Uploadcare’s Journey From Russia to Vancouver Through the Start-up Visa Program | Igor Debatur, Uploadcare

Welcome to another episode of Founder Journey. Today we're continuing on from Vancouver, but our international theme continues with Igor Debatur from Lighter. Originally from Russia, now in Vancouver. LiDAR is a smart content delivery network for user generated content. This is one of those unique situations where you have a team of entrepreneurs building products, building platforms and coming into roadblocks and challenges in their day to day operations and coming up with their own solutions for those challenges and through that process realizing, hey, this solution is actually valuable. There's other people that want to use it, there's other people that want to pay for it, and lo and behold, a brand new startup gets spun out and this is Lighter. We're also talking about managing a globally distributed team and pushing past political tensions in order to move your company forward.

3, 2, 1.

We're back this week with another episode of Founder Journeys. Again, I'm still in Vancouver, so we're privileged to have an international founder that's actually part of our startup Visa program here with us today. Igor Debitron. No, I'm horrible with last names and first names, so you gotta forgive me for that. So it's Igor Debatur from lightr, formerly known as Upload Care. So Igor, why don't you give us a quick intro of what is Lighter.

What do you guys do? What's the magic behind the platform that you're building?

And then I really want to dive.

Into you and your journey.

You're originally from Russia, you're now in Vancouver.

There's been a lot of political issues in Russia.

We're not going to make this a political podcast, but I want to talk.

About some of the great entrepreneurial ecosystem that exists in Russia because there's some really amazing Russian entrepreneurs out there building great tech companies around the world. So let's rewind back. Tell us about lightr. Tell us the platform that you're building.

Lidr. It helps tech companies to build newer products, to launch something new, or to upgrade their existing file infrastructures. So we basically help them with managing user generated content. We help them with file uploads, with storage, with file transformations, for images, videos, documents, and then we help to deliver files in the end. So it's like a smart content delivery network that adapts content on the fly to accelerate its delivery. And I think it's like one of the easiest solutions for handling user generated content.

So it's any type of user generated content. So it's not just images, videos, music files, like written content. You're basically collecting that digital file. Do you guys do Compression on that and just make it more efficient for the startup to leverage that content.

Yeah, so there are different types of content, images, videos, documents, some like binary files or tiffs for printing and handling them is kind of complicated. So the lighter itself has resulted from building the system again and again and again. Because we ran a web development agency and we've launched a lot of products for different big names and smaller sized companies. So we launched Internet projects and web apps every time we needed to ingest content, like to allow people to upload something. If we were building a marketplace or a CMS for someone or something different like an online printing, we needed to create a file uploading, we needed to integrate file uploader, we needed to store everything somewhere. If there was a potential for like traffic spikes, we needed to handle these traffic spikes. We needed to handle scaling this and then security because some data like for healthcare providers, it needs to be stored securely and it was a huge pain. So we went to Hacker News, we asked the community like if you're the only company who struggles with this or there are other engineers who struggle with handling user generated content. We found out that yes, there are actually many people who build this again and again and they were kind of duct taping many different pieces, some open source, some third party vendor solutions, something built by their own, about 50 different small pieces to just handle files. And we started building this solution and decided to start providing it with software as a service model. And eventually we found out that it wasn't like a proper software as a service, it's platform as a service.

So I love this whenever I hear somebody come to me and say we were building X and we run into these types of problems and we decided to build a solution for ourselves and it turns out it's a solution that we could have just we are now marketing on its own and it's turned out its own company. So you guys, when you say we, I'm assuming you and your existing co founders or so you were building other Internet projects for clients, ran into this issue and you went to Hacker News to kind of crowdsource like is it just us or other people having this problem? Validate. Okay, it's not just us. This is a bigger problem. Come up with a solution and then you realize that you can actually commercialize that solution yourself.

Yeah, it actually helped a lot because when we had our alpha version, we've already had this closed Google group with about 200 of people who were interested to try it. So it helped even when we. So the story is so we ran a web development agency and for us to launch a product was a success. But as startup founders, we also thought that when we launch it, people will find out and they will start using it, they will start bringing other people and we will succeed eventually. But then when we've launched it, we received about three payments in two days and that's it. And we were just sitting, waiting, and then we were demotivated because we've spent all the time, all the focus just to launch the product. We forgot about marketing and sales and other interesting things.

