Co-Founder @ Stan | building a $BN company 🚀

Hi, I’m Vitalii 👋🏻

Over the past 3 years, I’ve built a $30M ARR business with 30 people.

A $1M/employee company.

Now, we’re building a category-defining brand—with $100M ARR in sight.

To do that, I focus on Culture, People, and Product.

Everything that got me here is self-taught.

Born and raised in Russia, I started working at 13—packing parachutes and skydiving. 🪂
By 18, I had 800+ jumps and enough saved to pay for my first year of college.

Jumping out of planes redefined my relationship with fear.
Once you commit, you act. Without hesitation.

I learned English in one year to study abroad—still the hardest thing I’ve done.
That brought me to Canada, where I earned a degree in Chemical Engineering.

I never used it.

My side projects opened doors for me—first to Deloitte, then to eBay.
But the real work happened outside the job.

I made time to build:
9–5 for the paycheck,
5–9 (both morning and night) for what I actually cared about.

That’s where I proved to myself—nothing is impossible.

In 2021, I met my cofounder. We went all-in and started building Stan.

On my LinkedIn, I write about:

→ Founder war stories (unfiltered)
→ Building a $1M/employee startup
→ Creating top 1% culture

🎧 Follow me here if you're building—or want to build—something great.

People I work with would describe me as:

→ I make things happen
→ Zero tolerance for mediocrity
→ I build and run top 1% talent-density teams

🫂 DM me on LinkedIn if you'd like to work at Stan.

But know—it’s likely to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done.
And worth it. For the right person.

—

On LinkedIn, I share stories for founders building what’s next—
The ones who care about People, Culture, and Redefining what's possible.

If that’s you,
Follow me. Drop a comment. Or just say hi 👋🏻

Vitalii Dodonov

I spent $204,000 to take the whole team to Costa Rica.

→ Travel (Flights & Bus): $103,000 
→ Hotel & Food: $89,000 
→ Offsite Planner: $12,000

Total Investment: $204,000 
($4,163 per person)

That’s a lot of money to spend on "vibes" and gallop tours 🇨🇷

But here’s why we do it:
I treat offsite trips as a productivity accelerator.

By spending $204K to build deep trust and clear 6 months of roadmap debt in 4 days,
I'm catalyzing our execution speed.

If this offsite increased our efficiency by even 10% over the next year for every individual team member, our team-ROI is easily 10x+.

Offsites is one of the many vehicles we use to invest in our most valuable asset:
People.

I give Credit Cards to my team on Day 1.

"Isn't that risky?”

It’s risky. And frankly very expensive…
But here’s what’s more expensive:

→ An engineer losing flow state because they are hungry
→ A designer missing details because their screen is low-res
→ A PM waiting 48 hours for a $50 software license approval
→ A team member waiting for a bus in the snow after a late night grind

I remember working out of a shared WeWork.

Uncomfortable chairs. Fighting for meeting rooms. Fast food.

Scrappy and frugal is in our DNA.

Now:
✅ Standing desks (Health)
✅ Free lunch & dinner (Focus)
✅ Unlimited Bubbly & protein bars (Fuel)
✅ Discretionary spending (Autonomy)

We don't do this to be "cool."

We do this because top 1% performance requires top 1% support.

You can't expect Ferrari speed if you provide Corolla maintenance.

Invest in your team.

undefined undefined

Alina Antoniuk

I just gotta share this... I mean... Jonathan, what are you doing!?? And why is building security calling us… and you asked for 30 extra seconds? 🤦‍♂️

$20,000. 60 hackers. We hired 4 of them on the spot, and filmed the whole thing! LIVE 🟢 on YouTube:

https://lnkd.in/dtMd7sys

We went from $5M in the bank to under $1M in two years.

On purpose.

Every entrepreneur needs to get extremely comfortable with losing money.

For us, the lesson came after raising venture capital.

We made an uncompromising commitment to hire the top 1% and build a category-defining brand.

This meant watching our bank account shrink over a year and a half.

I still remember the day I pinged John: 

V: "Guess what - we're at $827K and didn't lose any cash this month!" 
J: "Years in the making. Upwards from here."

It takes a lot of belief and conviction to invest this way, as opposed to optimizing for safety.

The reality is, for you to have a disproportionate upside, you need to create disproportional value.

And that's expensive: technology, R&D, talent. 
80% of our costs were purely talent.

Losing money before you make money is the price of being in the game.

Having done it once, I have a lot more appreciation for the process. 
And significantly fewer worries.

