Victoria Vaughan

Bio

Victoria Vaughan is an award-winning business leader and communication strategist. She is the founder of B612, a New York–based PR agency serving high-growth technology companies. B612 clients are featured in top-tier media outlets such as Bloomberg, NYT, WSJ, TechCrunch, Fortune and have secured over $100m in funding in 2025. With over a decade in tech communications, Victoria has previously served as CEO of a top-tier media company, directly managing media strategy and operations. She was named a Best Business Owner by NYX awards’25.

Intro

Victoria Vaughan, the founder of B612, a public relations firm inspired by the beloved literary work "The Little Prince," shares her remarkable journey from managing a leading cryptocurrency media outlet to establishing her own agency in New York City. In this enlightening discussion, we delve into the intricacies of effective public relations, especially for early-stage founders, as Victoria elucidates her strategies for achieving substantial media coverage on a limited budget. She provides invaluable insights into the process of building authentic relationships with journalists and explains the significance of personal branding in the digital age. Furthermore, Victoria touches upon the advantages of cultivating a financial buffer to navigate the uncertainties inherent in entrepreneurship, emphasizing the importance of maintaining composure amidst challenges. Join us as we explore the nuances of PR, the power of niche marketing, and the resilience required to thrive as a founder.

Conversation

In a profound exploration of entrepreneurship and public relations, Victoria Vaughan shares her transformative journey from media executive to founder of B612, a PR firm named after the beloved planet from 'The Little Prince'. This episode delves into the very essence of what it means to take the leap into entrepreneurship, particularly for those who may not traditionally identify as founders. Vaughan's unique perspective, shaped by her experiences in St. Petersburg, Russia, and later in New York, provides invaluable insights into the dynamics of building a successful business from the ground up. Throughout the dialogue, listeners are treated to a wealth of practical advice on executing effective public relations strategies, especially for early-stage startups that often operate on limited budgets. Vaughan emphasizes the significance of a strong personal brand, the advantages of founder-led PR, and the necessity of establishing genuine connections within the industry. Her narrative not only highlights the importance of resilience and resourcefulness but also underscores the power of community among entrepreneurs, offering a refreshing perspective on navigating the challenges of starting a business. This episode serves as an inspiring guide for aspiring founders, illustrating how to harness one's unique background and network to carve out a distinct niche in a saturated market.

Takeaways

1. Victoria Vaughan emphasizes the importance of niching down in the PR industry, explicitly stating that by focusing on the blockchain and digital asset sector, she reduced competition from a thousand firms to merely five or ten, thereby enhancing her firm's expertise and reputation.
2. In the podcast, Vaughan advises early-stage founders to engage in founder-led PR initiatives before hiring a firm, suggesting that they should respond to journalist requests and publish thought leadership pieces to build credibility as experts in their fields.
3. Vaughan highlights the significance of financial planning for entrepreneurs, suggesting the creation of a 'fear fund' to manage the emotional challenges of entrepreneurship, which allows for clearer thinking during periods of reduced business activity.
4. The discussion reveals that building genuine connections with clients and acting as an extension of their teams is a core value of Vaughan's PR firm, B612, which seeks to foster authentic relationships rather than merely transactional interactions.
5. Vaughan shares her journey of transitioning from leading a successful media company to founding her own PR firm, illustrating the importance of self-belief and recognizing one's own capabilities as a founder.
6. The episode concludes with practical advice for founders on leveraging platforms like Quoted or Help a Reporter Out to secure media coverage, emphasizing the importance of establishing a personal brand and thought leadership in their respective industries.

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Hello. Please meet today's guest, Victoria Vaughan.

It is actually inspired by a book by Antoine Saint Exupery called the Little Prince. And inside of this book, the little prince is traveling across the universe. And over time, he finds a planet where he meets a fox.

And also he has a rose on that planet, so everything he loves is located at that planet. And the name of this planet is B612. That's the idea behind the name, like a place of love.

What happens when you take a media executive who built a 15 million reader publication with 200 employees but had zero equity, and she decides to finally bet on herself? Today's guest, Victoria Vaughn, founder of B612, a PR firm named after the tiny planet in the Little Prince where everything you love lives.

Victoria's journey took her from St. Petersburg, Russia, where she scaled Cointelegraph into one of the largest crypto media outlets in the world, to Brooklyn, New York, where she now runs a boutique PR firm that punches way above its weight. Here's what makes this conversation different. Victoria will tell you exactly how early stage founders can do their own PR effectively.

