Get ready to dive into a wild ride with Egor Podkolzin, the rockstar-turned-banker who’s shaking up the fintech scene! Igor’s got a story that’ll make you laugh, cry, and maybe even question your own life choices—he’s gone from jamming on stage to making waves in the banking world, all while navigating the ups and downs of life in Ukraine and beyond. He spills the beans on how he turned a brain injury into a passion for music and eventually, a thriving career in finance, all while keeping it real about the challenges he faced fleeing his home country due to war. Tune in as he chats about his new venture, Only Ubank, designed specifically for women entrepreneurs, and how he’s aiming to educate and empower through the world of crypto and banking. So, grab your headphones and get ready for some playful banter, insightful lessons, and a whole lot of fun!

Takeaways:

• Egor's journey from rockstar to banker is a wild ride, showing that life can throw curveballs like a brain injury that changes everything.
• The podcast dives deep into how Egor discovered his passion for extreme sports, providing insights into how hobbies can lead to unexpected career paths.
• Women are a powerful force in the digital market, being 84% more engaged on social media, which is a goldmine for businesses targeting female audiences.
• Curiosity is Egor's secret sauce, driving him to explore new ventures and learn new languages, proving that a curious mind can conquer challenges.

Links referenced in this episode:

• onlyubank.com

Foreign Good afternoon, good evening and welcome to the Trillionaire Crypto podcast. We've got and a very interesting guest this week.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Davos in Switzerland for the World Economic Forum and met some amazing people over there.

And there's all the world leaders and there's the billionaires and the super important people and sometimes you just meet someone randomly and go, wow, why are you not on a stage? You need to be on a stage. And so gentleman that I met, Egor, Egor Podkolson.

He is a banker, he's a businessman, he's a co founder of a couple of fintech products. He's got businesses that are operating worldwide.

He's also a musician, an extreme sports enthusiast and he has his own podcast as well where he interviews people. And Egor has got a very, very interesting story of how he came to be a banker.

So mate, would you like to give us a little bit of intro or would you like to tell us what sort of music you're into? Where do you want to start?

First of all, hey Jeremy.

And hey everyone who's watching us now or listening to us now, thank you very for inviting me today and thank you very much for the brief introduction you already gave to me. It's such an honor for me. So yeah, basically I think it's better for you to ask him some questions which you're gonna kick off with.

And so let's like moderate this conversation that way.

Let's start with the music before we get to the really exciting part.

Yeah, that somehow, surprisingly, besides all of my businesses and everything, because I wasn't a business Since I was 17, I was never working as a usual job as an employee, not a single day in my life and not a single salary I was gotten in my life. Got a bunch of passions, let's say. Yeah, one of them is heavy metal music. So it came out from that.

I was listening to Metallica since I was 8 years old. Back in the days my parents was bringing me this, you know, cassettes, not even the CDs but like, you know, that super old school stuff.

So I got obsessed with this. Yeah, right away. So it just kept growing and growing and growing, you know.

And it came out that I started to play and yeah, that's another funny story about that. How I started with that basically because my father gave me the just acoustic guitar when I was like 13.

But it seems super boring for me for four years until as you mentioned, I have another passion which is extreme sports. So one day I got really hurt in My mountain bike. I broke my leg and I lost my memory and I had a brain injury.

So I was laying down at home and it was forbidden for me to do any sorts of activities, even reading or like anything. I was just able to lay down and chill because of my brain to like, you know, restore itself.

So I just remember that I got a guitar and I started to play with it. And that's how that my passion of listening, it replaced with the passion of created. So I started to learn myself.

I was 20 at that point, 20 years old when I started to actually learn how to play, how to create, how to come with something. So it became like learn to play guitar, then drums. And then I found a friend of mine, a good friend of mine who became my guitarist.

But once again like, you know, the heavy metal stage, especially in Ukraine is very like specific.

Yeah.

In the terms that it's impossible to become like a professional, it's impossible to get paid for it. So it was just our hobby and our passion. So yeah, we were playing at some small shows with like 100, 200 people, you know.

But it really gave us lots of joy. And for me personally it was very, very unique experience in some way, you know.

And I'm trying to implement this even in my business skills right now.

And business is what I'm doing when I am like even taking an interviews or getting the stage at some conferences or some meetings, you know, so just skills I got there. When you are on stage in front of like 300 people and obviously you're not in pro musician, you're no. 1, so you need to pretend you can do that.

And when it comes out, really was cool. People liked it. So yeah, for me it gave me a lot of like self consciousness in some sort of way, you know.

Yeah, I guess. You know, performing, performing on stage is, is similar to going to a business meeting.

Like you're open, you're raw, you're exposed and gives you the self confidence because you're, you're presenting in front of people, whether you're giving a speech or whether you're playing a guitar solo. So it's, it's a similar skill set.

Exactly. And I, and I became a frontman, so I became a singer.

