In a recent episode of the Dealmakers’ Podcast, Sultan Murad Saidov, co-founder of Beamery, shared a powerful narrative of how his upbringing, experiences, and passion for fair opportunities led to creating a groundbreaking talent management platform.

His venture, Beamery, has raised funding from top-tier investors like Teachers’ Venture Growth, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, EQT Ventures, and Index Ventures.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Parents’ sacrifice and moving to the UK provided invaluable access to world-class education and opportunities.
• Recognizing the privilege they received, the co-founders of Beamery are driven by a mission to democratize access to opportunities for all.
• The early electronics, computing, and gaming ventures underscore a lifelong curiosity and penchant for innovation.
• Beamery’s genesis stemmed from a groundbreaking experiment that challenged the traditional CV-based job search paradigm.
• Collaborations with recruitment agencies and influential clients like Spotify and VMware were pivotal in establishing Beamery’s credibility.
• Beamery’s journey through the funding landscape showcases its ability to navigate challenges and secure backing from strategic investors.
• The COVID-19 pandemic prompted Beamery to pivot and adapt, ultimately accelerating the adoption of its software in unforeseen ways.

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About Sultan Murad Saidov:

Sultan Murad Saidov is Co-Founder and President of Beamery, the leading Talent Lifecycle Management Platform.

Sultan is a frequent speaker on AI, the Future of Work, and Talent Transformation, was listed in the Forbes 30 under 30 list, and is the host of the Talent Blueprint podcast.

Sultan is now leading Beamery’s mission to create equal access to work for the world – helping every human to find the right job and achieve their career ambitions, while enabling businesses to create more human experiences for talent – unlocking the true potential of their workforce.

Beamery’s Talent Lifecycle Management platform empowers companies to understand the skills and capabilities they have, build more agile workforce plans, and attract, retain, upskill and redeploy their workforce.

Connect with Sultan Murad Saidov:

• Linkedin
• Crunchbase
• TheOrg
• SignalNFX

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Already hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show. So today you know we have a really amazing founder that is joining us a founder that he’s going to walk us through his journey and through what he’s building with his company the building the scaling the financing. All of that we’re going to be talking about how he was able to and his company his team. You know to get the first enterprise customer how they went during the fundraising journey because it’s been ten years that they’ve been pushing this on how the landscape has evolved. They’re actually based out of the u k. And then also how they went about creating a new category as well as the lessons learned you know during the pandemic and also the macro environment dealing with the downturns. So again, super inspiring the episode that we have ahead of us and without farther ado let’s welcome our guest today. Sultan Murad Sayed off welcome to the show. So originally you were born in Russia in Moscow you know you grew up there and with your parents but obviously obviously there were certain changes there with the Soviet Union

Sultan Murad Saidov: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me excited for this.

Alejandro Cremades: And that ended up landing you in the U K So give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Yeah, so my um, my family’s from a ah place called ah dystan which is a part of Russia and after the the Soviet Union collapsed my parents are scientists and that was one of the professions that was impacted by the the collapse of the Soviet Union so they ended up looking for ways to to restart their lives and found an opportunity to to move to the Uk which is a pretty big reset. Um, our mother went from being a neuroscientist to having to start career and frontline work. Our father went from being a physicist to having to to reboot his life and as kids. Um. We didn’t appreciate just how much of a privilege they gave us by coming to the Uk and giving us one of the the best educations in the world. 1 of the best inner places to access networks and opportunities and that’s something we we definitely became aware of as we started our own careers. And realized just how how much of a privilege it. It was to be given that education given that access and and certainly and I’ll I’ll get to this is ah one of the the influences of what what led to beamery and and the the story of the last ten years

Alejandro Cremades: And we’ll talk about that in just a little bit now. Obviously that’s a pretty big deal. You know for you to experience your parents reinventing themselves for you to land in a new country. You know I’m sure that that is that has shape in quite a bit who you are how so.