For about 20 bucks a month, she'll share how she went from competing with a thousand PR firms in New York to just five or ten by making one smart decision. And she'll explain why being an introvert in the public relations business actually works in her favor.

If you've ever wondered when to hire a PR firm, how to get press coverage on a bootstrap budget, or how to push through the fear of starting something new, this episode is for you. Let's get into it. Hello, Victoria, and welcome to the podcast.

Hi. Thank you for having me here.

Absolutely. I always start with a context question, which is everybody's always curious. Me too. Where are you originally from and where do you live now?

I'm originally from Russia, St. Petersburg, and now I live in New York.

Probably a big change.

Very big change.

So the part of New York you live in is Brooklyn, right?

Yes, I live in Williamsburg.

Do you have to go far? Is your company in Manhattan? How far is your company from where you live?

Everyone is operating remote, so generally I just work from my home. But also I feel like a lot of companies in the industry now have office spaces at the same time.

After Covid, not many people are used to going into the offices. So what I tend to see is that there are companies who have offices and almost no one there.

So I have a lot of friends who are just always welcoming me to come to the office spaces and just work from there. So, you know, when I get tired from working from my apartment all the time, I just go, like, to an office space of my friends or clients or partners.

That's awesome. And you go everywhere by subway so you don't have to worry too much about parking.

New York is not the place to have a car.

The general field in which you are operating is PR, public relations. And your current firm is called B612?

Yeah, correct.

So, you know, just not to be too weird about it, but B612 sounds like the name of a vitamin.

It is actually inspired by a book by Antoine Saint Exupery called the Little Prince. And inside of this book, the little prince is traveling across the universe. And over time, he finds a planet where he meets a fox.

And also he has a rose on that planet. So everything he loves is located at that planet. And the name of this planet is B612. So that's the idea behind the name, like a place of love.

And one of the values, like, for my company and one of the mission we have is that we always try to be really close with our clients and almost act as an extension of the team and not be like someone from the outside, like, trying just to do their own thing. But we always find more and more ways to help our clients.

And it's very often not even only about pr, but we also try to help with other partnerships and with investments. And whenever we can help, I always try to do so. So, like, one of my values is to have, like, those genuine connections with companies we work with.

I think that's the most interesting derivation of a name of a company I've ever heard. And I am familiar with that book. Love that book.

You know, this company you started after you'd already had some experience working at other companies. Tell us a little bit about that. That sort of led up to the creation of B612.

Yeah. So I started my journey working for a tech startup in Russia, and it was more of a fintech retail startup.

And while I was working there, we were going to a lot of international conferences because the business model was targeting to work with big retail chains all over the world. And the main product was like an interactive pulse terminal with a screen.

But back then, it was super, super early on and very interesting to work with that company. So we were going To France, to New York, to all the conferences.

So after this conference we just like stayed in touch with that person and became friends.

He started building a set of products in this industry back then and after like the initial startup I was working for, we had like several pilot projects but. But unfortunately after that it never went like into real commercial projects. So it was feeling like we didn't have a product market fit.

So I made the decision that I wanted to transition to something else. So I joined like this person to build things for digital asset industry. And back then one of the companies he started was a media company.

So it's a news outlet about all cryptocurrency news, blockchain news.

I joined that project initially as a project manager and was responsible for developing the publishing platform and for some of the partnerships we were doing.

And then pretty quickly I was promoted to the CEO position and next seven years I spent with that company, scaling it to one of the top positions on the market, which when I was leaving we had over 15 million in readership and a team of over 200 people. So a lot of my experience is coming from managing a media company, understanding how the editorial processes work.

And I also gained pretty significant network in the space. So like later on for me it was a very logical step to start a PR firm.

Was that company in St. Petersburg? You were doing all that in St Petersburg, right?

I was based in St. Petersburg. Company was not based in St Petersburg. All our editorial team again worked remotely and everything was targeting international market.

We were always producing news in English later on, like most part of the editorial team was based in the uk. I was traveling a lot, so. So yeah, even back then I gained a lot of experience managing everything remotely.

And that was before COVID So yes, long before COVID got an early starter.

I remember we were having calls via Skype, mostly.

Skype, yeah.

Yeah.

You made this transition from working for someone else to having your own company. And actually that happened before you founded B612 because you were already running a company out of St. Petersburg.

