What 4 Years of Advising 35+ Companies Taught Me

We went through many, many iterations as a company during my time there, growing to about half a billion in revenue and about 500 people. I was the first go-to-market hire there. The things that I focus on in advising, like I have a couple of principles. Number one, be generous. I talk and I give away knowledge to more founders, like to 10 times more founders than I end up working.

What advice you would give to your younger self or to me in that case, who is in the beginning of their solo

I think the first thing is—

Hello everyone, welcome to GrowthMates. If you came here, this is the right place because here we learn inspiring stories from people standing behind the best products we use every single day. And today we have a chance to talk to someone who has worked not just on one or two products, but on 35 or even more products. And I'm so happy to have you here today, Yuriy. Before we start, also just a couple of friendly asks and reminders to people who are listening to us today. Please subscribe to this show on your favorite platforms right now or after you listen to this episode. Hopefully you'll find this useful. And most importantly, please share your comments, your feedback, whatever you want. It really helps to continue creating this show, iterate on it, grow it, and make it useful for you. I'm Kate Suma. For someone who haven't seen me before, be on this I'm a growth advisor helping companies create meaningful products and good user experience. And today I'm happy to host as a guest Yuriy Timen, a fellow advisor from the community of advisors. So happy to have you here today, Yuriy. I think you can better introduce yourself by yourself, but we will definitely come back to all the fantastic facts I found about you on the internet while preparing for this episode.

Oh man, yeah, the internet is a very comprehensive place, right? To put things mildly. Thank you for having me, Kate. It's a real pleasure. So I'm Yuriy. I spent about a decade in operating roles on the growth side, both marketing and growth product. Most notably, I did it for 8 and a half years at Grammarly, which was honestly probably once in a lifetime opportunity. Kind of catching the wave at the right time. We went through, you know, many, many iterations as a company during my time there, growing to about half a billion in revenue and about 500 people. I was the first go-to-market hire there, the first not engineer, not a computational linguist. And by the end of my time there, I was leading a team of about 45 to 50 across marketing, growth product, and other go-to-market capabilities. And then for the past just a little over 4 years, it's wild how time flies. I've been operating in this sort of like fractional world doing everything from high-touch advisory to getting involved on a fractional basis with companies, helping them build their growth engines and accelerate their growth engines. I've worked with about 35 companies, so not quite 45. in the past 4, you know, 4 years and change. And yeah, I mean, happy to speak more to that, you know, if relevant.

Absolutely relevant, of course. One of the topics that I was thinking about like discussing today is this advisory world and how to be an advisor, how to transition to this world, because I think when we will post this episode, this will be my first anniversary in this role after spent 6 years at Mira. Amazing.

Amazing.

You're way, way, way ahead. So like, you've learned a lot, you probably made some mistakes, and I also use this show just to learn myself. So this is why I would like to talk to you about this journey. But maybe just to start from, you've talked about your past and how you got where you are today. But who you are today and what mission is driving you these days in general?