Sultan Murad Saidov: I think in many ways obviously life life experiences shape both what you think is important in the world and and who you are yourself I think in my case so I started the company with my brother and we were both shaped similarly by by these experiences. 1 of the ways was the realization that where you work is 1 of the most important choices you make in life whether you work for yourself or whether you work in a company and yet it’s one of the least fair and least informed you know the the choices available to folks going through national upheavals like ah like our parents are. Very limited and not entirely up to themselves. But for most people the the question of how do you get to start a company. How likely are you to raise money how likely you are you to get employment so much of it is actually a passport lottery and so much of it is not ah, not fair based on the opportunities that that you have access to. And that’s one of the things that we my brother and I spent many years discussing you know what could be fairer. How could more people wake up in the morning and get a fairer chance and and we started to realize you know there are things you can do to create more access make it easier for people to be found. Opportunities or to find organizations where they can make an impact and certainly the the democratization of that is ah is a big thing that is going to happen in the world I think in the coming decades but for us personally you know that that kind of mission had been niggling at us for a long time before we started beamering and.

Sultan Murad Saidov: And when we started our own careers which happened to be for both of us in finance during the the 2008 recession that became even clearer. You know one of the folks that was um, interviewing alongside me when I started working at Goldman Sachs had 5 job offers um and ended up getting none of them because of a sort of last minute. Recession-driven change and ended up having to actually do deliveries for a while and didn’t end up working in finance and it’s one of those unfair things in life. It’s not really about what you’re capable of it’s about you know the lottery of how employment works now these chances work and so I think that’s what really shaped us. You know the realization of quite how. Meaningful that is and also you know quite how lucky we were and and how much of a chance we had to to start tackling this problem.

Alejandro Cremades: Now in your case you you got the entrepreneurial bug very early on I mean while you were at school you were already building computers and websites. So what do you think this entrepreneurial drive comes from.

Sultan Murad Saidov: You know I think obviously there there are some patterns for how ah kids who migrate to a new country are often more likely to to have that kind of bug I know that’s you know one of the principles that some Vc firms have talked about including you know, sequoia and others. Think for me personally and it was partly an element of you know inspiration by my parents’ story and certainly not something I appreciated at the time but in retrospect I think that was part of it. Um, but partly also just a ah ah mindset I’ve always had of being both curious about. Most things and wanting to to try and do things better and I remember you know the actual of the first venture I ever had was and starting to sell electronic speakers that I found in the early days of Ipods when they didn’t have their own speakers and then I found out that you you. You could build computers. Um in the early days of ah of being able to to do so cheaply and started trying to do that and so ah and then when I was still at school I started building websites and video games and and then found people who wanted ah that so to pay for that. So I think I’ve always had this sort of mindset of learning things and then it was less about the financial side of it or the sort of trying to get a financial outcome especially in the early days and more just a a constant desire to to try things out and do things that I didn’t see other people doing that I found interesting.

Alejandro Cremades: So one of the companies that you started was delivering boost and that was actually you know the time that you got into Oxford so how was how was it like you know like that. The first experience of um, you know, really building a company and and. And at the same time which you were pursuing your studies.

Sultan Murad Saidov: So so I’ll I’ll tell you what actually led to that. So just before I went to Oxford I spent in the Uk quite a lot of people do gap years in between school and university and in my gap year I spent um half of it six months in this scheme organized by Deloitte where. You spend six months doing rotations within Deloitte and then afterwards they help sponsor you through university and then you become you know a representative for them there and when I was in Deloitte. Um I ended up getting this idea for the teams that I was working in um to send ah faxes for team food. And coffee orders so that um people didn’t have to go pick it up because I’d be working in teams that were working after hours and then getting team meals expensing them and so on so I built this little website as a form for teams to just give their orders. What food you want? What coffees you want and then fax that to like Starbucks restaurants and. Um, and building that little thing just as a convenience while I was there when I then went to university I realized that there’s lots of cases where and this is obviously before you had like deliveroo and uber eats and all the things we have now there’s lots of cases where it was inconvenient to try and order. Food or drink especially as a university student. Um, ah the the latter and and so I did the same thing and built these like forms and sites and found some local drivers that I could send these orders to to pick it up and and unfortunately this is before the times of either drivers or people having iphones and smartphones. So.