So that's a big transition where you stopped working for someone else and now you were the boss. What was good and what was not good about that transition for you?

Yeah, well, I think I got really lucky with this initial experience helping building Cointelegraph because I had the leading role and I had a lot of freedom with experimentation on who to hire, how to hire, how to build things. But I was not risking anything like on my own. So it was almost like I had a startup and I had freedom to do different things.

But like I did not have like personal financial risks. And this is like also good and bad, right? I did get a lot of experience, I did have a good motivation system.

So I like, did like quite wealthy with Cointelegraph. But at the same time I never had any equity in the company or anything like that.

So it was not the situation where for example, I could get like an exit or in the situation I leave the company, I would not continue like having anything to do with the revenue and the company. Right. And like after all those years, I, yes, had a transition like in myself that I would want to start to try to build something by myself as well.

For a very long time I did not picture myself as a founder and partially, I think because of this very popular like media image of successful entrepreneurs who usually very early on start building things, things while they're still in college, in high school, like start right after school, they start buying, selling, like doing projects and then everything grows. And to be honest, I was never like that.

I did not feel like I had like this kind of entrepreneur mindset while I was like in high school, in university or even like early on in my career. I was always more like very rational, systematic, like I can organize things very well.

But it's almost like I did not feel creative enough or like good enough. Because these founders, they have this image like of people who have always full of genius ideas, who understand market really well. Right?

But like in the end, over time I realized already, but okay, I have already done it. I have built a company. So why now? Why not now try by myself?

So I really started feeling like this tension, like, okay, this company idea like was not created by myself. What if all this experience is just luck, you know? And I really started like questioning, okay, what can I do outside of this ecosystem?

So and then at some point, it was a moment when I really felt I'm ready to continue by myself and to try it out. And definitely I think it takes a big like mindset transition as well. Even on a cultural level.

For example, in Russia, I think the overall idea is that every business like have to be profitable and successful. In Russia, for example, venture market almost like non existent.

So there is no such model there as in US that you can raise funds and Then your company can be not profitable for many, many years and you can just raise and then again and again. So the primary model in Russia is that if you build business, like it has to be successful and it has to be profitable.

So with that in mind, like, culture of making mistakes is not that big and popular in Russia, while in US I see that like investors have that idea, okay, founder will not succeed with this project, but still founders are able to raise again for new products and then they succeed. And overall idea behind like making mistakes, it's totally fine. It's better to try to do something rather than sit and never try to do something.

So I think I started like also spending some part of my time internationally in Europe and in US and seeing how people think about it here. And I think over time, step by step, it like transition mind mindset as well.

When you were the CEO, when you were promoted to the CEO, why would they not give you any equity? The whole point of equity for the CEO is, you know, incentive to, you know, build it, grow it, make it successful, and maybe ultimately sell it.

I'm stuck on the fact that they didn't give you any equity.

I did have a bonus system that was tied to the revenue of the company, but like, while I was working for the company. Right. But I think like media company is still not like a tech product that you like want to sell over time.

And I think the founder like of this media company, he still owns it and he never wanted like to sell that company. So. So like this exit strategy would be like impossible, quite impossible anyway.

And for me at the time, I was just not even familiar with this kind of setups that you can get an equity in the company. So from my side, I never even like thought about it. So I ended up in such place,

you've got this vision that, okay, I might be ready. I think I'm ready to be a founder. You hadn't actually done PR before then, is that correct?

Yes, that's right.

So how did you get, how did you go and not only make the plunge of being a founder, but decided to do something in a space that was adjacent to where you were at best, but wasn't something you'd actually done? And, and you started a, a PR firm and it's, and it's doing great. How did you, you know, where did it come from that, okay, I'm going to do pr?

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Well, first of all, I think I still did not feel like I wanted to build a product or a startup for which I would have to raise funds and then be in this cycle of like raising again and again. So I wanted to build something that I would be able to grow organically by myself without attracting external investments.

And I think like PR or marketing agency is perfect service business, which you can grow by yourself. And that is a good consistent revenue stream and cash flow. So this was like one criteria.

And then also I was just like looking on the market, like what kind of companies are there? I had several friends who had PR firms, so I chatted like with them to understand better how exactly it works.

