“Educating Startups & Helping Them Attract Investors” with Victoria Yampolsky of The Startup Station

Jeffrey (1s):
Hello, again, Welcome back to Radio Entrepreneurs. My name is Jeffrey Davis and here we keep winding down 2021, over 700,000 interviews over a million people have watched different episodes of the show, but we’re not satisfied yet. And then maybe we, maybe we will be after the next interviewee. And that is Victoria Yampolski, founder of The Startup Station. Welcome.

Victoria (30s):
Thank you so much. Do you have for you, I’m very happy to be on the show and then nice to meet you.

Jeffrey (36s):
So tell us about The Startup Station.

Victoria (41s):
Sure. I’ve started effective stationing in 2013. So the company’s eight years old and it says finance advisor and education platform for startups. So what we do falls into three categories, one is consulting. We advise startups pre-funding and post-funding pre-funding with health and the prisoners to articulate their value proposition from the investor’s point of view. So we’ll help them put financials that they understand can justify that really show with pet to perfect, the ability, how those strategic decisions turn into financial results and how they go into Mister success and armed with this financial models and the results and valuation at the, in your skin.

Victoria (1m 21s):
Easier to convince investors that their business is feasible from the financial point of view, as well as use this as models to execute on their plans, post funding. And post-funding, you know, we continue to work with the prisoners who will help raise funds and we help them execute on those plans so that they can put their vision in reality and really focused on growing the company. And while we’re building the financial infrastructure underneath them, until they reach about 5 million ready, there is an education arm of The Startup Station where we work with them to print your score bootstrapping or with accelerators. And it’s a finest program that I’ve created starting 2015 philanthropy, bringing us with no finance experience to really allow them to live well, get their start up themselves.

Victoria (2m 5s):
And it’s covers accounting, financial modeling, and start applying. And so it really prepares them to understand the basics of finance to both, you know, either creates, you know, this materials themselves, but also to communicate with investors and the finance team on the same level, so that they’re able to understand the terminology. And they’re able to make decisions in an informed way as opposed to being scared, overwhelmed, confused at Sarah. And finally, the third pillar of The Startup Station is communities him aware would do a lot of free events interviews with create a lot of content for you to channel with social media. We are just beginning on their fundraising journey can go and learn a lot of the more introductory topics and get familiar with how the fundraising clips get looks like and what they will have to do to raise capital.

Jeffrey (2m 56s):
Well, that’s quite an ambitious mission that you have. What led you to doing this? What did you do previous?

Victoria (3m 5s):
Well, I didn’t have to wake up one day. It created The Startup Station. You know, it wasn’t that clear path. I was born in snippets. I came here in the 1996 and first I pursued a computer science degree. Was that a very practical thing to do from your point of view, but it wasn’t my passion. So even by the time that I graduated, I went to Cornell university. I knew that I didn’t want to be a programmer. It’s a great professional. It just wasn’t something that I wanted to do. So I ended up doing consulting and became a business analyst for a major, a consulting firm. I didn’t flop with either. It’s still wasn’t really, I think enough of a mix of creative and business and technical for me was very technical.

Victoria (3m 49s):
So then I went, I wanted to switch to finance, so went to Columbia business school and I spent a few years on wall street. And I think I found the same way she was where any job that I had up to this point, which of course were at more junior levels. It was only focused in one area. Whereas if the premiership allows you to do many different things every day, no day is like that. And so in 2009, I quit my job and I started the film company and it may seem like it’s real out of the blue, but it’s not because I have acting backgrounds together with my, you know, computer science and finance education. I also was an actress as a child since 11 years old. And so I always had the interest in creative arts.

Victoria (4m 31s):
So I decided it was

Jeffrey (4m 34s):
In St. Petersburg.

Victoria (4m 36s):
Yes, yes. I wasn’t a professional theater. And I act that, you know, for two years in the professional theater, every, I had three performances a week, one on Saturday and two on Sunday. So that was quite interesting that’s to get, it was being with the, in a specialized physics and computer science school so that I did during the week and then the weekend in theater. But so anyways, so I approached it from the business point of view. And, you know, at that point in my life, I was very arrogant. I never really failed. And when I started my first venture, I made all of the mistakes that first time and the printers make, I tried to raise too much money. I tried to raise 265 million as my first race for a slate of films from post production, distribution funds.

Victoria (5m 22s):
I didn’t put the right team together. I’m going to put together yet, but that wasn’t the team that could justify that race. I didn’t validate the product market fit for whatever new way I thought of fun financing, independent films. So after two years, it all folded, you know, and it failed. And it was a very difficult experience, but I think it was absolutely necessary for my growth. And they gave me an idea for my company because I realized that just like film producers are very passionate about their ID and how would they want to change the world? And they’d either want to, you know, bring for right. And the printers they’re also passionate and many of them, or let’s put it this way.