Sultan Murad Saidov: A lot of this was phone sms and fax based um would have looked different if I was starting it just a few years later but that was the that was the the business then a I guess a thing that now most of us have through things like uber eats and so on.

Alejandro Cremades: So I guess what? what was what was the lesson that you learned because I mean the the business. Obviously you ended up going to Goldman Sachs and you ended up wounding the business down. But what was the listen. You know that you took away from you from from that rodeo.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Well, it’s funny I remember um when I was asking some friends who were investors or ah it was actually friends of friends who who were investors what they thought about the idea because I was doing this myself I was like building the site. And I actually had a friend who was who was ah helping helping me out with starting that business but I didn’t know anything about fundraising certainly didn’t have funds myself to invest in this stuff and the response I got from the few investors I managed to reach out to was ah but you know just eat can do this just eat was a company that was doing it at the time and they weren’t doing. Either this or business deliveries but they said well why you know why? Why would we invest they’re already doing this um and similar responses came from folks who just thought you know this isn’t something that’s scalable and of course now we have deliveroo uber eats and of course it wasn’t a bad idea but 1 of the lessons was to ah. Not over rely on the importance of you know opinions of people who don’t understand why the idea is relevant or becoming relevant and to have more confidence in creating your own proof points because you know one of the reasons I ended up winding that business down. Other than I had a job lined up and I didn’t have the sort of financial security to keep doing it is because um I didn’t really have the self-confidence to at the time double down and carve the path to to making this a bigger thing and I certainly didn’t think about how to scale.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Something that was actually working in a pretty scalable way I didn’t really have that ah that ambition or confidence that it was Doable. So I think both on the how you think about seeking investment and and where it matters or doesn’t matter and how you think about having the confidence to to validate and and build on ideas that not yet proven. It’s certainly something that. Ah, influenced a lot the the kind of ambition I later applied to to starting beamery.

Alejandro Cremades: so so bimetri obviously came you know to to live you know as an idea initially while you were at Goldmanachs you know that’s how you started to incubate what ended up becoming bierri but what happened there I mean it was saying during the downturn you know on the financial crisis. And you started to see people you know, getting laid off left and right and and how did you start to think about like how to help out and and how to do something more along skillets versus you know cv based you know type of background.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Yeah, so the the beginning of what led to beamery was ah, an experiment that I started just as I was beginning my time at Goldman’s to help people get found for jobs if they lost their job or. Didn’t get a job especially in in finance and myself at the time you know part of the reason I ended up working in finance is because I didn’t really know what other? um, well paid roles or careers I could really apply for you. Can’t apply to every company and especially in a place like London most people tend to. Hear about the big firms. The big banks. The big consultancy firms and so lots of people were suddenly without jobs and I made a database to help those people be found by other companies startups firms that um, they might not have heard of or applied to and one of the ways I try to build that database. Um. Especially because of the coaching I was doing for kids from other privileged backgrounds at the time was to index it towards things that weren’t people’s the schools that people went to or the or the degrees people had and more towards people’s skills and interests and I ended up creating this this profile building. Um. Engine for an alternative to cvs because for people finishing school your cv doesn’t mean very much and certainly a lot of companies just hire based on who went to the best schools which is um, you know one of the things that creates a lot of bias and so that that early experiment actually ended up finding.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Quite a few of my own friends jobs quite a few people started getting placed but I didn’t at the time know exactly how to turn this into a bigger thing. But more importantly, made me question. Why is it that the only way that people find work in this twenty first century through either recruitment agencies or applications. You know when you think about how sophisticated our customer experiences are how organizations are able to use systems like salesforce to track their customer data and then create these really frictionless experiences to retarget customers. You know as a consumer. You go on uber or you go on Netflix and you have this really effortless personalized experience and then you as a candidate apply for a job takes 4 hours and you never hear back or as an employee you have no idea you know who to speak to and so on and so the realization was that actually and there was something to this skills and people-centric database. Um that I was. Ah, starting and there was something too being able to create an equivalent thing not as a database but actually as a software as something that companies could use and to look at their employees and candidates as people rather than as tickets in a process and that’s and that’s what led to? um. The the transition into building beemey and building. What was initially the first crm for talent with that skills and and intelligence behind it.