So I learned how to sing for a few years I was going to like lessons and I started to write the songs. The Lyrics and performance. So it all was my like part job. But yeah, during. We did it for like four years or something.

And during that period we got paid once we were touring to another city called Kharkov City. It's in Ukraine. It's like 500 kilometers away from capital. When we were living.

Yeah.

And we were paid with 200 grievance for the whole band. Back in the days, it was like €10 for a whole night. Yeah.

Oh my God. Funny, funny.

Where are you from in Ukraine, Egor?

Basically we can't see you. Kevin.

Yeah.

Hello, Kevin. Nice to see you. I'm from Kiev, from capital city. I was born and raised there and moved just because of the war.

Yeah. Hopefully that word should be over soon. Fingers crossed. Who knows?

We'll see. Hope so. Hope so, man. It already take a lot of time.

Yeah.

So I. I want to find out Ego. Before. Before you were being the. The rock star, before you were being the businessman, the. The extreme sports, mate.

Like what you. You jumping your motorcycle over a bus or what were you doing?

Basically, but not a motorcycle. Bike in terms of mountain biking. Like. Bicycle.

Oh, mountain bike. Right, right. Yep.

Yeah. It was my other obsession. Like I started to ride extremely when I was 12, so it's like 22 years already I'm riding.

We did just unusual mountain bikes which weren't absolutely not made for it. So I could have been heavily injured or died or paralyzed or something. You name it for like million times.

It became accessible for everyone to guide the specialized equipment because, you know, they're obviously extreme on a bike is different than usual bike for just riding the roads or something. So yeah, then it became a bit. A bit less dangerous. But still, yeah, I was taking parts in competitions.

I did big stunts like on level of Ukrainian riders. I was maybe sounds proud of me, but like one of the top riders at some points. We were shot in the movies, we were shot in the videos.

It was, yeah, another kind of, you know, some activity which. Which gave me like energy, passion to be focused on something before I became. Before I learned how to.

How to make business, how to create some things, you know, I need to put my energy somewhere and this gave me the very good, very good outcome.

And it gave me a lot of friends, it gave me a lot of skills, it gave me a lot of knowledge, a lot of tools, how to overcome your fear, you know, and it's very important, I suppose now I'm reminiscing that, you know, recalling all the way. And I understand that this is an important thing for me.

And even before that, before I became to Martin, to mountain biking, to extreme sports in general, my parents got me to do martial arts since I was 6. So I was training like parallel since I was a little kid in martial arts. And later on it was for 10 years training.

And I became a Ukrainian champion, champion in martial arts when I was 15, I think. And I was apparently riding mountain bikes and doing martial arts, participating in competitions and everything.

So when I was like a teenager, I was fully focused on sports. I was absolutely obsessed with sports. Nothing else would ever interested me. Like, nothing. I was just there.

And, you know, back in the days, the living was tough. I would say, you know, everyone, especially in, in Ukraine, back in those days, we had no money, we had no opportunities, basically nothing.

It was really poor and like broke countries.

So lots of my peers back in the days, they become, you know, interested in some destructive things, just like drugs, alcohol and then that sort of stuff. So I think I needed this, you know, to be focused on something more productive and more like, constructive or something. Yeah. And it helped me a lot.

You say, you're saying it's something more productive and I'm thinking, you know, drugs and alcohol, obviously, you know, you could, you could risk your life with those, but you're just going to risk your life on a bike and, you know, get a brain injury. At least you were entertaining. Right.

First and secondary. The outcome is not guaranteed with drugs and alcohol. It's 100 guaranteed that you're gonna ruin your life.

But there, you know, so, yeah, it was fun times.

The, you know, injuring yourself on a bike and ending up in hospital. That's not the, that's not the only time that you've risked your life.

Yeah.

So do you want to give an introduction to the story? Because obviously we've got the only Eubank, but there's a particular focus.

You're focused on women and you focus on crypto and you're focused on cards. So tell me first, why the women? And then we'll get to how the card came about.

Yeah, because when I got to this, like, it's in, in a whole, it's quite interesting story, you know, how we came out with this project and how I met my partners who are my co founders in this project, etc. Etc. So it all happened accidentally to be short everything.

But as we gather together with my current co founders, which I do appreciate them very, very big time, we just started to research because everyone is expert in banking, in web three, in crypto, you know, in legal structuring of banking projects and all that sort of things.

So we were basically thinking how can we implement the skills to build something fresh, to give some, you know, fresh breath into the world of fintech. And we started new research basically.

So we came out that women are 84% more active on social medias, both promoting something and consuming something. Because if you think about it, all of the major bloggers, influencers, etc. Etc. On Instagram are female.

So we came out with data that they are taking the significant part of the market which is significantly growing year by year, I mean digital consuming and digital goods market and social, social networks and all that sort of stuff.

So we came out with table ring the product for them and then we started to develop it and then we started to talk to a lot of them, to influencers, to leaders of female communities, to a woman who are into some supporting programs in Europe, in uk, in Africa, in India, you name it. So we did quite a big job, you know, talking to them and validating what we are doing in general.