Yeah, it's hard to talk about my advising journey without also incorporating some personal goals, objectives, and milestones. So when I was an operator, my work defined me in every way. I looked to my work for a sense of purpose, right? More so than I looked for a sense of purpose elsewhere. Like my work really, really defined me. And sometime along the way at Grammarly during the 8 and a half years there, I got married, I started a family, but it wasn't like an immediate kind of flip of the switch where it's like, oh, now there are new things that are more arguably, not arguably, should be more important, right? Than your work. It doesn't happen like that, which is actually one of the reasons why I felt driven to part ways with Grammarly is because I felt like I needed a reset in terms of my priorities and things like that. And so when I started building out my advisory chapter, if you will, I no longer put pressure on my work where it has to fill it. It's the only source of filling my purpose cup, right? And so the things that I focus on in advising, like I have a couple of principles. Number one, be generous, right? I talk and I give away knowledge to more founders like to 10 times more founders than I end up working with, right? And that's like, I believe, I don't know, call it karma, call it whatever. I've always been like that in my career and I feel like I've been well rewarded for it, right? So I never try to, I never paywall knowledge, right? I don't believe that by paywalling information, I'm gonna like, that's how I get hired or something. You don't get hired, you know, to, to, for tidbits of insights. You get hired for, you know, to, to help bring something to life, right? And insights and knowledge are a part of that, but a lot of it is also execution and knowing how to stay the course and knowing how to avoid obvious road bumps, et cetera. My second principle is who you work with. is at least as important as what you're working on. And when I was an operator at Grammarly, I was blessed with such incredible team members, but, you know, no company's perfect. And when we reached, you know, several hundreds, there were sometimes, you know, personalities and stuff like that that maybe I would clash with. But it was sort of like, listen, it comes with the territory of building a large, Enduring business. And as long as I found the mission and the vision to be meaningful, you know, I was willing to put up with different types of personalities. As an advisor, and it is a luxury, no doubt, I'm able to say, am I gonna enjoy spending time with these people? Like when I meet the founders, right? And we're kind of, you know, sniffing each other. To use a dog analogy, right? I ask myself, is this going to be fun? Is this going to be energy-inducing? And, you know, and sometimes if the spark isn't there on the kind of on a personality and the intellectual stimulation level, I, you know, bow out of that opportunity. And then the third thing I would say is energy-inducing. I touched on that Just now, but that's also kind of its own value. I try to be very in touch with what I'm doing and which activities give me energy and which activities drain my energy. And that is why as a solopreneur, for better or for worse, maybe it's bad from a risk management or a diversification standpoint, but I spend 90% of my working hours or time Advising with startups, with founders in the trenches. I don't run a newsletter. I don't run a podcast. I don't sell workshops. I don't sell merchandise.

I will do that for you, like instead of you.

Yeah.

I'm doing all of that, not selling, but just, you know, generously giving away newsletters.

Yeah, yeah. I'll take a t-shirt. I'll take a t-shirt. Size small, please.

Okay. Okay. We will create something for you. Definitely.

Yeah, we should create something from, yeah, from this episode. I don't do paid speaking gigs because of that. Because for each of those activities, even though I respect and there are so many, there are good growth newsletter writers and podcasters, I'm speaking to one right now, totally respect and admire their game. I, when I, when I put myself In that headspace, I'm like, am I gonna find this to be energy-inducing? And if the answer is no, I don't do it.

I personally believe that one of the most important jobs of anyone who is creating a digital product is to make the first user experience smooth, intuitive, and memorable. For that, we need to provide users with friendly assistance throughout the whole experience beyond just the first session. Command AI is a user assistance platform that exists for the sole purpose of helping users. It provides a user-centric alternative to traditional pop-ups and chatbots. The first thing that I love about Command AI is their Copilot. This is an AI support agent that can use AI to answer questions, perform actions for the user, or show them how to do some complex things with ease. The second thing that is incredibly useful are nudges. This is a great alternative to annoying pop-ups. Instead of bombarding users with too many messages, you can show them a proactive and relevant message that guides them right to the action. And you can get all of this within Command AI as a no-code platform that product, support, and marketing teams can use to influence user behavior in a positive way while respecting their needs. Thank you again, Command AI, Absolutely.

I think this is one of the main, like, decision-making criteria for us, like what gives you energy, what drains energy. You shared several principles, like just to summarize, being generous, thinking about personality and culture of people who you are working with and like where energy comes from.

I would add one principle that I'm following these days is like optimizing for new learnings. And this is probably what pushed me away from the corporate full-time environment. I grew to the role that I wanted to grow up to. I didn't want to grow further to the head of design role because I wanted to combine it all the time with growth. So for me, that was enough. And when I started thinking, where is the biggest learning potential for me. I uncovered that, of course, independent journey and founder path and all of these paths give way more learnings to me. This is why I shifted to this trajectory. But having you today on this show, what I wanted to do is like, let's get back in time when you just finished your first year advising, like officially advising after you left your corporate.

world. How did that feel, if you remember that?