Alejandro Cremades: And at what point does it become evident that the Goldman Sachs is not your way of going you know in terms of path and that you needed to um, you know, really go out it on your own and and build this thing.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Yeah that’s that was a tough question. Um, ah, especially because it was ah ah, a hard risk to justify at a time when we didn’t have um you know financial security to to to necessarily be be confident in in switching to beamery. There were ah 2 motivators one was you know I was initially doing both ah beamery and working at Goldman’s at the same time and actually ah hired an engineer that I was paying out of my own salary just to help build beamery and so it came a point as as the early version of our product was starting to to work. That I I just couldn’t do both things. Well I couldn’t really meaningfully double down on expanding Beber invalidating it and continue to to do my job. Well um, but also the level of conviction and excitement I got about just how big an opportunity. This is you know like I said ah the question of. Where you work and why you wake up in the morning. It’s one of the you know, biggest things you can change in the world and so the the opportunity to actually make a meaningful dent in such a significant part of how the world works and how people have an opportunity to to build their own lives felt worth it. It felt like it was worth the gamble and ah. And when I then convinced my my brother to join me on this journey certainly was a hard 1 to convince our parents that that was a good idea but but they they they were behind us. Um, emotionally and and so we we we took a big risk and I think in in retrospect, you know the it is exciting living in a time now 10 years on

Sultan Murad Saidov: When it is so much easier to have networks ah in Europe ah of people who’ve done this before and people you could speak to when we were starting out I didn’t know any founders. Um, we actually ended up after starting starting out ah finding out about accelerators and at the time you know this. This is before you had as many of these organizations as you have today but you had y combinator and you had angelpad and we came across one company that was based in the Uk. That said that they were starting a company in London like us didn’t really know how to scale it across the world and came across angel pad. And so that was the only thing we applied to just off the back of that recommendation and ah at the time we were making some revenue but didn’t know how to you know, go off to enterprise companies or make this big ambitious impact we were after and we certainly didn’t have ah funding. We took out a ah loan we were paying out of this out of our own money. And we ended up going to to New York which is where angel pad was running and went out there with no networks also couch surfing because we didn’t have enough money to to pay for apartments I actually ended up sleeping on a chair for a week because we couldn’t really ah afford to run the business and and and build it. And give ourselves places stay at the same time but looking back on it. You know 10 years ago. The the reaction we got when we were starting out and starting to fundraise ah was in Europe nonexistent because there was so few people to talk to in the us and was often what are 2 people from Goldman Sachs doing

Sultan Murad Saidov: Starting a tech company and you know why are you coming out here. Um, if you do come out here. You have to move here. The first investors are were interested said well you’re going to have to move to San Francisco um and we ended up actually in the course of you know the 2 months we were there taking over 100 meetings and some of those were with people that ah. We met only because they knew somebody who was an investor because we just have no networks and nothing no way of meeting people and in retrospect you know I think the world has changed a lot in 10 years and now it is so much easier both in Europe and in places outside of San Francisco to have access you know to find people who’ve done this before have advice. Um, certainly that was part of what made it risky at the time kind of going into more of an unknown.

