Sergey Seroukhov - Founder & CEO at Entinco

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom podcast. We have Sergey Serukhov with us today. He's a founder and CEO at Antinko. He's building AI-powered software factories, so talking about full agent team today as an agency. Sergey, welcome to the pod. Tell us a bit more about yourself.

Hi, Charles. Yes, I'm, uh, I live in Tucson, Arizona. I came here from Ukraine in 2001. Um, so since that time, I, I'm still like located in Arizona, never left that place, although like I traveled all around the, the world since that time. And so from the time I came, I worked in, uh, Komatsu for over 15 years and went there like from software engineer to like project manager to architect, and I finished there as a strategy architect. Working on their strategic initiatives, innovations. In 2016, I left corporate, started my own business. From that, already for 10 years, I'm running the company and still working on the business model because I started in software stuff and outsourcing, but that's not the space where we want to be. And since that time we tried like different things and finally we found our niche in AI automation space.

Right. And you said Ukraine, right? I see also spent some time in Russia. Why did you move exactly? Was it because of the conflict?

No, I worked with my co-founder. It was before the war started. Started in 2017, um, we had a startup idea. It was one of my startup that failed, so I had like a number of those, and one of them was back there like in Russia.

Got it. And you said the AI factory, so how do you fully automate, uh, software development? Have you been able to fully achieve that?

Uh, fully automate, um, yes and no. Like, on the simple, simple use cases, yes, we, we can see it. But we develop a complex enterprise software, and, uh, like this vibe coding approach, uh, simple cases like do not really like work there. So what we do, we systematically step by step developing all the methodologies, processes, automate Right now, most of those things are automated at the assisted level, how we call it. So still it works under human supervision, all those things. And our goal is to start introducing more quality control gates. And finally, like, when we will be able to remove the, the human supervision and start operating like fully agentic.

Right, so why should people buy from your agency if there's like so many other agencies out there?

I will rephrase it like how we're different, right? So we not only focusing on software agency or software development, our second arm, we developing, like, we converting traditional organizations into AI agencies. So, and our approach is different because we not so much going from technological point of view, but mostly like from methodological. So what important for us is restructuring business processes and make them AI ready. We are working on knowledge engineering to find all the knowledge gaps and recreate that hidden knowledge that go like exist in the organizations. And technologies is just enabler and they evolve like very fast. So today technologies are not able to do something or you can like buy them from one vendor, tomorrow it could be like a totally different solution which gives you more opportunities. And like we are making it possible to basically replace one technology with another one without losing this core expertise, core, core process core knowledge in the organization and have more straight path toward the end goal. And this end goal is another big difference. We build agencies like most, most of the organizations, they use a bottom-up approach. So they experiment and they find some isolated use cases that will, from their point of view, will give them like highest ROI, trying to apply AI there. We start from the end. We look, okay, how organization would look like at the end, whether it can be operated completely by AI, what agentic systems will be there, like how, how it should operate. And from there, we built a straight path toward that end state finding. And on this straight path, we take different agentic systems, look what level, automation level, it makes sense to kind of build it up to. And we balance technical feasibility, what technologies allows us to do today and probably tomorrow, and on the other hand, what business value it would bring to the company in terms of the cost savings, speeding up time to market, reducing— increasing quality. And by Bell, like balancing those two things, we find the best cases to implement, and it's still, it's on that straight path. So you're not spending too much time on local optimization. So you're optimizing your global path to that end state. And another thing, like why it's important, because I believe that we all as a humanity, like coming into this age, state when AI-enabled businesses, they will start dominating the market because AI allows to decrease cost and time to market and just number of times. And for traditional companies, it will be impossible to compete with AI agencies, with AI-enabled companies. That's why most of the companies right now will start thinking and implementing AI. And the— who— like, whatever company will move faster on that, um, on that path, uh, they will just— will be able to completely, like, push their traditional or slower competitors out of the market. So that's why, um, that speed of innovation and, like, AI adoption will matter a lot for businesses, not just prosper, but to survive.

And how do you find it to sell to potential customers nowadays? How's your go-to-market going?

Uh, hard.

Yes, don't you think? Because you took 3 minutes to explain something that could be explained in simple words.

Uh, yes, I would say we're still learning how to talk about those things, and we also believe that market may be like not fully mature There is a lot of hype, a lot of weird ideas around us, and we decided that for some time we will stop active marketing because we made several attempts and we see that channels are polluted with low-quality offers, with this AI personalization, and people just stop responding. They stop We're looking into that. So we said, okay, we will focus on our brand. We will be selling through network, building high-quality offers, looking at building a strong brand. And then when market will become more mature and more accepting to that ideas, then we will move on fully with our offers when everything is ready.