Yeah, I do remember that. Can I, I wanted to, I think you hit on something really interesting. I just wanna comment on this because I think it may be a unique insight that our audience would appreciate. When you speak to, you know, you had your path, like you could have been moving towards the head of design milestone. You weren't interested in that. and perhaps the thing that you wanted to be doing, it was hard to find a swim lane, a corporate swim lane to do that, right? And so advising, while it has its own difficulties and its own obstacles to overcome, it's a much better petri dish for designing your own role, right? That you may not be able to do at a company, especially as that company scales and You know, as you scale, just things formalize more. Okay. And you have to pick a lane more like, which one are you, Kate? Are you gonna be a desire or are you gonna be like a growth PL? I don't know what. And I'm finding more and more advisors that are able to specialize and I'm like, oh, you know what? That's really cool, but I cannot see you having that role in-house. Like I met a, you know, a word of mouth advisor. That's it. That's his jam. Word of mouth only, right? Or I met like, you know, like an onboarding, an activation advisor only or something like that. Or pricing. Like these are the kind of things where you can build a really meaningful practice and really lean into your passions, but it may be hard to sustain that kind of role In a corporate environment. So just thought that was interesting as one of the benefits to moving into advising. Okay, I didn't forget your question. Year 1, my story I think is a little unconventional in that I'm one of those few people in our peer group who didn't set out intentionally to build this life, this chapter. It happened very serendipitously. I left Grammarly because I just needed a clean break and I needed to kind of decompress and recharge my batteries. And I told myself, I'm gonna give myself a year, up to a year to figure out what's next. But if you really pressed me at the time, I would've told you that next, after I'm done recharging, is gonna be another operating role. That's what I would've told you. That's all I knew how to do. That's how I identified. That's what I identified with. And also my experiences at that time, my experiences to date working with advisors, like when I was at Grammarly, I had access to advisors that none of them I hired myself. It was more like done at the C-level, right? Or like at the board level. And they'd be like, hey, we now, you now have access to such and such person, you know, 'Cause they're on our cap table, right? They're an advisor. And so, and frankly, I found a lot of those interactions to be fairly underwhelming, if I'm being frank. Not because these were like, they weren't experts in their fields, but they were so removed. They were these sort of like ad hoc advisors of sort of like talk to them once a quarter or, and so like they had no business context. And so one of two things would happen. Either they would just give me— oh gosh, Riverside does this too now. They're all copying each other.

It's going to be recorded.

They're all, they're all copying each other. Like they all do the same. Gosh. Anyway, so where was I? Oh, so either they were super out of the loop and so the advice that I would get was just very generic. or if I wanted them to have the appropriate context, the amount of work I would need to put in delivering that context to them made it like, made me second guess, do I even go to them for advice or not? Now later, of course, I learned that there are so many other flavors of it, but at the time that was the stigma that I felt towards advising. So if you would've asked me, I would say advising, Geez, no, I'm a builder, okay? I'm a builder. I build. I've just taken a break. And then during this break, as a way to stay intellectually engaged, I took on a couple of advising clients. Again, it was, I was incredibly spoiled in that respect. This was all inbound and, you know, it was a different time. The ZIRP era, right? The raging bull market. era. You know, money was just, everyone was swimming in money. Companies were swimming in money. So I, the timing ended up being fortunate in that regard. But sorry for this long-winded prelude, but basically during that first year of me advising, in my mind, I was just on my break from operating. And when I got to the end of year 1, I was having a lot of fun, I was learning a lot. I still had a lot of inbound interest, but I didn't cross the threshold of saying, huh, this is something that I could be doing longer term. I was still in my mind like, this is my sabbatical, but looks like it's gonna run a little longer than anticipated.

Your sabbatical can become your full-time endeavor.

I'm now on a 4, almost 4 and a half year sabbatical from operating, right? No. But so the end of year 1 for me was just like more like having to reconcile in my head because I was like, because I still identify with being an operator and it was kind of tough. I was like, geez, it's now been a year. If I keep doing this, like, am I going to become like undesirable as an operator in the future? It was really important for me to still stay relevant as an operator. And somehow I agreed to give myself another 6 months. which is kind of like sweeping it under the rug, sweeping, sort of like being radically candid with myself, delaying it, right? Kicking the can down the road. And then at 18 months I was like, okay, I can no longer, 'cause I was even positioning myself like that when networking. I was positioning myself as like, yeah, I'm just kind of taking a break. I do a little bit of advising while taking a break. Like I was doing that, right? And I was still getting quite a bit of business. In retrospect, it's like maybe that was not the best thing, the best way to communicate or position myself, right? It could have turned away, right?

Maybe it was because probably, yeah, it's a differentiator in a way, right? So if anybody else is like saying, I'm an advisor, I'm doing this and that, it seems like Probably your expertise was like just something exceptional and people just wanted to hire you on any terms just to see how it works, how it goes.

