Only $500 And Nine Months To Figure It Out

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1. 0:00
   Wes Mathews

   So I have the pleasure of sitting down with Natalie Kaminski by the time I left my father's home, I had $500 and nine months to make it work.

2. 0:09
   Natalie Kaminski

   became a QA engineer and then, a project manager and a business analyst and the webmaster in the early 2000, opportunity gifted me, the knowledge of running a software company.

3. 0:21
   Wes Mathews

   me as CEO visionary. Like I'm the one stunting our growth, getting in the way. I'm not waking up every day super passionate about it, which led me to sell my company. if your agency is going to go out of business, because I can replace you, means you've never had enough value to begin with.

4. 0:37
   Natalie Kaminski

   the guy I met at the bar he created all these connections for us. He put me in touch with this person and then he disappeared. I ended up hiring the person who put me in touch with this person. His name is Igor Alexandrov. He is now my co-founder and CTO. God that Russia is such a country that you can solve anything with $500, This is the unfiltered truth about entrepreneurship.

5. 1:00
   Wes Mathews

   Raw. No BS, no sugarcoating. Welcome to Entrepreneur Intel. I'm your host, Wes Mathews. Each episode will learn from experienced founders and uncover the top 5% learnings that led to their success and all things personal, family and business. This show is sponsored by Stealth Consulting, delivering clear marketing strategies, ROI, and no surprises. why I'm super excited, today. So I have the pleasure of sitting down with Natalie Kaminski out of New York. I want to introduce you because I. There's a lot to unpack here. I don't even know where to start.

   I'm really excited. The conversation. But two time immigrant arriving in the US at the age of 18 with 500 bucks to your name, graduated cum laude from Northwestern University with zero student loans while you're working full time. Raised two daughters, and probably the most thing I'm impressed with is that you just ran your first marathon at 44. I just turned 44, I golfed yesterday, I feel like I got beat up a little bit, so I want to dive into that and how you have all this time to do that.

   But Natalie, thank you so much for joining today on the podcast.

6. 2:09
   Natalie Kaminski

   Thank you so much. Just one correction. I graduated from northeastern, not northeastern. My boss. It's okay.

7. 2:15
   Wes Mathews

   Sorry about that. We got an interesting backstory, so I'd love to start with, you know, two time immigrant I that that's that's new to me. But give me a little bit of the backstory on where that all started from, where that originated. Then I want to slide right into how you became an entrepreneur. Absolutely.

8. 2:34
   Natalie Kaminski

   So I was born in the Soviet Union, you know, the country that no longer exists. And I was born in the Russian part all the way beyond the Arctic Circle in the city called the rails, which is the most populated city beyond the Arctic Circle. I mean, needless to say, it's a very sad place. I imagine, my parents were kind enough to move away from there before I turned one, so I do not remember much. But I do remember that before we immigrate for the first time to Israel in 1990, my mother took me to Norilsk, just for me to see my homeland, so to speak.

   And I remember the it was either May or June and the snow just began to thaw. So it's it's an interesting place, I'd say, you know. So, immigrated to Israel, 1990. It was, thing to do for many Jews, you know, Jews have experienced a lot of, discrimination and anti-Semitism in, in the Soviet Union. And, so have my family. And, you know, in 1990, we had the opportunity to immigrate to Israel. And we you know, we're glad to do that. So I grew up, you know, kind of my formative years, my teenage years, etc., took place in Israel.

   And the amazing place to grow up in. I really enjoyed my time there. I remember skipping school, going to the beach, you know, tons of friends, lots of sunshine, great times. And then when I was just about to graduate high school, in 1998, my father, who was mostly estranged from us by the time he kind of showed up in my life again and he suggested to my mother that I joined him in the US because by the time he lived, he made his way from Russia, Moscow to, to Minneapolis, of all places.

   And, you know, was a great idea. He basically said, why don't you come, you know, move here, you're still 18. You'll be able to, you know, I'll put you through college. You'll have more opportunities here than you'll have in, in Israel. And I was not too excited about that option, but my mother was adamant. So I got on the plane and I moved to, to join my father and his family. Did not go to, well, unfortunately, you know, we really didn't see eye to eye on many things, like, we didn't really know each other.

