There are many articles about “How to find a tech co-founder” or “How to make your first startup hire,” but only a few show this experience from the perspective of the tech founder.
Hey everyone, I am Yev. I am a co-founder and the CTO of Scrimmage. But I wasn’t the original founder. I joined the company after it had existed for six months. In this article, I will explain how that happened and why it was my best career decision.
Why did I choose to do startups?
When I was 18, on my birthday, I started my internship as a full-stack software developer in Ukraine. I successfully passed the internship and joined the company on my way to becoming a software developer. I had no family, I had been living in a small city, and after earning a salary, money was not a problem for me. That is when I realized that by landing a job in software engineering, I had just secured my life on a pretty luxurious being. At 19, I realized that I would be great in old age if I just stuck with what I was doing right now. I didn’t want to feel that my life was over at 19, so I set bigger goals. The goals of societal change are making impacts on millions of lives. That is how I began reading Western literature, watching startup YouTube channels, and slowly growing the seed of my startup.
At that time, I was inspired by people like Elon Musk, and I saw no reason why I couldn’t become like them. In the worst case, I will return to being a software developer and still live a luxurious life; in the positive case, I will change the world.
How did I end up searching for a new project?
While trying to build a part-time startup, I realized that my main job was not bringing me closer to it. I felt tons of progress reading books about startups and no progress coding, one more feature of my main job. That is where I decided to shape my career to support my goals and become a technical product manager. Firstly, I wanted to become a project manager, but my mentor, thanks to her, said that I wanted to become a product manager. Luckily, my company lacked product managers, so I had an opportunity to wear a new hat before I realized that the hat was too small. The product I was managing was mainly for internal usage, and higher management wasn’t very open to the strategic pivots I was proposing.
That is how I decided to leave the company and get another job as a product manager. Unfortunately, I found a company that valued my coding skills more than my thirst to become a manager. Under the promise to be a manager, I joined the company and ended up coding 95% of my time, so I left in 4 months. Thanks to savings, I finally started working full-time on my startup.
It was an awkward first shot to start something, and it failed incredibly. In retrospect, I was trying to wear too much heat with too little knowledge. I was also trying to refuse market trends and follow my vision of how things have to work, which led me to be forced to close the company due to lack of funding. That is how I realized that money is significant in business, and I can’t handle it alone. I realized I would be better off working as a software developer, earning a lot of money, and investing it in my startup rather than working as a manager. Managers earn much less than developers, there is less demand, and I, a beginner, would earn barely a living minimum.
I remembered that my previous company was searching for clients on Upwork and selling us for something like $50 per hour while paying us $10 per hour. So, I thought I would make a great value by working for $25 per hour on Upwork. People would get the same value as they would get from my company for a lower price. That is how I ended up searching for new projects.
Why did I choose to join Scrimmage?
While searching for projects, I wanted to combine the need for money with experience working in startups, so I was constantly searching for projects with the word “startup” in it. I was contacting dozens of people per day and writing very personalized messages to every one of them. After three days of active searching, I found a project post titled “Flask developer needed for sports betting startup.” At that moment in my life, I had high social values. I was into ecology, equality, and stuff like that. So sports betting was like a straight NO for me. However, my primary requirement was money, so I submitted my interest while increasing my hourly rate to $30. For that money, I was ready to do whatever, honestly.
I can’t find a recording of our first meeting, but I remember it well. I remember the FOMO that Matt and Dan were able to create from the short 30-minute meeting. Their experience working on Wall Street was pretty exciting. The fact that they raised money was exhilarating, and how their business worked sounded very smart. I failed my business because I wasn’t able to earn revenue quickly enough; they seemed to have a plan on how to earn money and earn a lot.
After the meeting, they assigned me the task of implementing a socket-based data updating system for the front end. I had never really done sockets before that date, but FOMO made me do it in the next three hours after our interview was finished. Later, he said the most impressive part about me was how quickly and well I did the assignment.
Soon after, my offer was accepted. Here are some artifacts I was able to recollect.
Original offer
“Scrimmage is a pre-launch startup in the sports betting industry. Former professional sports bettors founded the company, and Scrimmage was created to share the tools they use to make betting decisions with the rest of the world. Development for the mobile app and website is about 80% completed, and an experienced backend flask developer is needed to get the project to a release point. After launch, development of version 2 will commence, adding a new element to the app and website, expanding the base of potential users.”
Original proposal
“Hi, my name is Yev. I have been working as a full-stack web developer for the past three years. My focus is backend and DevOps; I have attached my resume with a detailed profile.”
What frameworks have you worked with?
It’s hard to count all of them; if we are talking about backend and Python, I am most fluent with Django and Flask. “
My feedback to Matt after three months of working together
“Matt is a great client; he is very respectful and sets detailed requirements for his clients. It was a pleasure working with him.”