And we found out that there is a another whole group of audience we can target is female communities because once again women are super active, being into the communities, being into business, being into building something.

They're super disciplined, they're like extremely, extremely, how to call it, passionate about what they are doing, you know, and unfortunately even today they're usually not compensated enough for their efforts and it makes no sense. When we saw the numbers and we saw the statistics, we were like how's it possible? Not a word.

So we came up with the idea that if we gonna solve these like inequalities and give them more of opportunities, you know, more of a tools and basically just focus on them, just give them a bit of attention which no banking or fintech projects did before then we can become like a big thing to the audience and we can attract a number of loyal customers from there. But we're transparent, we just want to build a good product for them.

So our main goal as you focus now, we just launched our crypto friendly payment card which is instantly issued and receives all sorts of payments in crypto and fiat and automatically converting the money, just the first step of our product.

Our general idea is to give them the big, big, big application when they can gather as a big community and exchange ideas, experience, educate each other, give each other opportunities like such as jobs or I don't know, just some lessons or something or educational how to work with Web3ele to invest both in crypto or in usual traditional assets. So yeah, just wanted to work that way, let's say, if it makes sense.

Nice.

So tell us a little bit more about the stage of the company and where you guys are at.

Yeah, we just launched our card which is, as I mentioned, the first iteration of our product. We have a roadmap going on for launching more and more and more products. We just now started with the first iteration of it.

Our card is already working, but it's now in a better stage of testing. We are using it by ourselves and by our close team members. We have a board of advisors of female advisors from different industries.

So we are now testing everything to make sure it works.

Then we're going to launch it publicly and promote it publicly first within Europe, Union and UK because we are legally can do this in the current stage, then to expand it on other markets. But we have no limitations. If customer has not sanctioned passport, he can issue our card and use it worldwide.

So for instance, you can top up with bitcoin and you can go to, I don't know, India and you will pay directly from your bitcoin wallet and you're going to be swapping automatically to local rupees for instance, or wherever you go. So that's what worked today.

Then we're about to open around I think because we still need to build the whole infrastructure, we need to expand the team, we need to develop a lot of products and it takes time and resources as you guys might understand.

So from that point on, now we're using this together, the community, to build the community around the product and then to attract the seed round and then to expand by developing our product further and further.

We have in our pitch deck the write it down, all the roadmap with all the AI tools, automatic routing, even issuing our own token, which I cannot publicly speak yet about. But at some point we're going to issue even our own token. We already encountered the tokenomics which was quite, quite challenging. But we did it.

We consulted with guys from big exchanges, experts in the industry and I think we designed it quite well.

Very cool, very cool. So I was before, before Kevin came on, we had a little chat about how, how we, how we first met and I Don't even.

I, I think it was something to do with the card, the, the, the, the. That got down the rabbit hole story.

So do you, do you want to tell us not just how you became a banker after being a rock star, but how you actually exited Ukraine, how you got to be in Davos?

Oh, that's a long story. As I mentioned, I was never willing to leave Ukraine, to leave my home city in my home country. But unfortunately, because of the war, I had to.

And as soon as I did it, like the first minutes as a war started, we just escaped. It's a long story. And it was quite tough because I just lost everything ahead. I had two separate businesses in Ukraine which were working well.

I was living in Sandoval capital. I was driving my fancy Jaguar and stuff, and I literally lost everything.

And I stuck in Poland accidentally, just in one day, I just like appeared there and my former partners, who I was relying on, actually betrayed me. They just left me there and moved to Slovakia to live their own lives. So, yeah, I stuck there with no sources for surviving.

There's just little nothing, no business, no job, no friends, no. No opportunities. Fortunately, I found myself in a small village in the Polish mountains in the middle of nowhere. Literally. It was like.

Once again, it's a very long story, but to be short, you walked from.

Ukraine to Poland.

Basically. So.

How far is that for those people who don't know their geography?

I didn't know the geography as well until I did it by myself, you know, around 15 kilometers, I think.

15 kilometers?

Yeah.

Illegal, illegal border crossing.

I can't publicly talk about it.

Understand? Understand?

Yeah, but partly, partly. So, let's say, because at that point, yeah, borders were already closed. And, you know, I'm totally disagree with that. I'm supporting my country.

I love my country. I really want my country to win.

I don't like Russia at all, but, you know, I will never let somebody to cut off my freedom and I will never accept somebody telling me if I can go somewhere or not. It. It's just not how things are working for me personally, so I can support my country.

And I'm doing this in all the other ways, all the ways possible. But I was never seeing myself in the army. I was never seeing myself at the war. It's just not my thing.

And I can't be judged by my peers who are still living in Ukraine. I have friends who are at the war.

I have a lot of friends who died of the war or died because of the war, you know, and it's Tough for everyone, for every one of us. But I don't agree with that.