   And so I only spent about three months trying to live with him, after which time I left. And, I have $500 because my mother slipped it to me as I was, you know, kind of getting through security at the airport was like, here, have some money on you. And I also had, return ticket with an open date. Good for 12 months. So by the time I left my father's home, I had $500 and nine months to make it work. And, you know the rest, as they say.

   The rest is history. But, I definitely can take credit for a lot of this hard work I had to put in. But I also, am eternally grateful to the people that kind of came across my path and helped me get to where I am today. The what really helped me is that it was 1998, and if you remember, it was the year of the big Y2K issue. Everyone was getting ready to, you know, for the world to fall apart because computers were supposed to stop working.

   And, you know, it was fairly easy to get a job in Haiti. And that's what I had done. you know, I passed an interview, I claimed that I knew how to program, which honestly was a big load of no, nothing. And I worked really, really hard on my first project, which the project involved converting a database from a two digit here to a four digit year to accommodate, you know, us moving on to the new era of 2000, and I worked honestly, I want to say like 14, 16 hour days just to get through that project because I did not know what I was doing.

   The internet wasn't, like, helpful. I literally had to go to library, you know, get books about like, it was fun times. Fun times.

9. 6:43
   Wes Mathews

   Yeah. I was gonna say it by mind, you know, we're so if you're like, iPhone didn't exist, Google really wasn't, you know, there yet. Yeah. Yeah.

10. 6:54
    Natalie Kaminski

    Like the only research or help like you could really get was from your peers and books and then going to the library and kind of learning the hard way, you know, and I, you know, I did that for about six, seven months. Proud to say that I accomplished my project assignment. And, and that point, I learned two things. I did not want to be a programmer, but I really wanted to stick in, you know, with the with some sort of career in tech. And so I spent the next decade really working my way, kind of through the various roles in the software development.

    Right? I, I became a QA engineer and then, a project manager and a business analyst and the webmaster in the early 2000, that was a very fancy title. Yeah. Yeah. And so I kind of work through the ranks, so to speak, you know, and I learned a lot on the job. And my last, employment, I guess, was for a small company here in New York, where I kind of took upon the leadership role. I was, you know, the chief operating officer, which really meant everything in the company except for, you know, like, kind of support to the CEO and sales and project management and, you know, and account relationship management, like, basically everything.

    And so that opportunity gifted me, the knowledge of running a software company. So now I had kind of the knowhow of what it means to build software. And then now I've learned what it means to run a software company. And so in 2008, when we had a huge Lehman Brothers collapse, and the company I used to work for started, there's like lost a lot of clients was really showing the signs of going under. I jumped ship and I went on my own as a freelancer and never looked back.

11. 8:51
    Wes Mathews

    How important? I mean, that's really interesting. You know, I love that you in the tech world, you climb the ranks, you did a lot of different jobs, you became CEO and you really got to like, was there some moment for you that you're like, man, I could just do this better myself? Or I'm like, you know, at what point were you like, yeah, I just I'm an entrepreneur. Like, I'm just learning, soaking this all in and now I'm awesome to go. Did you have an moment that kind of smack you in the in the face or.

12. 9:20
    Natalie Kaminski

    You know, I've, I've always been very ambitious person. I think I've always had an entrepreneurial streak to me, but it wasn't, you know, but because I didn't have any like family financial support or anything like that, making money was always very important. And so to me, having stable income and, you know, having the jobs I've had, like holding those positions and learning allowed me to almost learn on somebody else's dime, you know, go through like understand how companies work because I, you know, I work for small companies for large corporations as well, and kind of give me the sense of what I wanted and what I did not want.

    I think I've always wanted to be my own boss. That has always been, I think from like my first job, you know, not that I don't want to say I have issue with authority. No, but like, I always wanted like the cloud, you know, I always wanted to be the manager. I always wanted to be the leader in the team. I mean, I led my first development team when I was 22, and my team was comprised of 40 year old, you know, man sitting around the room taking kind of lead from me, which was, you know, made me feel very good.

