"Fail faster. Shorten the path to success": Borys Pikalov, Stobox Co-Founder

Please tell us briefly about your background.

I have always been excited about innovations and had a huge desire to promote them. Back in the day, I used to be a researcher in theoretical physics. I wanted to work on creating long-term innovations, and this is how it came to me: I didn’t just want to work on them; I wished to be involved in real-world applications of such innovations and their commercialization.

This is what led me to finance and startups. I started developing Stobox as one of the disruptive and socially impactful things.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Our company’s name is Stobox. The problem we are addressing is investing in businesses not traded on a stock exchange. As more than 99,9% of all the existing companies are private, it makes them almost impossible to invest in. The Stobox team makes it possible thanks to the technology of decentralized finance, as the shares become tradable on the blockchain. Another benefit of such an approach is reducing economic inequality by giving ordinary people a chance to invest and direct capital to the productive sectors of the economy.

This is possible thanks to lowered investment threshold enabled by Defi investing: different people can invest as little as $100.

What is the origin story of Stobox?

Compared to our coming-of-age story, the origin story is pretty boring. We were witnessing the asset tokenization industry growing and becoming more potent every day, which eventually led us to create a product with the sole purpose of leveraging hype. However, after a while, we came upon big challenges, which in turn made us see greater possibilities. The challenges we faced made us realize that to conduct a truly functioning business, we had to keep up with an enormous amount of aspects, innovations, and technological issues.

Those were, for example, digital identity, a blockchain-based layer tune, a range of complicated consulting- and legal-related issues. It became clear that a venture like this required way more resources than we thought at first; but, at the same time, we realized this little deal of ours had all the potential needed to become a disruptive unicorn.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

First of all, everybody on the Stobox team is very committed to this company and to one another. Each soldier of our army is a working bee deeply concerned by the companies’ matters, and this allows us to keep each other accountable for high performance. We genuinely put a lot of our time and inner resources into this work.

Secondly, everybody in Stobox is a fast learner. This is a quality I especially appreciate since the blockchain industry creates innovations a lot faster than any other, which requires an adequate pace of learning: if you don’t educate yourself every day, you have a big risk of falling behind really quickly. Thanks to having an upper hand, we are always in the capacity to adapt to the market as soon as possible and offer disruptive solutions.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

It’s probably two options. The first variant would still involve analytics — either in the academic sphere or not. It could be some sort of product management. Variant two would certainly include education: I love teaching people and making them grow, become better at what they do, and share their experiences. It definitely would be coaching or consulting.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

Our most important goal, for now, is building a complicated scalable machine out of our business. There is one big challenge though. As tokenization is not a single complete product but a complicated process with a variety of movable elements, finalizing the whole process requires a lot of time.

The complication of this level leaves space for different types of errors or uncertainties, which is normal and requires customizing. I see my mission here to turn this business into one big tokenization corporation which would be scalable and grow every day.

It leads me to have two core metrics: the first is the quantity of the closed contracts. This metric includes various cases and companies turning to us for help as every single one of them allows us to practice something new and become better at it. It’s also about market share. The second metric is the speed of closing a deal: in our field, speed is a key to quality and efficiency.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

The grade of how much people trust us and believe in us, especially considering how innovative the technology is. Before we launched Stobox Digital Assets Exchange, we had 30,000 people signed up for the waitlist regardless of the fact it wasn’t live yet. The fact that all these people believe in us inspires me enormously.

At the same time, we have clients — companies with billions of dollars in assets. They believe in us as well, and they are willing to accept the challenge that disruptive technologies give them. I also should mention how much resources we have put into analyzing and building our solution. We spent over 15,000 hours building our product, which is the whole Stobox Ecosystem, including the most recent projects like DS Dashboard and DS Swap. This amount of time features legal, financial, and technical research, but doesn’t include the development itself.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

There are two such technologies.

The first is decentralized digital identity. Our experience shows us that the majority of technical issues and delays happen due to the constant need to pass the verification process for the investors and share their data. The next relevant problem is data theft or using it inappropriately. The big pain of this industry is ensuring proper data protection, which makes me excited about the technology to preserve such data in a personalized manner on the blockchain. It allows users to give easy access to their data simply by signing permission with their private keys, and, most importantly, monetize the data provision: the company can work with the user’s data only if it pays them for it. It’s an excellent opportunity for vulnerable individuals and additional control over the companies monetizing their users’ data very easily.

The second technology is brain-computer interfaces. On the one hand, it’s very exciting as it can influence the way we operate and think like humans. On the other hand, though, implementing such innovation can easily turn to some Black Mirror episode: what if it will cause bad side effects, or not everybody will get access to this technology? How will it influence the idea of the human?

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

First of all, HackerNoon helps the community to gather together. It is the circle of people who are in love with innovations and creativity, which corresponds to our company’s spirit. This is also the platform’s vibe: a startup-hackerish mood that comes in handy if your entire work’s supertask is to hack the traditional financial system (in a good way, of course). As I said before, it's our goal to make this system more inclusive and efficient.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Fail faster. 90% of everything you do is incorrect, but you can’t know for sure what 90% is, which is why it’s necessary to shorten the path to verify it.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

The quantity of work you put in doesn’t equal the output. Sometimes, while working significantly less, you get better results simply thanks to being fresher and taking care of yourself. Also, nobody really knows what they are doing.

At the very dawn of your career, it seems like all the CEOs, directors, and top executives get this mysterious bigger picture and are long familiar with the revelation, but the more you work, the more it comes to you that people are only humans at any given stage.

Millionaire investors tend to not know a lot of stuff; they learn and make mistakes, and each of them surely used to be in the shoes of an unconfident beginner. It’s crucial to not only value the experience but also to understand that, in the first place, it is about openness and flexibility of the mind, being ready to move fast, and willingness to work hard.