And then like initially I started just experimenting like helping some of my friends who had companies in the space just to try and help them get, get some media coverage, like even for free, you know, just to understand, okay, how do you pitch a company? How do you connect with the journalist? Not when you manage a company, but when you actually have to interact with journalists.

Like who, for example, you do not know. I did know like a pretty big number of journalists in the space already.

So again, when I was pitching like some of the stories for my friends, I knew who to contact initially. And then over time, when you onboard more and more of the clients, you have more experts to introduce to the journalists.

And for the journalists, for example, when you have a strong speaker who is a strong expert on some point for journalists, it's a valuable input because usually when they work on the articles, they want someone to comment on the news flow. So when you can provide like interesting comments for them, then like you build this kind of long term, win win connection with the journalists.

And later on when you need to pitch a story, you know like, where to go. So at first I just experimented a little bit with placing these kind of stories and commentaries for my friends.

And then when I had like a better understanding how exactly like pitching works, what kind of journalists write about what, I onboarded like the first client. And after that I hired the PR manager who started helping me managing client accounts.

And after that I was more focused on business Development, building partnerships that would be referring clients to me. And even now I would say maybe 90% of clients come through referrals, not through like cold sales or direct sales.

So even now I am mostly focused on building these kind of partnerships like with whom we have like Win Win cooperation, for example, some design agencies on the all VC firms. Sometimes we would do work PR workshops for the portfolio companies of the VC firms.

And after that, usually some of the portfolio companies come to work with us. Then the VC sees okay, like they did good PR for that company and they start leading more clients to you.

And of course when a company is introduced by the investors, the level of trust is really high. Conversion rates of this kind of referrals is really good compared like to when I think companies are trying to do cold, just cold outreach.

At what point in the process did you move to New York?

I actually moved to New York before starting a PR firm. And before started starting a PR firm, I also did a startup with couple of my former colleagues.

We were building a IT for Cardano Ecosystems ecosystem. Cardano is one of the leading blockchains and back then they were at the point when they wanted to launch their smart contracts.

So our idea was to be the leading wallet for the Cardano ecosystem of products. So my first experience was that more like technological business.

But then we faced some roadblocks with Cardano itself because at that point they never released those smart trucks smart contracts when they were promising. And like we kind of stuck in terms of technological development, but we did get some good traction in terms of initial user growth.

And even like there were a lot of users who were just swapping tokens inside of our wallet. So we were able to sell this wallet to the launchpad we were launching with. And then after that I started APR firm.

So after I moved to New York first I experimented with launching this wallet. And I also just found a consulting job here in us So I was like doing these two things in parallel. And then after the wallet, I started the PR firm.

You have a lot of courage. So speaking of which, were you nervous that you would be able to differentiate your PR firm in New York? There are probably a thousand PR firms.

Yes, but when we were starting, first of all, we are not targeting all markets and our first clients were in cryptocurrency like Digital Asset space.

And of course there are some agencies who specialize in working with this market, but not as many as if you are just a generic PR firm that works with any kind of account.

And secondly, as I mentioned before, I Did have pretty good network in this space because before that I was managing like one of the largest media outlet.

And yeah, I guess niching down your targeted customers you want to work with and having a strong profile in the industry definitely helped to kick off things.

What did you learn in the process of being a founder for the first time? What things didn't go the way you expected and you had to pivot. And of course that always is a learning experience.

So both good and bad, what things did you learn in the first founding process?

Well, first of all, of course there is a big difference when you were working for the brand that is already recognized in the industry. And while like it was helping me that I am associated with the brand, it's not like I'm working for it anymore.

So imagine the difference when you represent a media company that produces news, when you like come to events, or when you want to have a meeting with someone and you work for the media company.

Like people are very eager to take a meeting with you and it's really easy to come to events and everyone just comes to you and wants to talks to you. While like when you say I have a PR firm, it's not always that attractive to people.

So in terms of networking, for example, I do see a big difference in how people like react to your introduction and to who you are. So it is like I would say more difficult to do the networking.

But again, over time you just learn what are the most efficient ways to introduce yourself to connect with people. And my approach is like always try to find ways you can help someone you talk to.

And when you follow through and really make introduction, you promise to do and maybe provide a little bit of help. It is like time and energy consuming, but I find that long term it works really well and people recognize you.

So usually like, to this kind of people, I'm not trying to sell any service directly, but I try to do a little favor. And then I say, okay, like if you know anyone who needs pr, I have a referral program in place.