    Yeah. But yeah, know that that that's that's really great.

13. 10:37
    Wes Mathews

    Because thinking about that now, do you, do you feel you have a different perspective? I mean, you had you thrown out a lot of titles out there and a wealth of experience, you know, working in small companies and then also being the CEO. All right. So you're juggling sales operations, finance, you know, dealing with the crazy CEO, CEO. Now as you sit at the head of your company, are you a little bit more empathetic of team members and their roles or CEO like that? That's got to give a really great perspective since you know more seats.

    Absolutely.

14. 11:08
    Natalie Kaminski

    And I'll tell you, you know, some people say some people say, oh, I wish I started my entrepreneur early journey earlier. I don't say that. I actually I'm very glad that they have a good amount of, you know, like over a decade of experience. Before I decided to go out on my own because it allowed me to develop that empathy, because it allowed me to understand people in different roles, because it gave me some real world, knowledge and understanding of how, you know, things work. And now I can challenge some of those, you know, assumptions.

    I can challenge some of those, things that people do in business world. But I think having gained that experience has definitely made me a stronger leader today, for sure.

15. 11:55
    Wes Mathews

    So when you finally broke away and started a freelance and, you know, you kind of started that journey, what year or what year is this? 28 2008. So fast forward to 2025. A lot going on in the world. You have a vast experience in tech. Where did you end up landing in tech? Like, what was that? Hey, I'm a freelancer, but how did you gravitate towards where you're at now, which is jet rockets, you know, what did you decide to take on and why?

16. 12:24
    Natalie Kaminski

    Well, frankly, it's all since I've always been in tech and software. It's almost like I never knew anything else. This is what I know how to do. This is where I had the experience. This is where I have the connections. There's there was never a question in my mind as to like, what type of business am I going to build? It was almost like a given, right? So my freelancing had begun as a product, manager to, an investment firm, that I met through some prior connections.

    So they hired me. They gave me a gig. They asked me to help them design, a portfolio management system, which I had done. They really liked the result of the work. And then they said, oh, great. Can you build it for us? And I said, of course I can. You know, I mean, as an entrepreneur, you got to say yes. Right? That's how it's done. So I said, of course I can. And they said, okay, you know, let's let's do it. Give us some budget, give us some timelines.

    Let's, let's build this thing. And I went home, I remember, and I was like, oh my God. Well, this is this is real. This is happening. I gotta I gotta make this work. And so I went online and I, and I started researching, you know, where can I find some, you know, potential programmers that I could hire? And then I remember same night I went to an event, a networking event in New York. Right. So, like, again, putting yourself out there and going places is also very, very important.

    So I'm at this event in New York and I, you know, I kind of mingle with people I speak with. I'm speaking to someone. And then I hear behind me, I hear a very distinct Russian accent. And so I turn around and there is this guy, and we started chatting and I said hi, and he said hi. And I said, you know, I hear you probably from Russia. And he said, yes, I just arrived fresh off the boat, so to speak, and turned out so. So this is I'm going to give you like his side.

    And then month by side and then what actually happened. So he's telling me the story about having this amazing development center filled with, you know, engineers just waiting for a new project. And I'm like, oh my God, that's perfect. And I'm telling him this story about all these clients I have lined up, you know, that are just waiting to find the great team to get this stuff done. And so really, you know, just making stuff up, talking to other and then and then I said, okay, well, why don't you put me in touch with, with your team?

    I'd love to work with them. And so what he does, I go home the next morning, I get an email from him introducing me to one of his engineers. Well, here's a point of view of the engineer, who at that time was searching for freelance gigs on a site called us, which is now owned by, I guess, Upwork. So, you know, like and the first iteration of Upwork. So the guy I met at the bar sent an email to this random person on the left saying, hey, I have a project, are you interested?