So it sounds like you guys are very much on the engineering dev side.

And so that's one of the big fallacies that build it.

They will come. You think if I build it, it's.

An amazing project, people discover it on.

Their own and we're going to be rich. No, marketing is a very, very key part of every type of company.

Our background was focused to building products and to engineering, actually even not product management, but just engineering products until they launched.

And when you were, I guess again going back to the beginning, when you were building these projects for clients, were you doing this in Russia or were you already in the US because you guys were in the US for a bit too, weren't you?

So I was born in Russia and my co founder and our third applotcare co found lighters. We previously were called Apploc Care, so lighters co founder. It's still hard to evaluate everyone. We were born in Russia, we started building our agency in St. Petersburg. We were in St Petersburg. So I was an engineer. My co founder, he was a designer. So hacker and hustler kind of. And most of our customers at that point they were also at first in St. Petersburg, then in Russia, then CIS countries. So we started scaling because we kind of our goal was to build something not just to earn money. So it was like 10th goal, but we wanted to build something interesting, something new, something that didn't exist before. And third person we've hired, he was from different city. Then we started hiring from many different cities, but in Russia then we started hiring from different countries. So we've started building this agency 14 years ago and we've hired our first remote person about 13 years ago.

13 years ago. Wow. So you guys were doing distributed teams way before a lot of other people were doing it. Yeah, I actually want to talk about that. I definitely want to talk about your journey as well. But let's just keep on the distributed teams. How, how are you finding that? When we started going through Covid and everybody else had to deal with this. Was it very simple for you to just make the adjustments because you're already doing it or did Covid affect you guys as well?

For us, I'd say that nothing has changed in terms of our office. So we had our small office in St. Petersburg. It's not that small, but there were from three to eight people working from our office when Covid started, for two months no one visited the office. Then I think I started visiting it alone, then another person and then it worked the same way because the majority of our team was working from home and nothing has changed for them.

So no change in lifestyle or requirements because they were already working remotely.

Yeah. The only thing we were missing is that every year we bring everyone from our team to. So we rent a house in Finland. We called this. And still we call this like our annual retreat. So we rented everyone from every country, they take a flight to Finland and we spent a week there. And some people start asking me about like, oh, you are like resting and drinking alcohol, playing board games, playing like PlayStation, etc. But actually no. And our retreat is mostly like a seven days hackathon. And we are building things because it's interesting and we work together. It helps to bond, it helps to build rapport for team members who never, who have never seen each other. And it helped. But with COVID Finland border was closed and for one year we didn't have anything.

So you must be looking forward to having that again this year.

Yes.

And I guess it helps especially when.

Everybody loves what you're doing. So everybody loves coding, everybody loves hacking away. And so doing a company retreat where it's basically a glorified hackathon just for your team, it makes sense. All right, so want to jump back to you and your journey? So we've heard a little bit about the origin stories of lighter and how it came to be through innovation and then solving your own pain. Point. How did you end up in that agency to begin with?

So I was an engineer. I was working for a bigger software company. My co founder, he was a designer. He worked with DoubleClick that was acquired by Google and I think I was looking for a designer because some of my friends asked me if I can help with building their website and I needed a designer and my co founder, I think I asked my colleague and he was her boyfriend and that's how we've met. So he helped. Then I ran, I created a community for mountain bikers in Russia and there was a super popular forum, like one of the biggest Forums in Russia for mountain bikers. And I wanted to rebrand it to create a new design. And he helped me. So at first we launched a commercial project, then we did this forum stuff together. So we kind of started working together, started building stuff, stuff. And people started asking us to build something for them. So we started scaling and we scaled to 25 people, I think.

Wow, so you're definitely making money doing it if you're able to scale to 25 people.

Yeah, we were. So it was our goal to make money, but in the end we always, we were choosing like what to build and for whom. And we always have chosen something more interested than something that profitable. That profitable, that paid better.

You chose innovation over monetization. Obviously you need to make money to keep the lights on, but the real goal was to just enjoy what you're doing. Build cool shit.

Yeah, we had our salaries, they weren't that stable. So one month we spent a little. That next month we received like two salaries. So it was balanced. But still it wasn't a real business. I'd say it was like something lifestyle that helped us to learn something new and it helped us to launch. Later it helped us to launch another application we were working on. So we reinvested all our revenue, all our margins to build something even better and new to develop our own ideas.