Matts’s feedback to me after three months
“Yev is an excellent addition to our team. He accelerated the pace of our backend development from a matter of months to a matter of weeks and afterward did the same thing for our front end. He is highly organized, even with the flexibility required for a startup, and is the primary driver of team communication. He is extremely internally motivated, forward-thinking, and creative, which has proven highly beneficial for creating unique solutions to otherwise not-so-standard problems. Looking forward to the continued work with Yev.”
My resume
Resume-Yevhenii-Rachkovan28529Download
Why did I choose to become a co-founder?
At that time, I had been reading a lot of business literature, and everyone said that only shares can get you rich. Especially if you are the founder. After trying to launch Anthill Academy, I knew that the world of startups is not as easy as everyone likes to imagine. Raising money is impossible for a person without a reputation and personal connections. I was confident in my skills in building software for startups, but I was also satisfied with my incompetence in raising money and attracting clients for the startup.
Scrimmage seemed an obvious answer for me. A startup that already trusts me as a developer that can give me some credibility and become my entry point into the world of venture capital. Both founders were from the US, had a background in banking, and seemed pretty competent. They mentioned that they would be happy to have me as a CTO a couple of times, so I knew they also were interested in that. After three months of working, I started to feel that the company was not going through the best time and there was not much money left in the bank. It was a perfect time to make a first move and propose to become a co-founder.
It all started with Matt promising me some shares and payments for working hard on launching a product. At that time, I was already responsible for product development and felt like a CTO, so I asked if I could put the title of CTO on my LinkedIn. He said that investors are looking for a lifetime commitment to a company, and if I want it, we can discuss it further. To which I proactively replied with a proposal with initial numbers, which made the conversation go.
Then Matt brought a point that he and Dan have made all in into this company and if I wanna have a decent share in a company I have to share this mindset. Which basically means, I have to drastically cut my salary till the moment business can pay it. This is a moment where most deals go through. But I didn’t care about money, my goal was to get experience and reputation. Having ownership in the company was even better for me, so I agreed. The whole negotiation took about a week of back and forth with 15 emails in the thread. At the end of the negotiation, I was able to achieve my ownership goal but for the price of having a minimal livable salary till the moment, the company can afford it.
I expected to get my decent salary back in 2-4 months, but actually, it took us 9 months to start paying us decent salary. In the 8th month, I honestly was close to giving up, but thanks to the support of my founder I survived. After that, I realized what an entrepreneurial roller coaster means and why everyone talks about it.
2 years later
These 2 years were just crazy. The only thing I know for sure is that Scrimmage wouldn’t be in that good spot without me and I wouldn’t be in a so good spot without Scrimmage. Selfishly I would say, for Scrimmage the decision of bringing me as a co-founder was probably the best hiring decision ever. I added enormous value to the development and ideation around the product. I bring my best engineer friends to work with me. Recently I developed my own health check program for evaluating a product’s health. On the last health check, we scored 8.9 out of 10, which is an enormous number.
From a personal perspective, in winter 2022 we were accepted to Techstars in-person program in Indianapolis. I needed to travel to the US, but before that, I wanted to visit the EU. After 2 weeks of my leaving Ukraine, the war started. If not for Scrimmage I would have never left Ukraine at that time and probably ended up in a much worst condition than I am right now.
The ability to live 1 year in the US made me almost a native speaker and forever closed my need to study English again. Participation in Techstars gave me a powerful network I was so lacking. The experience of being a co-founder of Scrimmage gave me practical knowledge about how to build startups.
Joining Scrimmage as a co-founder was probably the most impactful decision in my life. It gave me ridiculous short-term disadvantages with a reduced salary, but amazing long-term career benefits.
Conclusion
This is not a story everyone is ready to share that openly. But I do because I have chosen an uncommon path that gave me uncommon benefits. I want this path to be more common across Ukrainian IT specialists. Startups do have not the best reputation. There are founders who make you work 7 days per week, 12 hours per day. There are founders who cheat on you with shares deals. All those people made a bad reputation for startups, but it shouldn’t be like that.
When I was 19 I read a similar article about how Dropbox started. That and many other founder stories inspired me to choose this adventurous path. However, all those stories were far from me. All those people were foreigners, they were born at different times, visited different schools, and had different parents. I believed that non if it matters unless you focused and your goal and you work hard. I wanna share my story so that you can see that it is true. I am nothing unique. I was born in Ukraine, in 2001, visited a common village school, was grown by a single mom, and had no wealth or reputation. If I could do that, you definitely can do that too.
I didn’t achieve world greatness as the founder of Dropbox or Facebook did, but I am in a great spot to achieve it in the next 10 years. All of it is because of a single decision, of sacrificing short-term pleasure for long-term benefits and becoming a co-founder.