    So like, he created all these connections for us. He put me in touch with this person and then he disappeared. I've never heard from him again. But what it led to is that I ended up hiring the person who put me in touch with this person. His name is Igor Alexandrov. He is now my co-founder and CTO. We've been working together ever since. We have become friends. July 4th. He just moved to the US. He settled in Atlanta. And, you know, it's it's like a Cinderella story.

    Really.

17. 16:06
    Wes Mathews

    What's amazing because if you rewind back, like, if you weren't at that event, if your ears or perked up. I mean, I'm a big believer as entrepreneurs, I think, you know, most have really strong vision. And there's one time in my life where I, I bought a Jeep Wrangler like a Jeep, right? And I'll never forget, I drove home with that Jeep and I told my wife, I'm like, first of all, there was a million jeeps on the road. I never even noticed jeeps before. And then everybody's waving to me like there's a weird Jeep thing that people waved to each other.

    But like, until you put something in your brain and like, your brain kind of subconsciously helps you find what you need. But you bring up a lot of multiple points on there. One, like taking risks of just putting yourself out there because you also raise a couple girls. You got a lot going on. You got to go to event. A lot of people are like, I work all day. I don't want to go out and meet new people, but that's really the backbone. And how your company began was you putting yourself out there?

    So what's interesting with that? So. Okay, so you meet this individual now you guys are great business partners. So. So what now? Right. You have that one project, you've kind of cobblestone this thing together for the second phase of that go swimmingly as well.

18. 17:20
    Natalie Kaminski

    You know, it's, you know how it is. It's like three steps forward, two steps, that kind of, kind of situation. So, you know, we did, we did an amazing work with this first project, which led to another project and then which led to an introduction and another introduction. And, you know, we kind of started growing from there. And we established, you know, at some point we realized we can't work together like just the two of us forever, obviously. So you know, my, my and my co-founder had brought in another person from his university where he studied and then we started hiring people.

    We had our, you know, our first employee who worked, her name, is Julia. She worked with us for 11 years. 12 years, actually 12 years. She stayed with us. And we only parted ways about a year and a half ago because, frankly, it felt like we were preventing her from growth. And she was no longer a good match for our company, you know, because, like, people outgrow each other, right? Like so. Yeah. So it was a very amicable kind of, you know, separation. Everything was fine.

    But this is just to demonstrate that we're really, you know, the company we're trying to build. But we realized that we were becoming a company because at first it was just, you know, a few people working together, building software products, making good living. That's what was all about. It was never, oh, let me build a company because building a company is a very different animal. Right. So when we realized that we're actually building a company, the first question we had to ask ourselves is what type of company do we want to be?

    And the answer was actually very, very simple. It was a company that we want to work for. Because all of us like, you know, we have three co-founders, actually, it's both myself, my CTO, and then we have a third person who, his name is Alexi. So it's three of us. We still, you know, 16 years in, we still love what we do. That's amazing. Like, I, I'm not one of those CEOs who just wants to. I can't wait to exit. Can't wait to replace myself with someone I do not feel the burnout.

    Despite the many trials and tribulations we have gone through in those 16 years. I mean, to survive that long in consulting business, it's, you know, not just to survive, to thrive. Because, you know, we're profitable. We've always been profitable, but I've never had a down like an unprofitable year.

19. 19:49
    Wes Mathews

    How do you solve for me? Right. As a visionary, I love that. I want to dive into that because I did this thing called strategic coach. So Dan Sullivan, he talks about like keeping an entrepreneur visionary in there. Three uniques. It sounds like somehow some way you fell into that, like for you to be that motivated. Like how did you how do you as a visionary running this company and you guys have over 50 employees, like, you're a good sized company, right? How do you stay in that zone?

20. 20:19
    Natalie Kaminski

    I think it's about knowing who you are and learning how to say no to things. You know, it's early on. When we first started, we were like, if you have money, we'll do it for you. Everything to everybody. Exactly. As long as you're able to pay my bills, I am your person, right? And then I mean, it works for a very short period of time, and then it stops working, because inevitably you end up taking on projects you cannot handle or you find extremely boring, unsatisfying, challenging, etcetera.