And usually over time now I have a big network of these kind of people who are just like making introductions to me and bringing like new and new accounts. So I would say for me the biggest challenge was to push myself to do like this networking.

Because when I was with Cointelegraph, I was very much focused on building like internal processes and editorial processing. And the main like business model of the media company is gaining as much readership and traffic as you can.

And it's not necessarily associated like with doing like business development or a lot of networking. And by nature I'm more of an introverted person.

So for me it was really challenging to like push myself to start constantly going to events, make connections, talk to people.

That's, that's interesting to hear that somebody who's in the PR space is an introvert.

Yeah. Yes.

The P stands for public.

Yes.

Now what would you say?

You made a really good point earlier that the way you initially differentiated yourself was by what market you were helping out companies in this blockchain market was who you were focused on. And so that took the.

If you just assume, maybe my rough estimate was right, thousand PR firms in New York, you probably took it down to five or ten at the most.

Yeah, five to ten. Yes, you're right.

That you're competing with. So now it's really a whole different game if you're competing with only five or ten.

And then, and subsequently you told us how you compete, which is that you don't oversell. You try to deliver great service and then depend upon word of mouth and referrals.

So as you've grown, because you're, you've grown quite a bit since those early, early days, your philosophy, I'm sure, has stood firm. Meaning the way you're, you know, one of the ways you're going to differentiate yourself forever is great service, not a hard sell.

And then people begin to trust you and want you to do more. Is there anything else you're using to differentiate yourself besides that, you know, great service kind of mantra?

I think process wise, like now we see the media landscape is changing a lot and a lot of media companies are actually shrinking. And we see a big trend that many journalists starting their own substack accounts or podcasts.

So I feel like current pr, especially in the tech space, is not only about like media platforms, if we like take more of a classic news outlets, but also all the new media kind of things. So we do also work with podcasts and newsletters and some niche blogs.

And what I see is like oftentimes when you go after this kind of niche publications in terms of ROI for clients, this kind of niche publication can even be more valuable than some big popular media, but not that much that fits the interests of the audience. And internally we have also built out a lot of AI agents that help us with their processes.

So with the whole AI thing, that's a lot of things are happening right now. And I see that many people overuse AI in terms of content, but in my opinion, still, AI is not that good.

When you need to really write a great piece or write a good outreach, it like oftentimes not really personalized and does not have enough of the hooks. But what AI is great for is that it helps with research a lot.

So I have like we used a platform called N8N which allows to build different AI agent flows.

And what we did is that we now have agents that constantly monitor all the media outlets and even like social media and analyzes what kind of trends and stories are coming up. And it also instantly finds the journalists that usually cover this kind of stories but have not written about it yet.

So our AI bots send notifications to our PR team about all these opportunities like okay, here is an upcoming story. Here are the journalists who might be interested in this story.

And we instantly always try to see what kind of client account would be fit for this story, draft a commentary or brand mention that would be relevant to this story, pitch it very quickly to the journalist. And I think we learned to be almost like a news agency by ourselves.

And I find like that with the journalists, the main goal for building long term relationships is actually help them do their work. And given like journalists, I pitched every day like hundreds of times.

When they see that you actually can deliver value, some data, insights and good experts, over time you build stronger and stronger connections. And after we built out the system, the number of media hits we were able to achieve for the clients increased significantly.

So I would say this really helped us work faster.

And with writing all the press releases and these kind of things, as we are not I have five people on a team, so it's like still I would say boutique firm and we always try to move really fast because if you take a look on how big agencies work, I have heard a lot of complaints from my friends who work with bigger agencies that sometimes it would take them a week just to write a press release after the call they had, while we always try to do it the same day and go pitch. So I would say like this automation of a lot of research helps team moves much faster and get more media coverage for our clients.

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So if you were right now, if you were talking to someone who was founder of an early stage company, what would you say is the right way for them to try to get media coverage? How should they work with a PR firm? Because it's so easy to spend a lot of money on PR and not get great results.

In many of my startups I waited a long time before I brought on PR because I needed to be careful, so careful with the money.

So what's your advice for what the early stage founder should be thinking about in terms of what they should try to get from the PR firm and when they should pull the trigger to sort of hire a firm?

I would say I think it makes sense to hire a firm after you did like at least seed round fundraising.