Right now in Ukraine, you basically have two options as a male person, 18 to 60 years old, to go to prison or to go to the war if you're healthy enough. 18 to 60, wow. Yeah. So literally, if I will go back home right now, I'll go to prison, most likely.

And I don't think it's the way it should be, you know, so just because it's. Because somebody thinks it is. So for me personally, both is not an option.

So that's why I made my decision, which is tough, believe me, I paid enough for it. I mean mentally. So, yeah, that's how I kind of everything I had there, because I understood that there's no way and started from the ground up.

When you crossed, when you crossed into Poland, you didn't, you didn't speak any Polish, did you?

No, absolutely not.

That's why we brought Kevin on.

So.

You can practice your swear words that you learned. It's the first words you learn in another language. Right.

Is the swear words basically for me the time now? No, but. Are you, Kevin, from Poland?

My family is Polish. Yeah.

So I'm loving for Polish.

Ah, jindobre. Yes.

No.

Yeah, I don't speak that much Polish, but I could, I learned a lot. I don't know.

So maybe we can switch back to English because we've just, we've just exposed one of Kevin's flaws.

But yeah, my father was from Poland and he taught us a little bit when I was a kid, but I, I don't really remember much of it.

Egor, you spoke Ukrainian and you turned up in Poland where you didn't speak the language. How long did it teach you? Sorry? How long did it take you to, to learn to communicate with people?

I think like two or three months or something.

But once again I got stuck in a super, super forgotten village in the middle of nowhere just because locals were super loyal and locals are very, very good people. So as soon as they found out that I'm Ukrainian, they just let me in to live in some wooden made shelter at the top of the mountain just for free.

So it was my only option to have any shelter basically because once again I had no sources to rent something or to like move. So. And yeah, I, I found myself there and it was a small village with two shops and one bar and one gas station and nothing else.

And mountains all around, like, I don't know, 40 kilometers. Mountains, mountains, mountains and Slovakian border. Yeah. So I was like an Alien there.

Like, literally, locals never have seen any foreigner in their village. Never. So everyone was very curious. When I came out to this shop or to the bar, it was the only place I could have a draft beer, which I really love.

Everyone was tending to speak to me, but they couldn't. And I never faced it. The people can understand absolute zero words from any other language.

I was speaking Ukrainian, Russian, Czech language, and English. I was trying to communicate with them, and it was zero success, Absolute zero. So I was really forced.

And, yeah, when people were later asking me when I learned myself to speak Polish, I'm answering in the bar because it's basically true. So I was literally sitting there trying to communicate with locals, and they were super fun. They were like open people.

You know, they were just curious, who am I? And how the hell I got there? But at the first stages, it was unsuccessful.

So they were trying to bring me some more beer and just to hug me a bit and just to continue the conversation. And I was meant, please, if you can, some other way. I just don't understand. Yeah.

And it took, like, two months for me to get to understand them and, like, one or two months more to start to talk to them.

So all of these guys, I mean, guys, they were 70 years old, locals in average who were in that bar for the last, like, 30 years, but they all became my friends. They're very good people, you know, lots of them. I can imagine they live their whole life over there without even visiting the closest big city.

I mean, big cities, Katowice, it's like. It's like small town, basically, but just people never even visiting that.

For me, it was pretty like, I was shocked, you know, but, yeah, there was a life there.

Like, it's. It's. It's hard to leave your home country and, you know, leave everything behind, literally. Like, leave everything, everything.

Like shoes and hats and sunglasses. Like you. You weren't traveling with a travel bag. But then it's also very hard to learn another language.

I mean, obviously, you know, nowadays you got duolingo, and someone can say to you, you know, if you want to know this word in Chinese, instead of saying hello, you say nihau. But I'm communicating with you in English to try and teach you a foreign language, which you had nothing. You didn't even have a frame of reference.

That would have been a hardship as well, trying to learn a language when they can't even communicate with you at all.

So, yeah, absolutely. Fortunately, Polish is a bit similar to Ukrainian, Right?

So, yeah, I could find some you know, some pieces to put up together, but still it's impossible for. For people in. In major cities like in Warsaw and of. If you're talking in Ukrainian, then they can understand you, like you can communicate.

But those people in mountains, not because they have even their separate dialect, like it's called. So it's like a different language. So. And this is dramatically different from Ukrainian.

So that was the problem, you know, and I really, I was shocked. How can they understand zero? But yeah, it was literally like that I was there like an. An alien somewhere in another like universe, you know.

So, yeah, yeah, it was tough. But you know, once again, it taught me a lot, a lot of things, and it changed me in a very positive way.

It was a toughest period, but at the same time, the best period, you know, for. Can you imagine? For the whole year, all of what I was doing is just walking around the mountains by myself all alone.

I don't have people to communicate to. I only could call my parents once in a while and basically that's it.

Kevin, did you know there was like mountain Polish and standard Polish?

I just learned that right now.

You should know. You should ask your father. The Beskidian mountains.

Totally different languages in the one country.