So you and your team together made a decision to expand to North America. And this decision was made before any of this political issue had been happening with Russia in the last year. What about North America really intrigued you? Why do you see lighter expanding here?

So when we launched an agency, we haven't been thinking at all about all the political situations because it wasn't a problem at that point. But we wanted to scale to Europe and to North America because just because it pays better and there is more opportunity to build something interesting when there is budget. When we decided to launch Upload Care, it was, I don't know, somehow I was thinking like where it's easier to start a business, where it's easier to organize all the shareholders and the documents and the bank account. We wanted to work with Stripe. Stripe started. I don't remember when exactly. No, Stripe Atlas wasn't a thing.

Oh really?

At that point when we started Stripe, it's even before. So I understood that the US is one of the best places to start a business. Easiest plus stripe to work with. Only with the US at that point, I think I found some person like CPA in Miami and she helped us to start a company without visiting the US I'M not sure if it was really possible, but she managed to do this. She helped us to open a bank account. So we structured everything as the US entity from day one and it helped in the end. So it was kind of intuition that I wouldn't dive into politics for sure. But I understood that if you target engineers, there are a lot of demand in northern North America for dev tools. So I think it was a wise choice. We never needed to restructure because we and also my like position in the company itself. So we positioned ourselves as a worldwide company without any real office in any country. We were born in Russia, but I think that even concept of countries is kind of outdated today. And the borders. So they're going to. Yeah, I think it's going to change maybe in 10, 20, 30 years, but still.

One of the things I always say is that for tech, tech does not know borders. We as tech entrepreneurs, we're building products and services that should be globally adopted and that means that we are looking for global customers, global teams, global partners and global strategies. And borders are really a political thing. The borders are there to protect countries, protect fiefdoms, kingdoms and whatnot.

That's right.

It's like that type of that way of living is gone. And so I agree like borders, politics, countries, there should be new ways to govern ourselves and manage ourselves moving forward.

So we wanted to avoid this. We structured in the US because it was easier and our market is even right now. I think 60% of our revenue comes from the US so that's why we've decided to open an office. At first I was evaluating European countries and capitals like Portugal, Spain, France, uk. Then I evaluated different regions in the US So we traveled in the US a lot. We visited I think most of the the popular places for creating companies, San Francisco, New York, even Washington D.C. and Austin. But then we equi hired a small company of two founders and one of the founders was in Vancouver and that's how I added Vancouver to my list to evaluate. And when I went to Vancouver first time, I think the first place in my life where I felt like at home and like after a week. So it was easy choice for me.

I'm guessing it was during the summer months, right?

No, no, no. But the weather is similar in St. Petersburg, it's even worse so it doesn't scare me.

Okay, that's great to hear. Now speaking about Canada and Vancouver, where do you see yourself going with your trajectory so lighter? Obviously is your company you're building dev tools. Is that what you see the future for Igor.

So we were running applot gear for quite some time. The idea comes out of 2012, I think. So it's 10 years. It's super long. In parallel, we've tried to run the same agencies and we've launched another mobile application for extreme sport participants like skiers and mountain bikers and skateboarders. And it also became popular. More than a million of signups, tens of thousands of active users. But then we focused on one business. It's lighter. And it's kind of a new life for the previous company. I feel it. So right now I'm not tired and I think that we have a good idea how to continue building it. What? Developer, engineering community and tech companies are still lacking some things that they're building old way. And we know how to do it simpler and easier. So.

The rebrand from Upload Care to Lighter isn't just a marketing play. It actually is a revitalization of the company. A 2.0 reinvention of what you were doing and where you see the technology moving into the future.

It's definitely a reinvention. And it's not Pivot, but it's Reboot and Upload Care. So we started from building Uploader and we found, I think, a good name. It was like a title of some mafics, twin songs, and it was like an abstract. We wanted to use it, but then when we decided to wait for a day, someone registered this domain name and we were super angry and we thought, like, all right, it's Uploader. Let's call it Upload Care. We care about uploads. So Upload Care is still about uploads and everything else is built on top of Uploader. It feels this way, but the platform we've actually built, it's much more. More than just an uploader and something built on top. It's everything about file management and content delivery. And we can compete with bigger players like Akamai. They have, I think, 9 billions or 10 billions in revenue per year. And the market of content delivery is 35. It's going to be $35 billion per year. And file uploaders market is super small and we have one of the best products, but still the total addressable market is smaller than we actually can target. So Lighter, it's not just about changing the name, it's changing positioning and moving us higher in hierarchy of content delivery.