And before that I think it makes more sense for like the founder or someone on the team just like to try to do it internally or maybe hire a part time freelancer PR person who has experience of working with startups and usually they do really good job as well. So securing some initial coverage. And in this way you don't have to like spend too much funds on working with the PR firm.

And in terms of what a founder like can make himself, I think overall now like founder led PR is a big trend and especially in the age of AI slopes, authenticity is like still one of like very important things.

And like LinkedIn is growing a lot and overall the personal brand of the founder really makes a difference when it comes to securing investments and partnerships and first clients.

So I would say like this work on personal brand both for social media and media, you can optimize the process that the way that you can repurpose a lot of content like something you would do for the media, you can then reuse on your LinkedIn, on your Twitter and everywhere.

So what I would start from is just try, try to push one thought leadership piece a month and maybe subscribe for a platform like quoted or help reporter out. On these platforms there are a lot of journalists who are seeking for their comment commentaries from the experts.

So it costs I think maybe $20 a month and you can set up the filters on which topics you want to comment on. Then you start getting alerts, okay, this journalist who works for that media wants a commentary and you just submit it on the platform.

So this is for like to build out some initial coverage for yourself as an expert in the field. And the second format I mentioned is called thought leadership.

A lot of media platforms, they accept contributor content meaning you can write an Article yourself about something like that is relevant to your product and to expertise and start like publishing on different platforms. So here it's a question of research. Okay, what kind of targeted audience I want to get, what kind of media they read.

Then you go to the media platform and analyze what kind of headlines and topics they usually cover. And then like as a result of this analysis that you can come up with a topic that, that will likely gain attention of the editor.

Then you get connection with this editor just on LinkedIn at Twitter and initially start just engaging with him like comment. And after like some time you can try to pitch him your idea. Like say hi, I'm this and that I'm building this product.

I have been previously mentioned in this and that article. For example, some of the commentaries you did. I have an idea of writing a piece.

Sorry, I have an idea of writing a piece about this topic and I have some exclusive data insights about this and then like you will get an answer. Okay, if they're interested in that, you go write 10 piece and then it's published under your name.

I want to shift gears a little bit and, and, and, and talk about. One of my favorite topics to talk to founders about is grit.

And if we define the grit in terms of other words like resilience and stick to itness and risk taking. And a word I mentioned to you earlier, because it jumped out at me was courage. It's obvious, anyone listening to this, that you've got a lot of grit.

I mean where you moved, moved. Well, you know, first of all, just trying to do startup and, and successfully running a business in St. Petersburg

and

then you know, pulling up stakes and moving to New York and, and then of course starting your own firm in, in New York.

And, and so the, you know, for me the question I always want to ask people and the answer is different for every founder, but every founder for sure has grit like you. But this, their story of where their grit comes from is different. So where do you think your grit comes from?

To be honest, I think I just try to approach like this like fear inside logically and make an agreement with myself. Okay, what are the ways I can like feel more calm?

And of course there are times like in business for example, when like you see, okay, some of the agreements are ending soon. You have not secured like anything new yet and you start have this internal fear.

I have to take care of my team, I have to pay salaries and I'm responsible for all of that.

So over time I just like analyzed financially what would be like what would make me feel calmer at these moments when for example that we have like less business accounts that like than we usually have.

And just over time I built out kind of a reserve fund or I don't know how you would tell call it, which I know would cover several months of salaries of my team and I would just like have this time to like get new business. So I think like financial planning for me both and business and for life helped me manage all those fears a lot.

So for example even when I was moving to New York I knew that I have a significant safe fund that would allow me to live couple years at my expense levels in New York even without any income. And this like having these thoughts always like helps me calm down and in the end it never even happened.

Since I moved to New York I always continue to have like some kind of cash flow. Of course like over time it grew and initially compared like to Russia price value in New York is absolutely different.

Like in Russia when I was living, I was living like in huge apartment in the center of the city like was having a very like high level of life. Of course after I moved to New York initially I had a drop in the quality of life.

But I just had an understanding that long term the like number of opportunities and upsides in US is like much, much higher compared to Russia.

Because also like having grown through the period of 90s after Soviet Union fell in Russia and like talking a lot to my grandparents and parents who have gone through these like devastating economical events in Russia.

I always felt that every 10 years something so crazy happens in Russia that's like it's not a place where you can build like a stable and long term life and especially given like all my career was focused on the international market. I have never really worked like for company that was targeting Russia market. I felt that for me it would be better like to move to a place like us.