Four of them actually in Poland alone, as I found out later when I came to the major cities, I was to Krakow. Later they were asking me where the hell you learned yourself to speak Polish. I was telling in the region and they said it's wrong. Polish.

We are talking another way now. You have to alone once again.

Since you've had to learn and adapt and create change in your life. And to all the aspiring entrepreneurs listening to the podcast, what would you say your greatest lesson is? And how.

How can you say to people you know from your experiences, help them where they are?

You know what I found out for myself because once again, I had pretty much time to think. The crucial thing is to understand your inner motivation. What.

What drives you from the inside, you know, and it's personal for everyone, for all three of us. It may be the different things. What drives you, what makes you wake up in the morning? What's your own own motivation to do something?

So when I asked to myself about my motivation, everything started to like, put up together. So I just found out that basically I'm just curious. So I just understood that my, like, inner fire is curiosity.

And from that point everything started to make sense for me. So I am personally an explorer and like, I like to discover. So I just started to was.

I was just curious, like, even in that, in that period when I was just sitting in that wooden made house and talking about and doing nothing, I sort of became curious. Like yesterday I was walking that mountain, but today I can go there.

I'm just curious what's happened there with, you know, without doubts, without fears, with nothing. Just curious. And from that point on, I clearly understand that this drives me.

And in all of my project and everything I'm doing currently, curiosity comes first. Just curious. I'm just gonna try to do that. And I'm curious what, what will be the outcome? You know, I'm not afraid of something bad to happen.

I'm just curious. Yeah, for everyone, it can be personal.

Exactly. And I think from that it's really know, know yourself. Right.

I find a lot of entrepreneurs, and myself included, you really got to figure out what you're good at and bad at. Mental acuity and capacity. You know, it's really hard to do the hard things.

And if you're not the person to do the hard things, then don't do the hard things. You know what I mean? I learned that the hard way.

You know, I could go shovel a mountain down with a shovel, but when it comes down to, you know, making hard decisions around giving up control or taking a step back or as a founder, you know, you fall in love with your business and project.

And the best thing that I've learned in my career and, you know, I've lost, you know, about a million dollars not making this decision at the right time is get out early and let other people run your business. You know what I mean? You don't want to be the operator. You don't want to sit there and try to do it.

Our jobs as founders is to think of the idea and then find someone to run it.

Because if you want to run it, you're gonna be working a 40 hour job, your wife's gonna hate you, you're gonna take a, you know, you're take a mental. You're gonna lose yourself in the project.

And, you know, my biggest thing that I learned, and I ask Jeremy the same thing to you is, you know, the biggest lesson I've learned is simply, you know, know yourself, because if you think you can do something, you know, I've renovated and built houses and buildings by myself, but, you know, I've always messed it up on trying to, you know, get myself out of the equation because I fall in love with it.

I'm like, this is my baby, my vision, you know, but really, if you're in love with a project, you're not in love with yourself and you're not in love with your wife. You know, that's just what it comes down to, you know.

Yeah, 100%.

Jeremy, what about you?

I'm just, I'm just loving the curiosity. Like, you know, I can see Egor's brain, the desire to learn new things like leaving your home country, going to another country, learning a language.

You know, I would have gone absolutely Cracker Jacks not being able to communicate with another human being. Like I would have been asking these guys like, can I use your phone to talk to someone in my language?

Can we connect up to the Internet so at least I could talk to someone in English or something like that. It's, it's very difficult. But you just embraced all these challenges and just something new, something new, something new.

I'm going to learn a new language, I'm going to explore this new area. What the hell, I'm going to start a new business and try and help other people as well. So it's mad respect, man. It's fantastic.

Thanks a lot. But that's literally how it went, literally.

And you cannot even imagine my happiness when the first time I met an English speaking person there in these mountains, like maybe four months after I got stuck there just walking on the mountain, I saw the guy who became my good friend Sebastian. He was serving in army in Britain because of the natto, some trainings or something.

So he was living in Britain for seven years and he was really good. The only guy over there in the whole area. I was talking in English when I first hear it, I was, no way.

I was like, man, please, please come over here. Definitely have things to discuss.

So how many languages can you speak now? Eagle?

I'd like to say five, but basically I would say four and a half. Because when I finished the school I went to Czech. I was living in Prague in Czech Republic and I was studying there for the whole year.

I was about to enter the university so I learned Czech language. But the tricky thing is I wasn't never practicing after like it was 15 years ago or something.

And then I learned Poly Polish and now when I came to Czech once again I was trying to talk to locals in Czech but it turned out to be Polish so I forgot. Czech language replacement happened.

Wow.

So four, let's say Ukrainian, Russian, Polish and English. And now I'm learning Spanish so I'm living in Spain and I learned in Spanish.

Fantastic.

And then another question for you. Relative to the crypto world, are there any projects or things that you're certainly excited about.

In the crypto world in general. Yeah, only Eubank.

