Eldar Sadikov came to the US at 17 from a secret Russian nuclear city, got a Stanford PhD in machine learning, then left to co-found Jetlore in 2011. The e-commerce personalization startup was acquired by PayPal in 2018. He talks about fundraising, scaling, and what it meant to build as an immigrant founder.
Chapters
years at Stanford, you absorb all this entrepreneurial culture. I think if you ever spend time, you know, you're here in Silicon Valley, you probably can feel that. But at Stanford, it's even more so. Everyone talks about startups. Everyone talks about ideas. Everyone wants, you know, always talks about NVIDIA and Google and all the big companies that came out of Stanford. And I think you get this, you get the bug. You get very inspired. Oh, I got the mic. Thank you. Well, this is the first time speaking at Draper. Thank you for hosting me. Excited to get to meet you all. How much do I have? About an hour? 40 minutes? 45 minutes? Yeah, I think you may have to— OK, perfect. Well, so today I want to share with you my journey. This is probably the first real venture for me that was venture-backed and, you know, a company with kind of revenue and customers and actually a real exit. Even though I've dabbled in entrepreneurship before and had some, you know, pretty successful iPhone app in the past, but it wasn't like real business. This is actual like real business that I that I took through fundraising to first customers and then eventually to an exit. So today I want to share with you my journey, how we started this company, what we went through, kind of the mental mindset that every entrepreneur is going through as you're building your own company. Also give you a little bit of my perspective on now kind of Retrospectively, we're always smarter than, than at the time when this happened. And so I can give you my perspective on how I look at those things. But first things first, I just want to share a little bit about who I am and where I come from. And so I want to start from, you know, I don't know how many immigrants there are in the audience or people who came, who came from outside of the United States. Maybe raise your hands. Well, you know, you see, this is, uh, that's, that's what I always say, you know, like a lot of the companies get started by people who come from abroad because I think, you know, we, we, uh, um, you know, I think have to sometimes hustle, uh, or work a little bit harder because we're in a foreign country. And so I'm one of the people that, um, that came to the United States when I was, uh, when I was, uh, 17. And now spent more than half of my life here. But actually, I was born in Russia, and I was born in a nuclear city, something— a city that actually did not exist on the map until '90s, I guess '90s. I don't know exactly, maybe 1994. So that's a long story of, like, you know, for example, you know Los Alamos in New Mexico? We have a few of those cities in Russia. in the United States. So it's a city like that in Russia that's kind of was kept secret until the '90s. I came to the US at the age of 17, and I went to school here. I got lucky and I got a scholarship here to go to school, and I graduated with a BS in computer science. Probably a lot of you here I would imagine software engineers, or people who at least develop things or, you know, build things on your own. How many of you code or, you know, at least have a, you know, or have a computer science education? Most of you. I would imagine that quite a few of you, if you're building your own company or aspiring to be entrepreneurs and are in Silicon Valley, are one of those people. Then when I graduated, I worked as a software engineer. I always thought about becoming an entrepreneur in the sense that You know, I think I took some business classes when I was an undergrad and I always, you know, looked up to entrepreneurs, but I always thought that, you know, maybe not now is not the time. And so I decided to first get some experience, you know, work for companies. Then in 2007, I decided to, you know, I felt like I was bored, I guess, and I decided to to pursue a PhD. So I went back to school and I decided to pursue a science career. And I thought that I would seriously— I was thinking of becoming a scientist. And so I went to Stanford. Again, I was lucky to be in one of the best schools in the world. And I was doing my research in— actually, I would describe it broadly as probabilistic models. Kind of large-scale data. And, you know, had some short stints at Google and Microsoft Research when I was at Stanford. And then by 2011, I realized that, you know, I think having spent maybe almost 3 and a half years at Stanford, you absorb all this entrepreneurial culture. I think if you ever spend time, you know, You're here in Silicon Valley, you probably can feel that, but at Stanford it's even more so. Everyone talks about startups, everyone talks about ideas, everyone wants, you know, always talks about NVIDIA and Google and all the big companies that came out of Stanford. And I think you get this, you get the bug, you get very inspired. And so by 2011, we couldn't, I couldn't hold it in me. And me and another founder, we started Jetlore. And then we also partnered with another founder later on, and now it was 3 of us working on Jetlore. And I had to take leave from Stanford and essentially drop out of the PhD program in 2011. So, you know, I don't have a PhD, but I spent almost 4 years pursuing it and, and, you know, passed the quals and did a lot of research and definitely can relate to, to anyone who pursued a career in science. Since then, I've been working on Jetlore, and last year in 2018, PayPal bought Jetlore, acquired Jetlore, and now I'm an employee of PayPal. So anything that I'm going to say here is not reflective of PayPal or company. It's just my personal views and obviously my views on my journey as a founder of a startup rather than, you know, representing the company that I currently work for.