    Right. And so, embracing who you are and what you do best, which for us a jet rockets. You know, we are a Ruby on Rails shop. We always have been since our inception, and we have stuck with Ruby on Rails as technology of choice ever since. And we love it. And you know, my developers love working with it. We've built amazing products with it and there is no need to pretend that we're not a Ruby on Rails shop. Although there was a period of time when, you know, we were like, maybe we should try other tech and like, why not?

    And so sticking to doing what you do best and what drives you, drives your passion, I think is very important. I personally have found a lot of passion and satisfaction in helping non-tech founders, you know, people who want to launch new products, who come from non-technical backgrounds and not sure how to proceed, how to actually, you know, find themselves in this world. I love like, I, you know, I'm a mentor. I'm an advisor to multiple startups right now who have built with us and continue to work with us over time.

    So this is where I find my passion. And so like, as long as I can do this right, like I'm excited, as long as I build products that I actually genuinely care about and learn from, I'm excited. Like, we probably could make more money, by taking on everything and anything, but it's not, you know, it wouldn't be as satisfactory as what?

21. 22:27
    Wes Mathews

    It's great. No, I, I totally resonate with you. I mean, I my background, I come from web like website design, SEO, paid search and I just, I, I woke up one day and I'm like, I hate this. Like my passion was zero. And I had a realization that me as CEO visionary. Like I'm the one stunting our growth, getting in the way. I'm not waking up every day super passionate about it, which led me to sell my company. And I find it very interesting that, you know, if you could be an entrepreneur, if you're an entrepreneur and you're sitting in that seat and you're, you know, really passionate about what you're doing.

    And my challenge was and I'd love to get your feedback on this, my company was too big in the sense of, I have this visualization of like, it's a cruise ship, so I want to change direction. But like, as captain of the cruise ship, I couldn't like, spin that boat around. I had to just, like, sell the boat, you know, and like, go somewhere else and restart like you must, like, does any of that resonate with you? Right? You guys, I mean, with AI and software and there's companies out there now that will spin up your software idea in 45 seconds through ChatGPT like it's there's all this stuff out there now.

    Yeah.

22. 23:39
    Natalie Kaminski

    I mean, first of all, let me, you know, I'm going to break this into like three distinct answers. So size wise in 2022, the year between 2022 and 2023, we had experience and explosive growth. And we got to 87 people in the company and I found myself setting a goal in my mind to get to 100 people and in hindsight, like there was no rhyme or reason for that, like it was the number. It's a nice round number. It's a very it's a goal. It's like it's kind of cool, you know?

    Oh, I employ 100 people. I completely ignored that time. I got so greedy, I completely ignored our profit margins. The quality of work. We ended up losing a couple of clients because things had begun to slip through the cracks. I had not taking care of properly, training my middle management because we grew too fast and we made, like. I personally take the ownership of saying I made every mistake in the book of how not to grow that fast like I've done everything I should not have done.

    I have learned my lesson. We, you know, reduced our employee, employee count to about, like I said, about 50 people and it makes a world of difference. You know, our margins, profit like profit margins have exploded again. Like we're back to where it felt good to run this company. So first of all, yeah, there is such a thing as getting too big and not being comfortable with it. Now, again, I'm not saying you cannot, you know, you cannot grow sustainably you know, slowly over time to get to, you know, 100 people, a thousand people, 10,000 people in a nice, sustainable manner.

    But listen, that's not us. That's not who we were set out to be. And that's okay. You know, that's okay to just say, this is not us. Yeah. So that's one second. Yeah. I mean, there's so much noise, there's so much hype about things. I mean, you talked it's coming out every day. I mean, we've gone through, you know, again, I've been in this industry since 1998. We've gone through so many iterations of, oh, everybody got to do big data, everybody got to do the cloud, everybody got it.