Yeah, maybe. I don't know. You know, we can, you know, hindsight is 20/20. But so, and then at the 18-month mark, so for me, the real inflection point came at the 18-month mark when I was like, okay, I still have all these engagements. I'm talking to all these interesting founders. I love this work. I'm learning a lot. I feel intellectually stimulated. Yeah, there are some things that I'm starting to now miss about the operating world, and we can get into that if you'd like.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, uh, and that's when I finally came out as an advisor, right?

After 18 months?

After 18 months. Yeah, that's when my website went up finally. I kind of whipped my LinkedIn into shape. I workshopped my positioning. And since then, you know, I've felt a lot more free, not worried about keeping that operator door open. Even though I'm not closing that door, like I'm not, I'm not saying never again.

This is interesting. There are many differences between our paths. I think we can, we can talk about that. What it reminded me, like when you announce who you are officially, it's probably already after a certain time you have done this role, even in a full-time environment. I've been announced as official, let's say, design manager or head of growth product design after I was doing that for a year or so.

Same thing happens in this solopreneur path. You are just exploring who you are. And for example, now I'm saying like I'm a founder of GrowthMates because GrowthMates is more than just growth advising.

There are many dimensions and I'm sort of building a business and this is a new interesting positioning for me as well. And I started doing that actually after 1 year of building GrowthMate. So it's been sort of, I was unsure if I can say that I'm a founder, like I didn't have enough confidence to say something like that. And still I'm not sure if I have that. But what is also interesting about this path and this journey is probably that you have to unlearn a lot of things that you used to do. in this full-time corporate environment. Now you need to do that differently. So looking back, what were one or two things you had to unlearn intentionally in your new role as an advisor?

Well, the first thing is that you don't control how the sausage is made, right? So you can help You can help design the recipe for the sausage. You can help negotiate with the suppliers of the different ingredients. You can diagram how big the sausage needs to be. The, you know, the— I'm taking this American idiom too far, clearly, but ultimately, As an advisor, you're not there to kind of oversee the quality of the execution. You're also not really a part of every key decision that's made, even with respect to growth. Sometimes I think I'm a growth advisor, you know, and that means like if a company ever has any question about growth, they should come to me. That seems reasonable, right? And I'll be working on something, I'll have my kind of dedicated focus areas, And then they'll be like, okay, oh, we just like changed our entire onboarding funnel. And at first I'm like, my initial reaction, if it didn't come through me, it feels like kind of like your ego is hurt, right? It's like, it's sort of like, well, you have access to me. Why didn't you come to me about that? Right? And you cannot take those things personally because you're not a full-time team member. They think differently, the client thinks differently around perhaps where you can have the biggest impact, where they want your focus and attention to be, et cetera, right? Now, it is your job to also educate your client on the kind of things that, where it makes sense for them to pull you in, right? So one thing that I now started doing is sometimes, you know, will be exploring an engagement and they have a very specific focus, like, I don't know, let's say demand generation. We really want to get our demand gen channels off the ground and that's like our mid and upper funnel channels, you know, YouTube, Meta, whatever, maybe SEO, and they really need help there, right? And so maybe I come in and I'll say, okay, look, you know more about your company, your opportunities, your challenges than I do for now. And maybe forever, but for now, for sure. So I will, I will follow your lead initially. So I'll come in and I'll focus on the areas that you believe are the highest impact areas. But I reserve the right, with your permission, I reserve the right as I get more up to speed, if I see that there are other opportunities elsewhere outside of the areas that you've delegated to me, I'm gonna raise my hand, I'm gonna point them out, and I'm gonna maybe make a business case for me to spend more time there. Is that a deal? Are you okay with that? Or are you gonna feel like I'm meddling? Are you gonna feel like I'm, you know, sticking my nose where it doesn't belong? And that's an important part of alignment for me now with clients after. So I guess the thing that I unlearned Is I unlearned that like you just have to like relinquish control. Things will get done how they get done. Like you can make your recommendations, you can make your, you know, business cases, et cetera. The second thing I unlearned is that, you know, just because you're the most kind of seasoned growth person at the company because of your, you know, small time investment, Not all growth things are gonna flow through you. Not all growth decisions are gonna flow through you. Another thing that I learned, and this is more about myself and many of our peers, is that careers are not linear, right? And which is why, and that's kind of a beautiful thing. Actually, let's take even more of a step back. We work, we are of the generation and we work in a sector Where the traditional, like I have parents who are approaching retirement age and they are, you know, for them it's very linear. It's like I have my working life and it's, you know, goes, runs from like 22 through 65. And this is when I make my money and this is when I try to set myself up for my non-working life, right? And then between 65 and hopefully 90 or whatever is my not working life, right? This is when I enjoy the— I reap the benefits of what I've built during my working life. And it's been like that for generations and generations and generations. And in a lot of fields it's still the case, right? Maybe if you're, you know, working like the assembly line or something like that. But think of how blessed we are. Right? We don't think that way. We think of things like financial freedom and trying to achieve financial freedom, you know, in our 30s. And financial freedom doesn't mean necessarily financial independence or never having to work again, but it's sort of like financial freedom. It's like being able to do the work that you love on the terms that you love, take— having some financial cushion to where you can take time away from that work. come back to it. It's nonlinear, right? And so like, what am I doing right now? Am I no longer an operator? I'm just not an operator for now. But I have faith that if I wanted to get back to building, those paths are there, either as a founder or by joining another company. I had to learn that. I used, and I had to unlearn more of that linear mindset.