And this kind of like financial planning helped me go through my fears both in terms of personal life and business.

I think that's really interesting to put it in the context of moderating or controlling your fears. That's a really interesting way to talk about it.

I've had a lot of difficult startups where, and I'm currently still running my ninth one and there are many times in those startups where I would, I would try to sleep and I would, I would feel the sense of cold sweat and, and you know because something was really wrong and, and, and I, and I, I hate that and I want to and I very Much want to try to quickly get things right, partly so that I can have a, you know, a normal life and sleep. And so what you said really resonates with me in terms of, you know, having things controlled in such a way that you avoid those really scary times.

Yeah.

I think it also helps a lot to be in a community of founders, and not only online, but as well offline, and to build a closer connection with those founders.

Because sometimes, especially in the age of social media like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and all the media, when you read all those stories, sometimes it feels like everyone is just doing so perfectly and so great. Every person has a crazy success story. No one is struggling.

But when you start building closer connections with other founders in the industry, you just get to see and understand that a lot of founders go through so many challenges, and then you start feeling, okay, I'm all right, everyone is going through it. And when you just share those, like, experiences and support each other, it also helps a lot.

I agree.

And that kind of networking is extremely helpful and valuable, and I hope that, you know, sharing these kinds of things through this podcast helps all of us as well. I think that what you've described is just fascinating. Your story is really, really an interesting one, and thank you.

It's great to have had you on here and to hear it, so I really appreciate that.

And do you have a podcast with yourself sharing all your experience, or is it all described in your books?

Well, I wrote the book mostly in the first person, which is different than most entrepreneurial books, I feel like, and I'm oversimplifying, but I feel like most entrepreneurial books are in one of two categories. There's the one which is somebody who's bragging and talking about how they, you know, had a unicorn and they sold it for a billion dollars, and.

And nothing ever went wrong with them, which isn't probably true. And then the other. The other frequent book type is very didactic, and that's.

There's probably really good information in there, but it's just hard to read because it's so dry. So what I tried to do was to tell stories.

And the most interesting stories are ones where something was wrong and I had to try to figure out how to fix it and how to move on. And sometimes that meant pivoting, and sometimes I had to do something else. But so, yes, it's my stories.

I did try to do a podcast of my own early on in this.

Designing Successful Startups, where I told my story, and it wasn't just the story of startups because I have to tell it in the context of, because I have quite a grit story. You know, I lost my leg when I was 16 to cancer. And it's a very rare kind of cancer that is usually fatal.

And it did spread and I lost a lung as well three years later. And so at that point in time, I was told I had zero chance of survival. No one had ever survived that.

That's crazy.

Well, that was very tough. That was very tough. And, and, and I figured out a way to sort of, you know, deal with it. And I, I did a TED talk about that, by the way.

And, and then when it, when I, you know, was, was surviving and, and got married and now we've been married for 45 years, I, I felt like, okay, I was ready to try to take on a, you know, a startup because I felt like, and it's true, nothing that could happen to me in a startup was as bad as what I'd already been through.

Yes.

And so, and so I could, I could, you know, put things in perspective.

It.

So yes, I did do a. Two short podcast episodes where I was telling my whole story.

I'll make sure to listen to it.

And here are your toolkit takeaways. Number one, niche down to compete.

Victoria went from facing a thousand PR competitors in New York to just five or ten by focusing exclusively on the blockchain and digital asset space.

When you narrow your target market, you're not just reducing competition, you're deepening your expertise in building a reputation that spreads through word of mouth. Number two, start founder led PR before you hire a firm until you've raised a seed round, do it yourself.

Subscribe to platforms like Quoted or help a reporter out for about $20 a month. Respond to journalist requests and commit to publishing one thought leadership piece per month. Build your credibility as an expert.

First, it costs almost nothing and it compounds. Number three, build a fear fund. Victoria manages the emotional rollercoaster of entrepreneurship through financial planning.

She built a reserve that covers several months of team salaries, so when business gets slow, she can think clearly instead of panicking. That cushion isn't just financial, it's psychological.

Now go identify the one niche where you can be the obvious expert and start building your reputation there today. And that is our show with Victoria. The show notes contain useful resources and links.

Please follow and rate us@podchaser.com designingsuccessful startups. Also, please share and like us on your social media channels. This is Jothy Rosenberg saying ttfn ta TA for now.