So how do people buy your token? How do they learn more about your project later?

We didn't issue our token currently, but we will implement a lot of web3 elements into our technology such as NFT. But not for buying some things as an NFT, but for coding your personal discount program as a unique token to every wallet.

We're going to code the sub wallet thing as an NFT as a piece of code. So this will guarantee that this wallet, how to say it belongs to this particular user? Right. Our talking gonna come later.

Once again, I cannot publicly discuss it yet, but later. But how can they buy it? Just usually we're gonna list it on some exchanges because we know a lot of them and we are working with a lot of them.

It's important to mention that we have another business and operational core businesses when we are helping people to create fintech projects for themselves worldwide. So we are helping to buy and sell financial licenses and to connect them to proper Rails, both crypto and fiat worldwide.

So we just know how to construct it properly. So to list our token for us on some exchange, it's absolutely not a problem.

Yeah, that's great. And then relative to your life story in crypto, how did you. And when did you get into crypto? Slash Bitcoin.

So yeah, now I understand was a mistake.

Yeah.

And did you buy what important. No, no, no. Yeah, no, but important lesson is that that was my mistake. But why? Just because I didn't tend to dig deeper into the subject.

So if I took like one day to analyze the market, to analyze what is actually about 100,000%, I would have buy it instead of my new Mercedes or something. I would have buy bitcoin. But I just never took efforts to, you know, to analyze bitcoin. So I understood that mistake and I tried to recover it.

Yeah, and that's an important lesson to learn too is if you don't reflect on your mistakes.

And then the whole time, you know, when it went way up, I was like, oh, shit, what am I doing? You know?

And so, you know, you gotta, you gotta really take a step back and think about from a landed point of view, you know, reflect on your past and the mistakes you make. You know, the, the.

Absolutely.

The story of a. A sociopath is one that doesn't learn from their mistakes and makes the same mistakes in the future.

You know, I just recently broke my phone because I was when jogging in the rain and it totally got messed up. And then about. I got a brand new phone and about six days later I was taking a shower and I left the phone on the ground and it got wet again.

I was like, what an idiot. You know what I mean? I didn't learn my lesson. And now I have like a phone that like has like a little bit of water damage.

And so I was like, what am I doing with my life? I had to sit there for like an hour being like, why didn't I think about my mistake? You know what I mean?

And I think that is really something that is learned. The hardest way is that if you don't take action, right?

I've had so many times where I've had an opportunity to sell a business and I go, oh, what if it gets better? What if I get better offers? What if I get this?

I had a business I could have sold for about $1.2 million, and about a year later it was worth nothing. And you know, action is always the key element.

The most successful entrepreneurs I know, they sit there and they don't hem and haw, they just say yes. Because saying no is so easy. It reduces your cortisol, it reduces your stress.

You don't want to go ask that girl at the bar because it's easier to say no, you know, So I am unfortunate have lost a lot of money because I learned the cost of saying no. And I remember in my head I was like, oh, this is great. I'm in this space, you know, I'm like, with crypto. I was like, no, no, no, no.

It's too stressful.

And then when I finally said yes, I was already behind, you know, so it's always better to make a mistake and learn from it than say no and never learn, right? Do you have any in your life that are akin to that?

Where to start? A million and a half? I think.

Yeah, that's unfortunate. You know, I think, I think those mistakes become the lessons of your life. Right. Time is our most precious resource.

And as we need to learn quickly and adapt, the only way to do that is to say yes, right, Absolutely.

Yeah. Because otherwise you're reducing your chances to achieve anything. Because doing usual things, you will never achieve some special results.

You know, to achieve something, you need to do something unusual for yourself at the first stage.

And yeah, I remember when I was reading, I was reading some book, I don't remember the exact name, maybe like from good to great, probably, but I remember the quote from there. They were talking about some legendary sheep captain who was taking his ship through the extreme storm somewhere and the whole team survived.

It was like the whole story. So it was super dangerous, etc.

Etc.

And then he got interviewed and he said that the most important thing while you're the captain of the ship is to face the facts and face the reality. Even if it's very harmful and very bad. Right, Exactly. So I was thinking about this a lot while I was walking into the Polish mountains for a year.

I had a lot of time. So for me, I, I understand this is that no matter how bad situation is or good situation is, you never can distort it in your perception.

You always need to see clearly on the things.

So in your case, when you could sell your business for $1.2 million, yeah, you were most likely thinking that this is not the point, that probably it's gonna get better, blah, blah, blah. But I am pretty sure that if you, at that point, if you would think deeper and if you wouldn't lie to yourself, you, you, you probably could predict.

Is lying to yourself. You know what I mean?

It's very, that's the main problem.

It's very easy to lie to yourself.

And you know, at the time I was so busy doing operations and doing business and closing deals and running the business that I didn't give my time to think.

And you know, I lied to myself and saying like, oh, I think if I'm, if I, if I can do better, you know, we did this much this year, next year we're do greater. And by time two years goes by, we're going to have a $5 million business, right? And that is the least productive method of thinking.