Alejandro Cremades: That’s amazing and obviously we’ve had the Thomas the founder of Angel Pat as well. You know the podcast so you know if any listener is interested in in hearing that story go for it now in this case, why ended up becoming beamery in terms of business model. How do you guys make money.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Yeah, and I’ll quickly say tamasses are amazing. So definitely recommend folks listening to that episode. Um, so we make money ah like so many other enterprise b two b software we charge subscription usually on a multi-annual basis and that’s a subscription. And this is from you know the world’s largely. Biggest companies we we tend to focus on the the fortune 500 the world’s biggest organizations but originally the core focus was subscription based on number of seats because similar to a company like salesforce who sells seats for their crm. Our first offering was for talent acquisition teams you know recruiters sources people within companies who are helping hire talent and so we made software and we would charge on the number of seats. Um as our software evolved and as our technologies evolved the same principle of so software pricing. Applied but evolved away from just seats and towards different offerings and the value we provided. You know we now serve employee experiences and so forth. So now we have these bundles around how an organization can purchase different value packages for what we do.

Alejandro Cremades: So I guess in this case, how did you guys go about finding the first Enterprise customer. Yeah, the first one is always the toughest one. So how how was that process like.

Sultan Murad Saidov: This was um, actually very tricky for us because you know in in retrospect, there are usually 2 set ways that you sell enterprise software to your first customers. The first is.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Sell something simple that can be piloted. You know if you are in the world of recruiting that might be an interview tool. You know you can go to and a Facebook or an Amazon and you don’t have to sell to the whole company if it’s a simple tool. You could have one team try it out the challenge for us was um, the very value proposition we had was. About ah the whole organization using us as the source of truth for people data. So we couldn’t really have a small version. It would just have to be a very different business and and so we we didn’t really have a version of our our approach that could be easily piloted or used in that way and so um, the. The thing we had to figure out was how to have large organizations for whom we were building our product get to try out our early software without us having the credibility. You know we were um for all intents and purposes first-time founders with on on proveven track record certainly and ah hr and so we ended up finding. Organizations that worked with the clients we were targeting. Ah for example, recruitment marketing agencies. Our first customer didn’t actually know they were a customer of ours. Um, there were companies like Spotify and actually just eat ironically given my previous business who ran their graduate schemes. Powered by our technology but they had no idea because they were actually using agencies that came to us to to run the technology in the experience. Um, and then our first ever customer who was a real customer is a company called vmware who similarly were trying to do bold and ambitious things with attracting more diverse talents.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Sourcing candidates all the things that we were offering. Um but we didn’t have the credibility to sell to them. You know selling to this large organization having references and all of these things that you need to have a big global contract but they had a relationship with a big employer brand agency who actually heard about us through blogs and things we were writing about this new category. And came to us and said hey and what what you guys are doing sounds relevant to what our clients trying to ask for and they brought us in as essentially the tech software provider behind the the change that they were contracted for and then after a year vmware just um, ah contracted ah with us directly and said hey we’d love to keep. Expanding what we do with you guys and and their you know customer to this day have grown with us and but that was hard and that was hard because we we didn’t really know how to get that first line or that credibility it was hard to build and validate the product we kept being tempted to go into a different proposition into midmarket because it was so hard to. Go after the business we actually were trying to build. But once we had that first credibility it it. It rapidly accelerated so just north of 200000000.

Alejandro Cremades: And how much capital have you guys raised to date. So obviously I mean you are alluding to it earlier I mean the landscape has changed quite a bit I guess ten years ago startups were not even a thing you know in Europe I mean nothing I mean even I remember the. Ecosystem in New York was still even forming with companies like double clickck and stuff like that. So I guess in your guys’ case like how has it been the experience so of going from one cycle to the next you know when it came to fundraising. What was the.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Are.

Alejandro Cremades: Landscape to at that point you know on the venture side and and what do you see now in comparison.

Sultan Murad Saidov: So it’s been um, a different experience at each milestone we. We’d gone through the experience I mentioned after angel pad we almost ended up raising a round in the us and actually um. We ended up living in San Francisco New York for about six months thought we’d end up moving there. Um for a number of reasons that that didn’t work out and we ended up finding actually a partner from Goldman and some other angels who um, did a small round that. Eventually culminated in us finding ah not venture capitalists in the traditional sense but actually venture arms of ah major businesses in Europe that took a bet on us. There was a polish job board called Groupa Bratsui um who we met at an event when we came back from angel pad and there’s this organization called Eden Red and so it was um ah the venture arms of those organizations that took a bet on us and it was after we got our um first major clients. Enterprise clients which was vmware and also Facebook that we ended up raising our first venture round through index and again you know I think there are different types of scenarios and firms. But for us that was a very different experience to anything that happened before in part because.