I love so much that you touched this topic of nonlinear careers because that was one of the taglines of GrowthMates as well. Like we are exploring people's nonlinear trajectories here.

Yeah.

And what I love about this concept is that it really unpacks a lot of possibility to unlearn and learn and self-reflect in a way that, I don't know, I haven't feel—

I haven't felt that level of self-reflection or ability to self-reflect when I was in a corporate environment for some reason, because this environment pushes you to explore deeper your personality and like questioning why are you doing these things? What are you doing? Where are you going? And when I was reflecting what I had to unlearn myself, I put like several things and all of them are connected to things beyond work, like to life actually. So for example, one of the things I'm still unlearning or learning how to do is how to focus versus multifocusing on multitasking because that was my superpower. in my corporate world, I could do several things in parallel. You remember like these Zoom calls and you can do Slack in parallel? My favorite part. Now I cannot allow doing these things. My time, if I'm doing a call with a client, is like 3 or 10x more intense than any previous call that I've had in the corporate world. Then another thing is like setting boundaries. This is what you were talking about. aligning expectations, management, setting up clear boundaries because if we will not set them up, I've done these mistakes and my time was sort of cannibalized in a way that I have a limited, um, availability as an advisor. This is why I'm doing that, but then it wasn't like utilized well and then it becomes not effective or like... enjoyable for anyone. And the third thing that is probably a combination of my particular path as an advisor, as a founder, is like delegation in a new way because you, you have run a team of like 45, 50 people.

It's absolutely different situation versus doing something by yourself where you don't have a lot of people who can support you, but maybe at some point it's valuable to delegate some parts of your work as well. Let's say, uh, when I found finally an assistant, my, my day, my time, what I spend time on and the quality of the things I'm doing, like dramatically changed. So maybe this is just a new mental model of how to delegate to different types of work, to different types of people and different types of personalities. Um, and talking about that, like what advice you would give to your younger self or to me in that case? Uh, who is in the beginning of their solopreneurship path today?