You know, I believe that the two less greatest lessons I've learned and I've lost a lot of money because of this is that one, you need a board of directors to make managerial hard calls, right? Like as a operator, you're there running your business. But you need your investors to be your board of directors, right?

You need someone who can make those hard calls. Especially as a first time entrepreneur, you know, I've always been like, oh, I'm the guy, I can do this.

I don't want to give up control, I don't want to give up, you know, what I need to do. But you know, I think you're an idiot if you think you can do everything right.

And I am, you know, another business I was running, I didn't do that and then I didn't make the hard calls that need to be made, you know, about as a big real estate business. And you know, I basically made some of my investors, took too long on certain things, you know, and now you're in the hot seat, you know what I mean?

So as the general partner, you want to not ever be in the hot seat. You just want to run your business, do your, do good work, and then let others sometimes make good decisions.

And not that you need a board of directors, but if you do have investors, you know, a board of directors does protect you very much in all aspects of the business. Yo, you forgot to file taxes sometime. Oh, you forgot to send, you know, investor relations documents.

Oh, you forgot to, you know, talk about something in the business that you know, that you didn't disclose well enough because you're moving too fast. You know, that's not your job anymore, right?

Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense big time.

How many females on your team, Egor? The advisors or the board of advisors?

We currently have six, the co founders. There are three of us. We are all males. It just happened to be that way.

But yeah, now we are forming the board of female advisors who are experts in all the particular niches.

And later on we're gonna partnership with some women who are making products for women such as educational products or some advisory or HR or you know, all of these sectors. So we want to build in, into our application all the products made woman by woman for woman, let's say.

Nice.

So we just want to design that infrastructure and that ecosystem for this audience. But obviously we don't know how it should look like. Exactly.

That's why we're just proposing and getting feedbacks and on my interviews and taken online with women entrepreneurs, women in tech, in government, in communities, influencers. So I'm literally just gathering the feedback and that gives us an idea how to properly design the product. So we just Executioners, right?

Exactly. So on, on your company itself, what's the ratio of men to women?

Once again, as I Mentioned, let's say three men to six women. So basically the ratio is nice. But I don't, I'm not counting the developers team, there are five of them, all males, but they're developers.

I don't know if we can count them or not. They're like another reality.

Yeah. And then relative to your partners, you know what, how did you guys meet? How do you guys complement each other? What?

In what world, you know, do you guys work really well together? Love to hear, you know, the work ethic and synergies you guys, you guys do.

Yes, that's the thing.

When I was over there, at my Polish period of life, accidentally when I was in Krakow, through our mutual friend, I met that co founder of mine who is now my closest friend and partner and co founder accidentally just because they were passing by the city and he got me the call, I mean our visual friend got me the call and said we are here, let's meet. Like I don't know, have some beers and go for a walk, etc. So yeah.

And that evening we somehow found out that there is something, there is the synergy because we were, you know, exchanging our experiences and everything. So he said that he's in the banking for 18 years already. He's building the new companies, you know, so to do this and that, this and that.

And I said I, I have a banking degree as well and that I'm. I was always interested in but I had my own projects not related to banking before so. And after that he just said that let's have a project together.

Will you be the CEO and I will be the executioner like legal side and all of the structure. And I said yes, why not? So that's all started. It was to a bit more than two years ago.

It was one year after I lost everything and started the new life of myself. So I redeveloped myself completely and that particular meeting was like the starting point of current projects.

So I got involved in literally at one evening and then it got me to move to Spain because he was living there and I relocated to be closer, to have an ability to communicate more and more and more, you know, so that's all I started. From that point we started to develop and it's like ongoing process.

I'm going to throw a question out because there'll be women, women listening to this and saying okay, we've already got a business, we're already banking with, you know, Chase bank or XYZ Bank. Yeah, whatever. What's, what's going to be the attraction. Why should a woman Entrepreneur move her business to your bank just because of.

The community side, I think and just because of the design and just because of our focus on them, just because we're giving the attention to them. So I suppose there's like, you know, all the great things are easy things if you think about it, you know.

So basically just because we are designing it for them and nobody else is doing them. Still, even for me, some banking applications, I'm using a lot of them and they're extremely complicated, like I cannot find the proper thing.

It just works, I don't know how, it's just like crazy. So we are here to solve that, you know, we're here to give the usable, nice looking and fun product.

We don't want it to be the boring, cold school banking or something sort of things, you know, just wanted to look attractive, to be nice to use, you know. And I believe, it's my deep belief that that is how it should be, how it should look like, you know, all the great things.

You're using the iPhone, you're using it and buying it just because it's convenient to use. It's nice to keep it in hand, you know, it's nothing special. Android is like 100 times smarter than this thing, but still it's just nice.

And I believe this is the main principle, you know, so there's no some secret sauce like we don't want to pay to somebody to, you know, bring some client or something like. No, just want to tailor a perfect product.

