Stanislav Skakun is the Founder of biodata. He is a passionate entrepreneur who started his first entrepreneurship journey back in 2007. This helped him a lot in learning how a startup requires proper planning. Stanislav is an experienced financial analyst who used his expertise to provide valuable services. His company, biodata, is a startup that is working on a cross-platform application for health and activity data with a plan to add value to the healthcare sector. Learn more about Stanislav Skakun and his startup through our interview below.
What is your background? Have you always been an entrepreneur?
No, I am 40 now, and I only started my full-time startup journey exactly four years ago, in March 2019. Before that, I had quite a successful 12-year career in corporate finance with a leading BPO (“business process outsourcing”) company in the CIS. I started as a financial analyst and eventually left my corporate career as a regional CFO.
Interestingly enough, I never regretted a single day that I started this new life. A startup’s daily routine is totally opposite than that of a CFO. As a CFO, every month for me was totally like the previous ones, and now it’s highly risky and chaotic. I also remember my good old days with warmth: my corporate background helped me a lot in startup building because legal and finance expertise is something typical startup founders usually lack.
How did you start your entrepreneurship journey? Do you have some advice for beginners?
My first entrepreneurial experience was in 2007. We raised a small friends & family round with my university classmates and started an insurance broker. The idea was to create a premium IT-enabled service, but as you may remember, a severe financial crisis broke out that year. So, we had to close our company in 2009.
I drew a few lessons from that failed attempt, which worked for me:
- It takes more than just some financial plan to create a startup – you got to have a real passion for what you build; more simply put, you should only create a startup when you cannot avoid creating it;
- Having too many co-founders dilutes responsibility and may likely lead to failure. One leader must take responsibility for hard business decisions and lead the pack.
These lessons may not work for everyone. One may start a startup by putting money in the first place just because the idea is commercially sound and pull it off successfully. Further, there may also be great co-founding teams where co-founders can cover each other’s blind spots.
What do you work on in your current startup, and how did it start?
Currently, at biodata, we create a “super app” for all categories of health and activity data – i.e., genetics, nutrition, medical records, wearable health, and more. You can say that this product is totally different from the finance space I worked in before. But in fact, preventive healthcare today is all about key indicators and big data. So, basically, processing healthcare data at its core is not so different from financial analysis.
I started biodata because life science and longevity are now frontier industries, promising we may soon control age-related disease and perhaps even take on aging. This may sound unbelievable, but think of it; scientists decoded the human genome in just 2007. Our lifespan – the number of years we may live on average – is also a genetic trait. So, we already have all the blueprints for aging and disease. We only need to put effort – and investments into decoding this riddle to radically extend human lifespan and quality of life.
I believe this is the most important industry today, and that is why I wanted to become a part of it.
What do you believe is the most crucial part of continuing business seamlessly?
The short answer to this question is that the longer your runway – the more seamlessly you can run.
But what does it mean? We live in a VUCA world. Even having seemingly substantial financial reserves may not guarantee that you will be able to use them in an emergency. Hence, the business must be inherently antifragile to survive without external help.
Let me give an example in biodata. We keep all our costs variable (or almost all – constant costs in our company account for less than 5%). For this reason, we can scale down as fast as a couple of months when we need to. And we can scale up that fast too.
Being able to scale both ways is not enough. You should also be able to embrace hard truths and be flexible and fast in your decisions regarding sunk costs. Often entrepreneurs build success by “overcoming” negative circumstances and “fighting” for their business initiatives when things go south. But it is more important to have correct kill points and avoid pointless and unfruitful struggles over dead ends and sunk costs.
Building an antifragile business takes a lot of effort to communicate with the team, suppliers, and investors, but this is something worth the effort.
We saw that you were active as a leader in multiple companies. What are your goals through your companies, and how do you plan to help individuals with them?
Every time I was active in some parallel projects, I was hoping to build some synergetic technology and bring it back to biodata. Recently though, tech has become so advanced and complex that I prefer to build everything we need in-house and have full control of how we use our tech.
Describe yourself in one word.
I would say I am “one with my company,” meaning I fully share its fate. I don’t know how to say that in one word, but every time I have to make a choice, I choose my project over everything else.
Do employees’ energy and enthusiasm have a hand in business success? How do you plan to motivate your team to go the extra mile?
It is impossible to keep unmotivated people around a startup, so the “startup atmosphere” is about full alignment and high motivation.
In a small team, the founder has the privilege to only hire people who initially share common values and company mission and believe in the feasibility of what the startup is going to do. But when it comes to changing the initial plan and going the extra mile with your team, that must involve some personal growth and, more importantly, curiosity to get new skills and make an impact. Going the extra mile most likely involves some “internal entrepreneurial thinking” on the employee’s side.
How would you describe your leadership style?
Leadership style is about being liberal vs. authoritative, right? I prefer being authoritative and clear about priorities, deliverables, and timing but liberal and flexible in the way these deliverables are achieved.
Did you face any challenges during your career span? If so, how were you able to overcome them?
Challenges are inherent to corporate careers and startup building. The safest way to overcome them is to always be quick in admitting your mistakes but be reserved and un-hasty in your reactions to these challenges.
Are you adapting to digital transformation? How is it helping your business?
Even a fully IT company – like biodata, which is essentially an application – goes through constant digital transformation as a product becomes more complex, the stack becomes more diverse, or tech becomes outdated.
The great thing about IT and digital transformation is that it is so powerful in cutting costs and achieving results that would otherwise be more expensive and even unfeasible through manual labor.
Do you use innovative ideas to be unique?
Innovation is the only sound reason to engage in startup building. The next “unicorn” would unlikely be a social network or a taxi aggregator. The trick is always about creating something new. So yes, innovation plays an important role in our activities.
It is a founder’s “must” to be always on the lookout for innovations that can be brought into the startup. I would say around 15% of the time has to be dedicated to this “idea hunt,” and it is difficult to delegate this founder’s obligation.
Where is your leadership going? What benefits do your clients get from your company in this competitive world?
We build a super application that can process all categories of health-related data: genetics, medical records, nutrition, activity, and many more. My ultimate goal is to create a smart assistant who would, in a gentle way, help every user seamlessly collect their data, be educated about it, and build healthy habits to achieve long-term well-being through a data-driven approach.
I believe this is quite a straightforward value proposition, so we will align with it.
Connect with Stanislav Skakun on LinkedIn.
Find biodata on LinkedIn.