Val Katayev - The Journey of Bootstrapping to Over a Hundred Million

The Casey Adams Show

Listener.com Podcast Network

Business, Entrepreneurship

4.8 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 19 January 2023

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on The Casey Adams Show I sat down with Val Katayev. Val Katayev is a serial entrepreneur who has been following his entrepreneurial journey since the late 1990s. He started with a PlayStation website, during the dot-com bubble, and eventually moved into search advertising. He has since grown his portfolio of companies, and today focuses his time on Jocalio, a new company he is building to become the backbone of the independent jewelry industry. Val preaches bootstrapping companies and has never looked into venture capital as a means of financing. 00:03:32 Bootstrap for success. 00:10:05 Create legitimate content sources. 00:17:11 Question existing paradigms. 00:20:06 Find people who understand you. 00:27:36 Test and put out value. 00:33:37 Aggregate audiences to monetize. 00:38:04 AI is transforming businesses. 00:40:42 Follow Val on social media. Follow Val Katayev on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ValKatayev - Subscribe to The Casey Adams Show on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-casey-adams-show/id1328795944 Follow me on social media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casey Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/CaseyAdams TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@caseyadams YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/CaseyAdams - Follow The Casey Adams Show on social media: Follow me on social media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caseyadamsshow Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/CaseyAdamsShow TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@caseyadamsshow YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CaseyAdamsShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Casey Adams Show. Today I am joined by Val Katayev. Super excited to have you on the show, Val. You are quite the serial entrepreneur and I've been following you on Twitter for quite some time now. So super excited to have into your story. Thanks, man. Great to be on. Absolutely. Thank you so much again. As I just mentioned, you are quite the serial entrepreneur. You've,
0:22.0	you've been at this for quite some time. And again, I've been following you on Twitter. And I know
0:26.2	one thing that you talk about is being a bootstrap founder and growing to over 100 million
0:30.8	across exits and in revenue. And I want to start off by saying, you know, for the people that
0:36.2	might not know your story or follow you on Twitter like I do, where do you spend your time today?
0:40.8	And then how did you get started in this whole world of business and entrepreneurship?
0:45.0	Yeah, sure.
0:45.9	So today I'm spending, so I have a holding company and I have a number of different companies.
0:51.7	Most of them I either co-founded or got really early on as a,
0:57.5	let's call it a controlling stake. And so, so that's one thing I have in my portfolio is kind
1:06.2	of all these companies and I have amazing CEOs operating all them so I don't have to spend a lot of my time.
1:12.6	But where I spend most of my time today is a company called Giacalia, which is essentially
1:19.6	I'm trying to build a backbone for the independent jewelers, which is a massive market that
1:25.6	is very fragmented. So I'm trying to fix that and build a backbone for that
1:30.7	industry so that's where most of my time is spent on today you know if you want to go back to
1:37.0	how things started yeah where to where to this journey begin and we'll definitely dive into the
1:41.8	new company but for you know you've co-founded
1:44.8	and have operating stakes in so many different businesses what was your first business and what
1:49.8	led you down the path of entrepreneurship yeah good question um you know it kind of came
1:56.0	i'll be honest with you it came a little natural to me um so i started early my first business. Well, actually, my first,
2:01.5	like, somewhat of a real business was a content site. I had this, like, little website for PlayStation.
2:09.3	Today, it seems little. But back then, I had something like 20,000 DAUs a day. Wow.
	...

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