Yeah.

And I believe that's the only option.

You mentioned before about education that you provide, is that education around crypto, Is that education about banking or running a business? What format does that come in?

We are now working on this. It's not ready fully but we're thinking currently is that educational programs on how to use Web3 and crypto, how to use AI tools.

We already have a partners who are doing that, who are running female communities on that topics. Pretty much like three or 4,000 members each and separately. Some business courses here, how to invest properly so that what I mean by educational.

So our main goal is that through educational product we want to empower women to learn them how to earn more out of existing tools of existing opportunities. They're out there but lots of people just don't know about them, you know.

And one of our missions is to explain them that crypto is a very useful thing and it's not scary and it's not 100% scam. You're not gonna lose your money if you Will buy USDT or Bitcoin or something, whatever.

So we think that we just need to educate people to show them an example and to give them the proper tools, especially when we are talking about our target audience. For them it's 90. Something scary, something out there. Something. Something distant and unclear.

I believe if we're gonna switch the perspective, first of all, we're gonna give them a very good tool to use because all of us now, we are, we know that this is a good thing, right? It's not a scam, it's useful.

So we want to explain our audience this and that's how we want to attract a new huge piece of audience into the web3 and crypto community.

For people out there, female people or male people.

If your bank is not educating you about blockchain, if your bank is not educating you about crypto, you start to worry that you're going to be left behind. It's like if your school didn't teach you about crypto computers, then you're going to be left behind.

Yeah, exactly.

So.

Exactly.

Fantastic. We. We need, we need to wind up. We've got a couple more minutes. We'll. We'll probably get one more, one more question out of Kevin.

But also you need to tell us where people can sign up. I'm assuming you, you also allow blokes to have a bank account or maybe not. Sorry, you, you allow, you allow men to have a bank account as well?

So far, yes. But I believe at some point we're gonna cut this option at all.

So if I've got a narrow window for the next 10 minutes, you can open up an account. Where do I go to open. Open an account?

Just easy. On our website, only youbank.com.

Only you with it. With a you. Not, not.

Why are you like you? As you see here on my logo.

There'S something listening on Spotify.

Ah, all right, all right, all right, all right. Sorry, I forgot it. Yeah, just U as a one letter U.

So O, N, L, Y, U, bank dot com.

Exactly.

Okay, Kevin, you got, you got a final question then wrap up for us, mate.

Yeah, just last question. Do you have any good book recommendations? What's your favorite book?

Oh, man. Business wise or just whatever? Just like literature.

Just business wise.

You know what? I was reading a lot. I was reading quite a lot of books on business and everything, but I don't remember them at all, to be honest.

Honestly, I mean, honestly, in my opinion, you cannot agree with me. I think reading business literature is nonsense. I think it's not Useful at all because once again, people are obsessed with this.

But there are a few ideas which you can come up to by yourself without reading these books. And you're not implementing this in your everyday life and in your business. Nobody's doing that. Okay.

People are reading this thinking that they will become the billionaires. Next day they're finishing. So I don't believe it's useful at some way, at some point to give you motivation or some basic knowledge.

If you're in your like mid-20s and thinking about going to the business and something, it might be useful. Yeah.

But for me personally, I do more appreciate the usually classic books, you know, and if you asking me about the recommendation, I will tell you that my absolutely favorite book of all times is Theodore Dreiser Trilogy of Desire. I was reading it in Russian.

I don't know if I translated this correctly, but this is the whole financist, titan and stoic, I believe like three books at one. Theodore Dries. This is an absolutely outstanding thing.

It's like a biopic on the guy who became the first richest guy in United States at the end of 19th century. He was a railway magnate. He built the half of Chicago and half of New York back in the days.

And just his life, I mean how he was thinking, how he was acting, how he was doing things, etc, etc, and is written so, so deeply that literally when I was reading this, that changed my mind a lot. That changed my perception big time, you know.

Yeah.

And I think that is useful.

Really awesome. And then to wrap it up, we appreciate you taking your time here. We're looking forward to following you as your company progresses.

If any investors are listening you, you are raising a seed round currently, correct?

A bit later we're gonna open the seed round. Yeah, that's correct.

So feel free to reach out to Egor about the seed round. Really intelligent individual, really takes life by the horns, so to say success in his own right, you know.

Seems like it would be a great thing to look at for any of our prospective listeners. And then finally, Jeremy, thank you so much for your time. This has been a great podcast. And signing off, I'm Kevin Wojton.

This is the Cryllionaire podcast.

Thank you, Egor Podkolzin. Apologies about that. Egor Podkolzin Kevin Wojton, Jeremy Britton, thank you very much. Very exciting story.

Rockstar Extreme sports pilgrimage through the mountains and now Only Ubank, the best bank for women entrepreneurs education and love it. Thanks very much, guys.

All right, thank you.

Thank you gents very much. Have a great one. Thank you really much for inviting me today.

Yes. Thank you, guys.