That's awesome. So lighter is the future for you. You're going to keep building that and growing that.

So Igor, I want to ask you.

About your own personal journey now, Founder Journeys. We always talk about the taboo topics, things that most entrepreneurs don't talk about openly, things that we wish other entrepreneurs talked about so that we were prepared for when we felt those challenges or frustrations. Are there any challenges or frustrations or taboo topics that you want to talk about today?

I think for me as a founder, one of the complex issues that we've solved later than we should have, it's focus Founders Focus. So when we ran an agency, it helped us to generate some revenue and we've started from scratch. So there is like a common thing start fundraising from family friends and fools. And we didn't have any money in our families, any friends with money. So we actually we wanted to create something by our own. But there was a like financial crisis and at that point and we've understood that we can start from running an agency, then earn some money and then it will help us to build something. It worked this way. But when we started Upload Care an investor came to us. So we never fundraised at first. And angel investor, he found us at one of the list of top IT products of somewhere and he was willing to invest to us and we agreed. So we thought all right, it was about $200,000 at that point.

Was he based in Russia or was he based in the us?

He was based in Russia. He was one of the co founders of largest social media in Russia, vk. We agreed he sent money our way but we were scared to focus on one product. So we thought that all right, we have this 200k, it will be enough for some Runway. So we have some Runway. But it was scary to stop our agency. And we continued working in the agency building Upload Care in our spare time. And we tried to hire a team to do it for us instead of focusing ourselves. And it was a huge problem. And our investor, he has just started investing. So he wasn't experienced enough to help us to stop or to kind of. He could have pushed us to stop running two businesses simultaneously, but he never did. And we had our agency, we had Upload care and you know what we did third. So we started another business. We started this mobile app for action sport participants, for skiers and mountain bikers. And the fun thing is that the same investor he invested to the app.

Too, that one too.

He wanted to invest to our team. So he trusted us. He trusted that eventually we will finally build something, something that worth it. And he wanted to invest to our agency too. But we never closed this deal, I think it was for good. So the problem was we tried to juggle three different businesses and it led to conflicts between founders. So I tried to focus on the agency and upload Care. My co founder, he tried to focus on Riders, our mobile app. And we were fighting because if we succeeded somewhere, it has meant that in other place we haven't. And it's unsolvable issue. It was unsolvable issue until the end of 2017.

I can also imagine in that scenario, when one project starts to do well and you want to dedicate more resources toward that, you have to convince the other person, hey, we need to take resources away from your project and put it towards this because it's doing well and they might not feel comfortable, hey, why am I struggling harder to make this project work with you taking resources away from me?

Yes. And it's still hard. So we have some ideas. Even now we still have this app, but when I told our investors that we have this asset like as riders app, they told me, no, it's not assets, it's liability.

Definitely. Focus, focus, focus is always the mantra, but it's a challenge for entrepreneurs especially. Most entrepreneurs have some level of ADHD add and it's the shiny object syndrome. Like there's new tech always coming out of the pipeline and like web3stuff or augmented reality, social commerce, all these different things. And you look at, well, how can I apply this to my business? But you really shouldn't. You should be like, no, focus on what you have already until that is super successful. Then you can look at integrating the other new shiny objects.

And there are still some people who managed to run several different businesses, like Elon Musk. So Tesla and SpaceX and boring companies. So he kind of successfully ran different businesses. I think potentially it could be a role model or something for entrepreneurs who also want to run different businesses. But it requires a change of a mindset from building something by your own to employing people who will do this for you.

Yeah, and I think the other thing is a lot of people don't realize how much work is involved. They look at the glamorous side of things. Yeah, look, Elon Musk, he's running five different companies. But you don't realize that he with, with Tesla, he was sleeping on the floor for months in the office because he was working 20 hour shifts trying to figure out engineering challenges and engineering problems. Even just the past few months when he acquired Twitter, made the announcement, did some talks, and then he went straight to SpaceX that night and he was Working on trying to solve a gasket issue. And so, yes, you can run multiple companies, but you have to have the, the fortitude to keep at it. And there's sacrifices like personal life, family life, kids. Like all those things.