    Like, you know, like every couple of years we have this new explosion where things say, oh, everybody's going to lose their jobs unless they do X, Y and Z. Right. And so now it's I and look I, I love it. Yeah. If we embrace the AI we use AI every day in their work. Right. And I'm talking about AI assisted development, meaning all of our employees, all of our developers are utilizing AI, coding assistance, you know, but the truth be told, and this is what, you know, you read online that anyone with no tech, no engineering knowledge can just, like, spin up an app.

    You can. You absolutely can spin up a proof of concept. But if you want to scale, if you want to make sure your app is secure, if you want to make sure you know you can actually service your clients, then you can't. Not quite. You know, my engineers, my good engineers, strong engineers have gotten about 30 to 40% in like efficiency improvement, improvement. And that's amazing. And that's why, beloved, yeah, we can do more things with less people. Absolutely we can. And, you know, these code systems are allowing my engineers to focus on the interesting tasks instead of, for example, writing tests for their code.

    Right. Nobody likes that. So no doubt AI is making our job so much badder, so much faster, so much more interesting. And we can, you know, solve real problems now instead of being stuck with, like, trying to, like I said, write code or create crude matter to, you know, whatnot. At the same time, I believe that if your agency or your company or whatever is going to go out of business, because I can replace you, that means you've never had enough value to begin with. Interesting.

    I mean, because I don't sell like jet rockets, doesn't sell lines of code. We don't sell Syntex. We sell. You know what? What we offer to our clients is long term partnership in building, maintaining, sustaining their products. Products that you know are secure, are scalable, are delightful to their users that allow them to become, you know, profitable over time. And product development and coding are two different animals. Like coding has been cheap for a very long time. I mean, you could hire a coder, you know, for 15 bucks an hour if you wanted to.

    Yeah. Coding skills is the least of what we do. It's the engineering. It's the architecture is the thinking of how to build a platform that will not, you know, expose all of your information to the world, like just happened a couple of weeks ago, right, with this, t app. I don't know if you've heard of that, so. Yeah. Right. But engineers make sure that doesn't happen. Yeah.

23. 29:13
    Wes Mathews

    No, it's it's really interesting perspective because I that's I feel like, you know I hear it's moving along. It's going to do its thing. But you can't you can't replicate or replace relationships. But I feel does it create a new head a headwind for businesses. Right. That say like, you know, the architecture is now easier? I'm just going to wing it and do it myself and find these $15 an hour people, like, I always feel like there's a level of clientele, and I feel like that's the head when that's coming.

    It gives this false sense of, you know, it's something more than it really is. Yeah. But no, that's interesting. It's interesting that you can reflect back in even in a couple of years. It'd be like, hey, I really screwed this up. And there's a lot of learning. But with that, I mean, there's a big part in here that you relocated your entire workforce from Russia to Georgia. Yes. Like what? Yeah, I like how were you prepared? Not prepared as CEO. And what was going on during that time?

24. 30:09
    Natalie Kaminski

    Oh, well, not prepared at all. I mean, you know, before the war started. So I remember January. Actually, that's an interesting anecdote. So, like, I remember the summer 2021, we were thinking about organizing and offsite, you know, for our employees. And we were thinking, oh, you know, that would be cool to go somewhere, maybe Turkey, maybe, you know, someplace warm. Would that be fun? And then, you know, fast forward two months later, Russia, Ukraine, the war begins and we're like, oh my God. Like, what are we going to do?

    Well, for two reasons. First of all, you know, I, you know, I'm Ukrainian like I spent my early childhood in Ukraine. Like I mentioned, I was born in Russia, but like ended up in Ukraine before moving to Israel. But also, you know, I think it's pretty obvious who's the bad guy in this world, who's the good guy? And you know, I wanted to do nothing like nothing that would even remotely support this war. Meaning I did not want to send any money to my Russian employees because I didn't want them to pay tax in that country, to spend their money in that economy, etcetera.

    So I said, look, our only way to continue working is if everyone is just going to get up and move and, and then like, reestablish our new lives. Right. And so, at that time, we had 55 employees, about 45, you know, give or take 43 people have immediately said, yes, we're we're we're going. And then the ones that decided to stay behind, they were given generous, you know, like a few months to find a job and kind of parted ways. And, you know, we didn't fire anyone overnight but were like, okay, we understand you know, whatever.