Victoria (6m 3s):
Very few of them have any idea of how to bring their ideas to market before they get any business and find 60 events. Of course, sometimes they have those people in a team and they’re lucky. Well, most of the times there would be product experts who really know the industry and they found something that doesn’t work and they come up with an idea to fix it. Right. But that’s just an idea. It’s not to make a business. And it all depends on the execution. And very few ideas remain unchanged when they finally get formed, <em></em> big company. And so I created the, The Startup Station and, you know, and then eventually became after eight years, the three pillars, it’s 30 does that consulting.

Victoria (6m 44s):
Then I ended the education arm and then I added into community, autumn them and everything expended, you know, first we just did pre-funding support. Now we’ll do post funding. So now I have a team. So it will was a journey that, and also not a straightforward one, but a lot of learnings along the way, but it gives me a lot of joy to help people put their dreams into a reality,

Jeffrey (7m 11s):
Quite a diversified background. And I think really helps to make your experiences, make it better for the entrepreneur. But are there specific industries? I know you mentioned size that you think that you’re best suited for helping or that you’re most comfortable with right now,

Victoria (7m 28s):
I work with industries, any tech or any product startup. I apologize for the noise outside. I hope it’s going to go wait. Right. But yeah, finance is really industry agnostic. So it is about a framework. It is about a way of analyzing companies. So helping entrepreneurs see how to translate their vision into quantifiable decisions, which are inputs to the financial model and how we define in the logic of converting this data into financial results. So in your tech startup, any product startup,

Jeffrey (8m 8s):
Could you just give us that answer again? You froze

Victoria (8m 11s):
Sure. Your

Jeffrey (8m 12s):
Internet is not great. Yeah. Just go now and then we’ll just, we’ll make sure it gets edited properly.

Victoria (8m 22s):
Sounds good. So Amy, so finance is really industry agnostic. So it doesn’t matter what the industry is. It is a framework that is an approach analyzing business plans and helping you to bring your, see how their vision should be translated into strategic decisions, which are inputs to the model. And then how those decisions will further get translated. Right? What is the business logic? What does the company you do into financial results? So in a tech startup, any product startup, of course, most startups that I’ve worked with are SAS models. This is just a very common one, a lot of tech startups in terms of industries, blockchain, and a thesis, bare popular education, tech, eye charts, tech, media tech.

Victoria (9m 4s):
This is just the recent startups that I’ve worked with out of the product. I’m actually now involved with the fertility website that helped some women get pregnant. The ones that are having infertility problems. That’s a very exciting company for me to help with because I feel like it can make a lot of people happy. So it really doesn’t matter. What I don’t have with, I would say is biotech, anything that involves natural resources, oil, and gas, metals, and mining, things like that, or a bank. So those are very specific industries that would go through a different financing process than that. Typical tech, a product startup.

Jeffrey (9m 42s):
And how do you see the next couple of years rolling out? Do you see any major changes

Victoria (9m 46s):
For The Startup Station? Yes. I would like to really grow the education arm. I believe that education is the way to make the most impact for the startup community and to teach. You know, my mission really is to remove the fear of finance from when to bring your own minds and to help explain how they can use it, to drive their business forward, to grow, to accelerate the fundraising process and to ultimately achieve the change that the one I achieved. So I believe that the way to do it is through education. And so I am in the process of licensing my content and creating new content for a few platforms, outlawed, ready to teach at the bank of America issue Institute, the women’s entrepreneurship.

Victoria (10m 29s):
So I plan to do that more and go way forward. I’m going to be writing a book to put the entire framework that I’ve created for modeling and value in early stage startups, into practice. And I hope that to be adopted in Mongo, all of the accelerators in the world, if that’s possible or as many people so that, you know, the reason, the reason somewhat order to this chaos. So strike now, I think when people think about startups and they think about startup financials, very few understand how to do it. And most of them ignore ignored instead of thinking. And this is your plan. If you don’t read through your plan, you increase the chances of your favorite.

Jeffrey (11m 14s):
Victoria just sounds so dynamic and exciting. If someone’s looking for you and startup station, how would they find you?

Victoria (11m 22s):
Well, my website is www dot The Startup Station dot com. They can follow me on LinkedIn, The Startup Station on LinkedIn things, subscribe to my YouTube channel or follow us on clubhouse, where we host regular life events.

Jeffrey (11m 39s):
That’s great. And we hope you come back to Radio Entrepreneurs again, cause you clearly have a lot to contribute. Remind everybody, this is Radio Entrepreneurs and we’re going to take a break. We’ll be right back with more stories.