Yeah.

Need to be balanced. And so if you're gonna be running multiple companies, you have to realize that that's a reality. Like, I myself run multiple companies, but I'm not married, I don't have kids, and so I know I can dedicate those times. But if I did have a wife, I did have kids, I know that I can't run five different companies because they need my time and attention.

Yeah, I feel you.

Building a startup is never easy. There's lots of challenges, lots of ups and downs. What was your journey like? What was some of the founder elements that you wish you heard or like? We, in founder journeys, we talked about the taboo topics. What are some of the taboo things that you wish other people talked about that you could have prepared yourself better for? Or did you come across anything in your journey that you want other people to know that they should be watching out for this, or be careful around this, or be aware that these are the things you're going to have to deal with.

So there are a lot of good things about Russia. I think about every country and there are pros and cons, I think. And one of the pros was, of course, there is a good access to engineering talent in Russia and mathematics level is still super high and they win math Olympics and different challenges. And our third person we've hired, I remember, like a quick story from the past. So we went to a conference called Europython. It's one of the biggest Python conferences and it was in Florence. And he was, I think 17 at that point, maybe even 16. So super young person. And there was a challenge for Python developers. He won. So he was the first person to send his results, but he was super nervous and he pressed F5 like several times to refresh the page and then he was second. But still, out of about 100 participants, he won this challenge on one of the best conferences. And this story talks a lot about level of engineering and engineering talent in Russia also. It's very affordable. It was, it was very affordable. At some point it helped us, so it helped us to run faster, spending less money. St Petersburg itself is a great place to visit or to live. It's like historical capital of Russia and one of the most beautiful cities in the world. So it's also a great thing. The current political situation So I felt that something is going to happen. So I wouldn't say names, of course, but if the company, if a business ran by people who are kind of, they're not modern enough, they can't solve modern challenges using modern tools.

I think a great example, I know which way you're going here is like you look at Tesla compared to General Motors or any of these old school car companies, they were stuck in their ways. People tried to tell them, build electric, look modern, look at alternatives. And they're like, no, no, no, we need to do this or yeah, we'll do it later, we'll do it later. And they just kept going the way that they're going. But the rest of the world wanted something else. They wanted to progress, just like we were talking about. There shouldn't be, there should not be borders. Countries need to be governed in a different way for the society of today. Tesla was building electric cars and now it's probably the big best car in the world, one of the best companies. And it's not a car company, it's a technology company. There's so many different layers to what they offer.

And another thing is that there are definitely countries where government tries to help entrepreneurs because I think entrepreneurs is like a blue blood for building a country. They will pay taxes in the future, they will employ people, they will teach people to do something. So it's basics. In Russia, government doesn't help real entrepreneurs. And until it started messing with our business, it was still alright because this access to talent was great and we were born there. So it was much easier to continue living where we were born and not moving somewhere. But about three to four years ago, I started feeling like it's not going anywhere and I don't want, want, I want to network with people with similar mindsets. And that's why I decided, all right, at that point I can start thinking about moving somewhere. And then we acquired this company in Vancouver and I left Vancouver. So I decided why not to move.

That's awesome. So it wasn't really a factor of political discontent or anything that was happening with the borders and whatnot. It was really about the mindset of the government and how they're treating entrepreneurship and innovation and looking at the future economies. That's what you really wanted, to position yourself and be in an environment where you can think, I'm building a company for the future, I'm building technology, I'm building innovation.

And also I think one of the things where Russia helps, it really helps to build the resilience and to solve.

Problems different ways, very little resources, but very innovative ways.

So I think one of the things like Russians, Ukrainians, Belarus people still it's the same language, is similar mindset. I consider this like that we have similar mindsets like Slavic people, they're good with problem solving with duct taping something, solving really complex things like in space by duct taping it. Cool.

Igor, this has been amazing talking to you. We are extremely lucky to have you here in Vancouver coming through Launch Academy and our Maple program. Our team has really enjoyed working with you. Really excited to see the, the future of lighter, the the reinvention of upload care and, and where it's going to go. Thanks for joining us. And I'm pretty sure we'll see you.

On the slopes or in the mountains, biking away.

Thank you. And thank you, Ray.