and then forgot about it. But then we got a call from Sberbank who invited us to take part in a tender. We won and then started working on specific cases. First, we worried that our startup energy would get buried in the corporate world, but then we discussed managing the business like our own product, and avoided potential risks.

A corporation with bonuses and a golden parachute, or your own business

Working in recruitment is fine, but I wanted to develop my own business. Initially, I did this during the evening, but then I realized that my business would not move forward in this situation, and the corporation would suffer as well because I was distracted. So I left.

I’m not trying to encourage people to start their own business. I actually recommend staying at your workplace, especially if you’re not willing to take risks all the time.

It all depends on your mindset, either you’re comfortable working for someone, doing tasks, and growing from being a cog in the machine, or you’re not. It’s not even about financial values, but about your way of life.

Either you want to go on holiday twice a year and calmly get a mortgage, or you’re ready to worry every day about paying wages and office rent.

I have lots of friends who’ve always dreamed about owning their own business. They talk about it all the time, listen to podcasts about it, but when they need to do something, they’re scared of even taking out a 5,000 dollar loan. Entrepreneurs need a different mindset, they must be ready to take risks.

About evaluating investors

When founders attract investments, foundations usually evaluate their background on a scale of 1-5. It’s a sort of reliability and safety evaluation. What I had then was a few unpaid loans that I had taken out for my business. I was rated 4-. They said I was “positive overall”.

Then, an investor told me that this was the best grade for an entrepreneur. If you get 5 and have a “sterile” background, that means that you will not be able to take risks or take responsibility for serious solutions. 4- minus is for people with a few snags but are positive overall. These are the ones that achieve success.

If an entrepreneur has a loan, then investors will see that they’re serious and believe in themselves. At first, the loans drained all my energy, but this experience proved useful. Especially when we started attracting investments and many checks were passed. If I could go back in time and turn down any loans I’d taken, I wouldn’t do this.

If you can get a loan with decent interest, then why not?

How not to argue with partners: You can divide 100,000 in two, but not a million

One of the main conditions for a successful business is having the right partners whom you can trust and with whom you want to move forward. Even the most brilliant person can’t cover all areas of expertise needed to develop a business.

It’s important to delegate tasks to each other and divide areas of responsibility. Your paths may part, but working with a group of like-minded people is invaluable. I warmly remember times when we dreamed about a bright future, thought up new features while having a beer, and motivated each other. It looks like a scene from a movie.

Your team is important at any stage and for any business, whether it’s a startup or a corporation.

My mentor taught me to go into projects “like a grown-up”. Starting a business while missing key elements and then saying “Eh, we’ll sort it out later”, even if your partner is a close friend, is not something you should do. All possible options need to be discussed in advance, such as how to get out of business, how to share profits, etc. When your business is developing and you start talking about big money, people start to change beyond recognition.

I believe that you need a clear, corporate agreement early on. This will secure the entry and exit rules for partners. That way, everyone will know what they’ve put in and what they can take out, without any kind of unnecessary expectations or feelings of deprivation.

In these cases, not everyone will be satisfied with an A+, but if they’re satisfied with a B-, that’s fine.

Thinking about agreements before you set sail means that you can move forward without thinking about personal gain. Then no one will take offense.

On investments

Previously, there were foundations that held competitions. There aren’t so many of them now. Foreign venture investors left because they no longer believe in other markets for macroeconomic reasons. Despite this, it’s actually easier now to attract funding for a good project than it was a few years ago. This is because there are fewer projects, and many startups with a simple business model have collapsed.

Now, major investments usually come from closed communities or organizations that deal with this sort of area, such as Venture Studio. They’re constantly looking for education and HR startups. They don’t try and take control at the very beginning, they just invest and observe the results.

On networking and pitching

Networking is one of a company founder’s main tools. Meeting people can, at the very least, get you different perspectives on an idea, but can also help you get into closed circles of investors and attract rounds of investment.

It’s also important for an entrepreneur to know how to present their idea. My favorite story from Silicon Valley is about a person who told an old lady about his business on public transportation, and then the old lady turned out to be a major investor and wrote him a check for 300,000 dollars.

There are always people looking for something to invest in.

You can meet them through mutual friends. In this scenario, decision-making time is literally a week. When a startup is still at the idea stage, there’s barely anything to look at, and bureaucracy doesn’t play an important role at all.

But constant pitching is not always good. I know people who’ve been pitching their idea for 5 years. Some people have managed to sell their company three times and retire during this time, but they’re still on the same level. This can be an indicator that something needs to be changed.

Should the founder know how to sell

One of the key areas of expertise for a startup founder is how to sell their business. This is not about working with clients, but about selling an idea and a vision. Any founder should know how to speak in such a way that everyone they meet is impressed and starts thinking that this is an idea of the future.

This happens regularly, every day that an entrepreneur sells their idea to employees, investors and partners.

You need to know how to sell not just a product, but belief that everything will be OK.

On key business indicators

Nearly all indicators are important to me. I won’t talk about classic indicators like revenue, EBITDA, etc., that’s important in any business.

The following indicators are especially important to me:

– Project execution rate. For example, the first projects we had took around 8-12 months, but now they take a week. This is one of our team’s achievements.

– Project cost. It’s important to understand how much a project will cost for us, so that we can determine it for a client.

– Product development rate. Development should not stop even for a second. I try to keep things under control so that I can be sure that our competitors don’t overtake us. The tech market is developing quickly.

There is one more indicator that can’t be put in numbers. For me, it’s important to maintain the atmosphere of a startup, stay innovative, and never stagnate. It’s possible that I’ll stop being interested if we become a big tech giant that does its work perfectly. I’m happy to do what no one has done before. This motivates the team and pleases shareholders.

Andrey Krylov, founder and CEO of Hiberty