Um, well, in your niche there's a lot of players, right? You got to start with this. And then I had the PR guy on my podcast, um, last week, and it's— his advice is simple, is like zig while they zag, right? So you just— your agency, immediately when I land on your website, it feels like, oh, just another software dev agency, right? Yeah, sure, you mentioned AI, but everyone pivoted with AI like 2 or 3 years ago. So there's no like clear distinguisher. I feel need to go down on one offer and one ICP, right? And just like go all in on that. You can have multiple landing page on your website, but ideally, for example, if you take my company's RazRocket, right? We do fundraising for B2B AI SaaS companies. It's like super precise. The competition is not too big in that niche, and we're like the king of a little small niche, right? And we really like 10x down on this. Um, and last but not least, it feels that you're targeting, uh, corporate customers, right? So corporate customers, uh, are very hard to sell. They have a hard time understanding it. So I would choose my ICP carefully, right? Like a great high speed and might have budget for your, your—

you're absolutely right. And, uh, the website right now is being like completely rebuilt from scratch. We exactly how you said, like we found like we need to target very specific markets with specific offers. So that way, Tinko website will be just a company site, uh, talking about the companies, but the offers will go for business process automation, will go, uh, one domain and side for software development, another side for Software Factory will be like the third targeted side. Well, our team is right now working on that, right?

Because it seems you're the bridge between like, uh, older people that have not fully caught on to the AI revolution. So not only you're helping them build better but more scalable stuff that is cheaper and potentially even teaching them your ways, right? So that's your value prop. Um, and maybe, who knows, maybe the website reflects, uh, to that audience, right? But cannot tell you how many software agencies I had on this podcast and AI ones, right? And I, I feel in your space of the business, everything is played on the go-to-market, right? Because everyone offers something that is somewhat similar, even if you don't think so. So it's really played like at the go-to-market level, for example. So you're 10 clients, and what niches are they? Are they in a specific niche?

Uh, we have clients, many clients in mining. We have clients in e-commerce, telecom, oil and gas. Yeah, in those areas. And those are mid-sized companies centralized in the US, or— uh, yes, most of our clients in US, and we have a few clients in, um, Australia.

Okay, you know what's the best way to get in front of clients at scale? A podcast. A podcast. Yes, you use the podcast to get in front of them at scale, right? Uh, you ask them questions just like you would on a sales call. You narrow down your data, your ICP, and eventually you get like a critical mass of CEOs in fintech in Miami, let's say, and then you, you scale from there. That's usually the best way. You ask them for referrals, of course. Um, the team— what does the team look like? It's you, your co-founder, and—

no, we have about 25 engineers right now. They all around the world. We have people, many of them located in Europe, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, all there. Then we have people in South America, in Argentina, few of them here in North America, Canada, US. So we have a completely like distributed global team.

Okay, and these 25, are they like full-time on a payroll? Because Looking at your agency, it seems that you're doing a lot of stuff identically and with AIs, but then you still hire humans. So where's the balance here?

I was still working with clients on our old offers around software staffing and outsourcing, and our new team that is working on the AI automation stuff, their role like some of the critical people, they are not even like software people. They working on AI strategy, process engineering, knowledge engineering. We have AI automation specialists who don't know how to code, but they, they're training models, they are like configuring assistants and chats on popular platforms. So We still like need a lot of— although all our processes inside are being automated right now, we're turning ourselves into AI agencies, and we calculated that we need about 80+ systems to fully run on AI. But still everything, like, because we working in complex engineered environments, We cannot trust AI fully. We did not get to that level when we can just write code and get quality results and run with it. Absolutely not. So our team is heavily involved in all the processes and it controls AI to a very fine degree to get high-quality results. So that's why we still need humans and we'll be using them for a while.

Right, and what's the moat of your agency? Like, if Claude is using Claude to code Claude, like, what's— why wouldn't you— why would your agency stick around the next 3 to 4 years?

You know, as I said, we are heavily focusing on methodology, and we not, uh, ourselves, we are not trying to stay on one, one platform. We like multi-platform. We're trying to get experience and understand pros and cons of using any major technology on the market. And when we come to the client, we use the same mindset. Like, we use whatever clients wants. If a client doesn't have any specific idea what platform they would like to, to use, we can recommend something. But what important for us is methodology, is Putting together like business processes, aligning them with organizational goals, extracting knowledge and making more knowledge connected to AI. And then one technology, another technology, like today it could be one technology, tomorrow like another great technology will come out, and switch won't mean that you need to rebuild everything from scratch.

Got it. What are your next goals for this year? What do you want to accomplish?

As I said, for this year, until the end of the year, we decided that we'll be switching ourselves into full agency mode, covering everything like from all the service lines that we have and all the internal support processes, covering them with AI, building strong offers, redoing that website, creating, like, building a strong, strong brand around what we do. And sometime, like, by the end of the— end of this year, beginning of the next year, will come out already, like, with marketing campaigns and offering, uh, agentic transformation for our clients in the software spaces as well as in the regular business space.

Sergey, where can people find out more about you and your business?

Uh, right now I'm trying to be active on LinkedIn, so you can find me on LinkedIn, and I'm posting there, uh, some stuff about like what we're doing. And in about a month, we will launch our websites and connect them together, so that, that should