    Like, you can't move. It's fine. You know, stay, but you have to find a new job. So, and then the first thing we did was we really wanted to end up in a NATO country. So we started looking into Turkey. So, you know, be careful what you wish for, right? Like I said, we wanted to do an outside in Turkey, inside the liver, moving everyone to Turkey. And why Turkey is because at that time, Turkey was the only country that Russia had. Aviation, like, was allowed to fly into.

    Right. Because they, you know, they grounded all the flights like there was no flight communication between Russia and any of the other countries and still isn't, by the way, right. With the exception of just very few countries. And so we said, okay, you know, we'll go to Turkey. Turkey is, you know, native country, meaning Russia will probably not attack Turkey, although who knows. And so we started looking into establishing our presence in Turkey turned out to be a lot more complicated than we had imagined. There are certain rules that require you to hire certain number of Turkish citizens per each foreign employee, etcetera, and that just became very logistically difficult for us.

    And so the next best that we said, oh, well, there's Georgia. And literally that's what happened because we flew over some people to Turkey. Then we hired a huge van and we started to just like move people to Georgia because there's like a border between Turkey and Georgia. Right. So, and I remember it was March 2022. So the weather was, you know, it was kind of on the colder side, but also very wet. And they ended up arriving in Batumi, which is a coastal city in Georgia.

    And it's it's a beautiful, you know, kind of resort city. But in March, it's almost abandoned. Right. And it was a little bit snowy and a little bit wet and cold. And we were trying to find accommodations and the only thing and we were, we found someone, some realtor who had promised to find us, like a big house that we could rent for everyone at that time. But then, apparently he just took us money. Our money, and disappeared. So like, that happened. So my CTO was literally walking from one hotel to another hotel, like on the strip.

    There's like a strip looking for a temporarily housing solution for, like, you know, all of our employees. And we ended up renting out like an empty hotel and, you know, housing everyone there for the first like month or so and then started renting Airbnbs for everyone, you know, to give people their own place and kind of sponsored that for the first couple of months. So like, I'll tell you, it cost the company a lot of money, like about a quarter of $1 million, not counting. Well, also remember, we had to shut down our office in Russia.

    We had to, rent a new space in between Georgia. We built out a new, beautiful office. We ended up we wanted to buy some furniture, and then we realized that there was no, no Ikea in Georgia. And, like, would you buy furniture for an office? Right. You go to Ikea or like to play similar to Ikea. And George apparently has neither. And so we ended up we ended up moving our furniture from Russia to Georgia in a big truck. And thank God that Russia is such a country that you can solve anything with $500, because at the border there, you know, they didn't want the driver to let them go through, so they just paid like 500 bucks to let them.

    So yeah, it was quite an ordeal because I'll tell you, like I was in New York, I can imagine this. Like I'm sitting in New York in my office in New York, and I'm trying to arrange flights, Airbnbs, hotels, furniture, like I've, all at once while still running over projects, while still maintaining all of the client relationship. And I gotta give it to my employees. They were phenomenal. They managed to keep all of their deadlines. They managed to help one another during the move. They managed to somehow not, you know, screw anything up.

    That was amazing.

25. 36:29
    Wes Mathews

    The best part is like, not a lot of people, you know, nobody sees that. Like they see software like what is it goes into running a software company. Oh, and there was oh, and by the way, there was this thing called Covid that you were probably doing with the tail end of that on top of it.

26. 36:46
    Natalie Kaminski

    Oh, well, I gotta say, Covid was good times for companies like mine. Yeah. The first the first couple of months were tough because nobody knew, like what's happening. And so we had a lot of our clients put pause on projects or like scale down work, etc. so we took a bit of a hit early on. But I think the moment that people had realized that, oh, well, there's all this money now available and we're all going remote, so let's build all these platforms that Covid was actually really good for us.

    That's awesome.