Sultan Murad Saidov: We already had some proof or credibility and in part because the the partner we found ah we found and were found by at index yan is um, you know a visionary investor who who took ah took a big bet and had an understanding of the ambition that we were were driving towards and I think investment afterwards became very different because. By that point, you know we were 201617 when we raised our series a the european ecosystem started maturing and they’re already started ah becoming more of a landscape for enterprise software and and this kind of scene expanding in Europe. We didn’t have to justify that there was talent that could build this based in Europe in the way that we did when we were first starting in 201314 and so I think things really accelerated and then our follow on rounds came through european investors eqt and then most recently an amazing. Pension fund called antario teachers and their venture arm and I think in all of those cases. The the experience ended up being less and less about the the sort of search for organizations and more about relationships you’ve already built up over time and then by the time you come to looking at a fundraising round you know having those conversations rather than. Treating the the funding as a sort of reactive process.

Alejandro Cremades: Now in this case for you guys I mean how has it been to navigating the downturns now like the pandemicmic the macro environment now I mean what what has ah but that been the experience like.

Sultan Murad Saidov: You know it’s um, it’s been tough at ah, both personal and professional level in a few of the things that have happened over the last couple of years I think what was really interesting for us as a company that kept growing at a. Accelerating rate you know from when we’ve had that first customer onwards ah not knowing how the pandemic and recession would impact us because it’s a known thing that the you know the first thing that a lot of organizations cut in a time of crisis is recruiting and our business. Ah, is primarily driven by helping organizations or at least was at the time now. It’s more diversified but it was certainly at the time in 192020 primarily driven by helping organizations drive talent acquisition hiring better candidates doing it more efficiently and so we didn’t know what the impact would be. On our customer base in our demand when suddenly organizations had this uncertainty and lockdown and we didn’t know whether to trust the signals we had in the early stages of the pandemic. We still had pipeline. You know we’re an enterprise software business which means that generally there’s a lot of predictability. Ah, you generally see you know six months of pipeline that closes converts at a pretty predictable rate and that customers tend to be customers for at least 1 to 3 years so a lot of that is is quite predictable revenue and ah suddenly we entered an environment where you started getting you know advice from people about how similar.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Downturned and recensions in the past meant that you should um, start cutting staff. You had some some vcs famously publishing letters saying this is a time to cut deep and so we started questioning our own assumptions like do we trust our pipeline. Do. We trust the? Ah, the way that we’re building the business. Um, it was ah also ironic timing for us in terms of. Ah, us moving into a new and our first refurbished office in March Twenty Twenty two weeks before the the pandemic hit and so we we decided to find a middle ground and to have some confidence in our signals but not to be overconfident so we paused hiring and in retrospect that was actually a mistake. Ah, because we ended up doing very well out of that first six months of the pandemic in fact we discovered some really interesting patterns where clients of ours who stop recruiting double down on our software but for different use cases for nurturing talent for preparing for the future. And we actually had people starting to lean into things that we’ve been trying to prove like using our technology for predicting whether you needed to hire and went to open jobs but that we’d previously found hard to get people to to look at and now in this new environment people started looking at it but then over the ensuing two or three years the hr industry that we’re in and. Went through the biggest upheaval in decades you know organizations suddenly started talking about employee retention and all of these talent challenges that most people will have seen in some way or another.

