Max Denevich

Honestly, I believe it all started with video games.

I was a serious gamer as a kid, and that's what pulled me into computers, into logic, into math.

That curiosity eventually turned me into the IT.

But somewhere in my first or second year of university, I wasn't wired to just code.

I wanted to create things, come up with ideas, pitch them, talk about them with people.

So I needed the product side.

So I started to

find some opportunities for me couldn't find that combination in just a regular job traditional roles were too narrow for me you are either a marketer or a developer or a salesperson but I wanted to touch all sides of the product at once so I started looking at startups figured that was like the only place for me that like a student with no experience could actually do that

So it landed me in my first story, my first startup.

It was like Android TV connectors.

It was early days before Google Chromecast, before smart TV, all this stuff.

And it was some kind of device that turned your regular TV into Android machine.

I did marketing.

I did B2B sales, B2C sales.

And we sold actually thousands of units, I believe, something like that.

Landed one big retail deal.

But the company's margins were really bad.

Money ran out.

And that was my first real lesson that enthusiasm does not pay salaries.

You need revenue, real recurring revenue, or you just burn time.