I think the first thing is, uh, know your why. I, you know, I have an anecdote when, about how I, when, how I had a dream that ended up being an illusion because I wasn't true to myself about my why. And I thought I was destined to be an entrepreneur. I came from an entrepreneurial family and I thought that like, I went, I got an undergraduate business degree and I'm like, and there was this one, my, I grew up always hearing how my dad, you know, would say that he can't work for anyone. He can only work for himself, right? And so, and you know, I wanted to be more like my dad. And so I thought that I was destined for entrepreneurship, right? And I also like when growing up, I showed like rebelliousness toward authority, which further reinforced that I guess I'm supposed to be, which by the way is a complete caricature of what it means to be an entrepreneur, right? Like you actually have to be really good with people. And so, and I remember there was a time, you know, after I had like a couple of jobs in growth and I started doing a little bit of consulting and I met Grammarly. time. Okay. And we started kind of dating, right? And they wanted to hire me, but I was like, no, I'm destined to myself. I'm like, I'm destined for entrepreneurship. Like, this is a step back. Joining this company is a step back. It's a step away from my purpose, which should be an entrepreneur. And somehow, Thankfully, I was able to justify it and say, okay, you know what? I'm gonna go and work there for maybe 2 to 3 years because the guys who are running Grammarly, they are repeat entrepreneurs. So I'm gonna learn from them for 2 to 3 years and then I'm ready to go. That's how I justified it. Well, 2 years turned into 4, 4 into 6, 6 into 8. Now I'm 4 years advising. Where is my entrepreneurial destiny? And at some point along the way at Grammarly, this goes back to knowing your why, I started peeling back the onion and I realized that a lot of it was just ego-driven, right? Like it's gotta be my company. I have to be able to say this is my company, right? And once I was able to kill my ego, I guess, right? I realized that, look, what I want is I want autonomy, I want impact, you know, and I want collaboration. And it doesn't have, like, I can find that mix elsewhere. It doesn't have to be in a company I found. So I became, so once I figured out my why, I realized, you know what, I'm okay with never founding my own company. If it happens, it happens, but it's no longer like a bucket list I'd bring this to advisors because I meet a lot of, I mean, I don't need to tell you how large the graveyard of failed advisors is. And I think with a lot of them, it's not being clear about their why, why they're getting into this and not being clear-eyed about the trade-offs. People really, They tend to, what's the word, idealize what the life of an advisor is. They just think it's like, I don't know, rainbows and unicorns. And Dara, yeah, go ahead.

I think we can break a couple of myths about that as well. You also reminded me about our conversation that we had before recording this podcast that defining your why is important, understanding why, because it helps to define your differentiator in positioning.

And you said like, Kate, you own a real, like a brain estate in my mind on the POG plus user experience because I haven't heard about that. And this is something that like I had to come back intentionally because my roots, my background is in product design, it's in design, even graphic design that I really like and collect everywhere. And I create, like, I love to create some tangible outcomes in the end. So just knowing that helps to define your positioning as an advisor as well and stand out from the crowd if you want. But then when we are talking about this role, there are some complex parts, right? So one of the things I'm still thinking about is like, how To make sure like that we are not putting too much pressure on our shoulders, let's say. And the cost of mistake of the advisor can be quite high if we set up these expectations that whenever, whatever we say is gonna be like upside or down for the company.

So how do you think about this today and have you done Something that, I don't know, had some very negative impact on the company, that you made a mistake, you gave wrong advice, if that's even possible, because this is something that I sometimes worry about, like, what if I say something without like clearly measuring, managing these expectations, they do that and their metrics will be just awful, what we gonna do then?

You know, I'm not gonna have anything really sensational for you for this question. And the reason is that, I mean, at the heart of what we do is data-driven and hypothesis-driven experimentation and testing, which means that almost everything that we do is reversible. Based on data, right? We are not as growth advisors telling people to launch new product lines and also are sticking around long enough to see it happen and then see does it succeed or fail, right? So in a way, I feel like in a way this role, if I can be honest, kind of protects you From some of the, I don't know, really big, big lows that you can experience as an operator. I like to say this as an advisor, one of the downsides, 'cause we want to be candid here, the upsides are plentiful, but one of the downsides is that your highs don't get as high, your lows don't get as low. I mean, your lows don't get as low as an upside, but your highs don't get as high. Right? Like you're not gonna have the magnitude of failures that you may have as an operator, right? Like hiring the wrong person, promoting the wrong person, shipping an experiment that, you know, I don't know, tanks the metrics and then you fail to catch it in time or something, things like that. Because again, you're not making the sausage now. And then there's also the function of like, you know, the engagements are maybe like 6 months or something like that, right? So a lot of the things just like, You don't have the longitudinal view to see maybe some of the second and third order effects of the recommendations you make. Okay. Now with that being said, I'll give you something, right? I'll give you something. I mean, there've been tactical things, right? Where let's say someone wants to make the onboarding shorter and I say, no, like I promise you, Like my intuition tells me that if you shorten your onboarding, your pass-through rate, your completion rate is not going to improve, but you're going to miss out on the data enrichment that you're getting, you know, by having those additional questions, right? And then like, I'm like, but honestly, if you feel strongly about it, let's go ahead and experiment with it. We experiment with it and you know what? My intuition was wrong. But again, we ran a test. Is that a big failure? Okay, my intuition was wrong on that. But this is, that's why we have A/B testing, right? And that's why we have hypothesis-driven experimentation so that it's not my intuition against yours, right? You know, other things is a lot around hiring, which goes both ways. Maybe I'm supporting, I help a lot of my clients hire and, you know, sometimes run searches for them. So there've been instances where maybe I advocated for a hire Uh, or I supported a hire that ended up not panning out. That's a failure. Or maybe, not maybe, there have been instances where I was, let's say, a no, a thumbs down on a hire, but due to how the process was run, you know, I was overruled and then that hire ended up thriving. So there are, there are enough of those examples.

Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me about like the corporate environment as well, but it It's interesting that you highlighted this perspective that externally you are not feeling this down so much, but you also don't feel the up as well, meaning that it's like probably it's something like about being a little bit isolated from this fun game, but still being involved.

That I'm also trying to build these days with my approach with companies who I work with.

I know we are almost on time.

Yeah.

And maybe last question that I wanted to ask you, you mentioned that somewhere in the beginning of our conversation that there are, there might be some parts that you miss from the teamwork, corporate work. What are these parts that you are missing?

Ownership, right? Where you have ownership of a specific metric, specific OKR, specific KPI. I miss being part of a specific team. I am like, I'm like a quasi-part of multiple teams, right? But I'm not, you know, I miss that. I miss the, you know, there's something, you know, about those long nights with a team where you know that you're all sacrificing together, right? You're choosing to be here to be here together and build, you know, as opposed to, yeah, you're putting other things on hold. Yeah. And there's something really rewarding about that when you reach some kind of outcome, successful outcome or milestone. I miss that. I mean, you know, there is a, I'm going to, this is a really silly example, but like, let's say you can win $1 million in a lottery by buying a scratch ticket, right? Or for instance, you can like, I don't know, advise a company for 6 months, get some equity, and then that company ends up doing well and you get $1 million. Which million dollars feels better?

For me, of course, the second one, because you have put some energy into that. You feel some sense of belonging to that versus just the lottery, which Which is just an occasion. Yeah.

So it's human psychology, right? Like the things that we're most proud of are also the things that we had to work hard to get, right? And that dynamic as an operator, it's hard to replicate as an advisor, right? Because by definition, you're kind of like diversifying your time. Yeah, you care about each one of your clients, right? But that diversification means like you're not like You're not putting all of your skin, you know, the skin in the game. You're not putting all of your skin in one game. And that, I think, the kind of fulfillment that you can get from putting all of your skin in one game, if it works out, is something that I miss at times.

Interesting. Wow. You reminded me about so many things and like rose some thoughts that I will probably spend some time on thinking and maybe come back to you to ask you more questions. But yeah, I think the thing that I'm combining both like advising and founding something, building something helps me sort of fill these gaps as well. However, the teamwork part is like probably the most missing part for me as well.

Yeah. And listen, you're gonna go through ebbs and flows, right? I'm 4 years in, so I've had probably, I've had more cycles of emotions around this, right? Absolutely.

And I'm super excited about that. And thank you so much for being here today. I hope people who will listen to that will think about this advisory path more intentionally and compare it with the full-time world with more data, not just like a beautiful unicorn world. Um, so thank you for being here today. Uh, thank you for being so open to share your path and for all our listeners, I hope you will enjoy that.

And if you will, please share your feedback, comments, share it with your friends, share it with anyone who is thinking about the advisory role. So to make this decision more intentionally. Yeah.

Thank you so much for having me, Kate. It's been a real pleasure and honor. You know, people can look me up on LinkedIn, Yuriy Timen, or check out my website, yuriytimen.com. You can learn more about my work and, you know, some of the content that I put out. Absolutely.

We will attach all of that to our show notes and thank you so much. Yeah, enjoy the rest of your day.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening. Subscribe to the show on growthmates.club and get free playbook with frameworks and insights. If you find this valuable, please share it with your friends and colleagues and subscribe to this show on your favorite platforms to get new episodes. Let's keep growing together.