Sultan Murad Saidov: And we were on the forefront of being able to do something about it. It’s you know who we are as a business from from and and why we are founded creating better outcomes for employees but it became very difficult to um, prioritize because we had a lot of our organizations starting to. Demand some of the tools we were building in lots of different directions and the predictability that we usually had also went out the window because even the clients we had that were trying to buy our software sometimes we had ah we actually had a few cases where the person who was about to sign our software suddenly ended up losing their job. Um in the week that they were meant to sign it. So lots of our usual metrics for how we would prioritize whether we trust our pipeline went out the window and so the last couple of years. We’ve really had to reinvent our own internal muscles for how we make decisions how we help clients navigate change. We ended up building a small internal consulting practice of a few people. With folks from organizations like Mckinsey to help us become an advisory to how to navigate change not just to deploy software and really got to the heart of you know how unique each organization creating a new category um ends up being in their journey. You know we’ve we’ve had to ah reinvent the wheel in a number of areas with with very. You know few blueprints to follow for for how to navigate it and I’m sure many organizations have gone through the same thing but for me personally it’s been um, a pretty big learning journey.

Alejandro Cremades: Now Imagine you are to go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world where the vision of biber is fully realized what does that world look like.

Sultan Murad Saidov: It’s ah something I do think about a lot I think there’s 2 parts to it one is it’s a world in which everybody is able to access opportunities. Whether that’s full time work or otherwise.

Sultan Murad Saidov: In a way that isn’t biased by where you were born or where you went to school but is or who you know but is but is equalized by what you’re capable of and how you can show you and prove your potential and the other side is where organizations are able to treat talent. As the core thing that drives their business in a really meaningful way. You know most ceos of large public companies will say people are our greatest asset but in practice very few businesses actually understand their people and their people data and what skill sets that people have who has potential. Who’s likely to leave which people are going to drive business impact. You know if you think about um, any goals. Any organization has the number 1 driver of whether you meet these goals are your people but how well do you know that? How do you know which people will make the impact and which of your objectives are actually at risk because of whether or not you have people in the business. So. I truly think you know we will enter a world in which the way organizations think about their people and how much that drives the outcomes of their their business and how to actually make that a data-driven process is going to be a radical change to to every organization and and I think. You know the chance to be a part of it is ah is one of the most impactful things we can do.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, let’s say I put you into a time machine. Let’s talk about the past here with a list of reflection. Let’s say I put you to a time machine and I bring you back in time to year. They said Coleman Sachs where you were thinking about doing something about the layoffs that you were seeing left and right and you had the opportunity of sitting down. You know, right? next to that youngerultan and you were able to give your younger self one piece of advice before launching a business but would that be and why given what you know now 10 years in with bimari.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Um I would probably pick not over intellectualizing things. You know I’m someone who. I I read a lot I think a lot and in the early days of you know, starting the business I ah did the traditional thing of creating business plans and thinking about you know, different trajectories in reality. You know that famous Mike Tyson quote of everybody has a plan until they get punched is real and I think you you have to? ah. Optimize for being prepared but not over valuing the the things you already know today you know one of the things that happened actually when we went through angel pad and one of the things I’m grateful to to maskful is that he and that experience. Helped us reset rather than thinking how do we make the business. We’ve already built work. We thought how do we take all the knowledge we’ve acquired and if we had to treat today as a new day. What would we do now and we ended up pivoting the business at that point in time with that mindset and I think you know nowadays I treat. Every day with a healthy skepticism of whether the priorities I had at the end of the previous day are still the right priorities whether me helping other people in my team or in the company may be more valuable than what I thought was important and I think that mindset of knowing how to pragmatically adapt.

Sultan Murad Saidov: And how to be prepared but not over. Trust you know the the insights that you had before is is the biggest advice I’d give it would have certainly helped us move a lot faster and make more rapid changes to the decisions we had.

Alejandro Cremades: So for the people that are listening Sotan I will love to reach out and say hi. What is the best way for them to do so.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Ah, you can drop me a message on on Linkedin and and I would love to speak to to anyone that wants to reach out.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing! Well hey, easy enough. What sotan thank you so much for being on the deal maker show. It has been an honor to have you with us today.

Sultan Murad Saidov: Thank you so much been such a pleasure.

*****

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