27. 37:19
    Wes Mathews

    Yeah. That's great. I appreciate you sharing that because it's it's part of the entrepreneurial journey that people just don't see. And here you are the CEO of this really successful software company, but you're navigating Airbnbs and moving stuff from Russia to Georgia. Hey, you know, pay it off. Gangsters or police. That's that's awesome. So in the software world, like, what's an you guys are a Ruby on Rails shop. What's keeping your interest today? Like, what's that one thing you're working on that just jazzes you up?

28. 37:46
    Natalie Kaminski

    Well, I mean, because we don't have any industry special specialization, as in, you know, our clients fall into a variety of different like, niches. Every project is an opportunity to learn something new. I clearly I mean, obviously like the past six months or so has been very I haven't and I'm not talking about just generative AI, you know, like or judge prettier rappers, like many people do. But we've, we've, we've we've done a lot of interesting stuff with, you know, customized alarms and like, sort of like decision making and, and coaching through LMS and such.

    And that is actually pretty interesting, learning how to work with the lumps in the way that you learn to prevent hallucinations, learn to manage memory. And like, a lot of, like, technical stuff that you gotta do in order to understand how it works, which once you dive into it, you understand that there's no such thing as of right now as intelligence. You know, in, in, in AI. Yeah. My opinion, there's more intelligence, there's pattern recognition. And that's what people are failing to see. And I'm sure somewhere behind the scenes at OpenAI headquarters, they're doing a lot of real intelligence with AI.

    But most tools that are available to us today, they're amazing pattern recognizing software. Interesting.

29. 39:22
    Wes Mathews

    Now you guys are working on something that is a PTO related. Can you clarify that for me or. Yeah, absolutely.

30. 39:28
    Natalie Kaminski

    So we, you know, running a global company and when I say global means that we have employees all over the world now because, you know, after we've relegated everyone to Georgia, almost three and a half years, almost four years have gone by right now with the war, many people have decided to continue their journey of relocation. They moved on to different countries. So we actually have people like, right now, we have people in Brazil, we have people in Europe. We have people in Asia, like our employee staff is like literally global.

    And one thing that we found early on is that we had trouble maintaining our effective leave or PTO, paid time off tracking and management, like people, you know, that there wasn't like a good centralized system for people to know how much time they have, how much time they've used up. You know, how to schedule vacations, how to make sure that vacation time doesn't overlap with their teammates, and so on and so forth. And so we looked into, some of the platforms available on the market, and we realized two things that were either very, very expensive for a small company like ours or they were not flexible enough to actually allow for different statutory rules and regulations around the world, or to create multiple vacation policies that perhaps apply to different people.

    Right. And so we decided to build our own because, I mean, we're a software development company, so why shouldn't we solve our own problem? And we have and we battled tested it for three years. And I love that product. I don't know how to run, you know, like, effective, PTO management without one tribe. But I'm happy to say that a few weeks ago, we've actually made it available to the world. So it's called one thrive. That team and anyone now can sign up for, you know, a very affordable, very efficient and very flexible leave management platform.

    One tribe, that team.

31. 41:26
    Wes Mathews

    Nice. So it sounds really interesting. Now, I think a lot of people are going to resonate with your story. I appreciate just your candidate's and openness to share because it's it's really helpful. I think anybody throughout any journey. And here you are 15 years into your journey and these big things are happening two years ago. Right. And you're still learning, still motivated. So if anybody out there wants to connect with you to talk shop as an entrepreneur or even like software development, what's the easiest, best way people get a contact with you?

32. 41:53
    Natalie Kaminski

    My email is Natalie at Jet rockets.com. They can also find me on LinkedIn. Natalie Kaminski I'm fairly active on LinkedIn and so I'd be happy to chat with anyone.

33. 42:04
    Wes Mathews

    Awesome! Well, thank you so much Natalie. I really appreciate the share. It's been a lot of fun chatting with you. Thank you so much for the opportunity. This has been another episode of Entrepreneur Intel. Thank you for joining us. For show notes and other episodes, please visit us at entrepreneurintel.com. Until next time.