What's the biggest bet you've made on your company?

Hanging out with Liz Nucci today who got us our beautiful office 🏡. If you’re looking for office space in Toronto, call Liz! 

Just saying 👀

No alternative text description for this image

I’m having a wonderful time at BrainStation tonight!

I waited 3 years for a top 1% mobile engineer.

Not because we couldn’t hire.

Because I refused to hire a “maybe” and call it progress.

For 3 years, we could’ve “just shipped something” on mobile. 

We passed on several candidates who were good on paper… but weren’t a clear yes.

I kept coming back to one filter:
If this person can’t take what we built and make it 10x better, they’re not going to change the company.

So we waited.

Then we met Johan.

He built the entire mobile app solo.

When we launched, we got 500 five-star reviews in 2 weeks.

That’s the part people see.

What they don’t see is what we avoided: months of “management work” disguised as building—

Rewriting specs, re-scoping tickets, adding layers of process so a hire can keep up.

That’s how teams get slow. 

Not from lack of effort—standards quietly dropping.

Lesson I keep relearning: talent density isn’t a vibe. It’s a strategy.

Where in your org are you accepting a “maybe” (role, project, decision) just to feel progress?

Yesterday, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang made it free for any company to build AI agents. Here’s what that actually means:

He announced NemoClaw — the enterprise version of OpenClaw, the open-source operating system for AI agents.

He also named what’s coming: ASAAS. Agentic Software As A Service. OpenClaw won’t kill SaaS — it’ll create a new category.

The “A” in ASAAS is the hard part.

At Stan, we’ve been working on AI agents for over a year. The technology was never the bottleneck. Teaching the AI what “good” looks like in your business — that was the bottleneck.

NVIDIA just commoditized the easy part. The hard part is still hard.

The companies winning at ASAAS in 2027 won’t be the ones with the best plumbing.

They’ll be the ones who spent 2025-2026 doing the boring work of encoding domain expertise into their agents.

What was the first thing your company successfully taught AI? (or planning to?)

⚠️ ⚠️ If you're an engineer, now is the worst time to quit your job.

I know. Everyone's saying the opposite.

AI makes it so easy to build. Ship an app in a weekend. Be your own founder.

But here's what the "go build your own thing" crowd isn't thinking about:

Yes, you'll see success stories. 

But for every one that works, there are hundreds who shipped the same weekend. 

The barrier to entry dropped for everyone at the same time. 

More builders, more competition, lower odds for all of them.

And the question is still the same question it's always been: who has distribution?

Distribution, customer trust, brand — these are built over years of compounding. 

They live in the human relationship world that AI hasn't touched. 

Companies hold that. Your side project doesn't.

Sure, your app might launch well. 

Maybe you make a few thousand dollars. 

Then it gets duplicated by your friend over the weekend, and you're left without the job and without the revenue.

If you've been thinking about going out on your own — do it. 

Just not right now.

Don't be impulsive in the middle of a revolution.

"I'm sorry, I f*cked up" 

This was my opening line at our leadership offsite last March.

Standing in front of all 8 leaders at Stan, 

everyone paid attention.

If I was to rate my relationship with everyone in the room, 

these would be my scores:

🟢🟡🟠🔴🔴🟠🔴🟡
(relationship health check: you get the picture)

6 months earlier...

I took on 2x more responsibilities at the company. 

As a result of this crushing workload, I had to prioritize and remove everything that wasn't mission critical.

One of the things I sacrificed was weekly 1:1s with my direct reports,

delegating them to my Chiefs of Staff.

I reasoned that most people I'd been working with for years and we'd manage.

What a mistake it was.

What I failed to see at the time was that the company ran on shared context established in those 1:1s.

Leadership runs on two things:
• Trust
• Shared context

Remove either one, and it's a matter of time before everything breaks.

That's what happened to me.

It took me the following 1-3 months to rebuild what I'd lost — to rebuild the relationships and rescope my work.

Some scars are still itching.

If you're a leader at your busiest time, I'm sharing this story to remind you:

Your company is a group of people working toward a shared objective.

Prioritize people so they can prioritize the shared objective. 

It doesn’t work the other way around.

We took an AI product from $0 to $10,000 MRR in 14 days 📈

I documented our process in full, from the initial build to the specific growth tactics we used to hit that $10k milestone in two weeks.

Sharing the 19-page Playbook today.

Follow + comment “PLAYBOOK” below and I’ll DM you the complete breakdown.

You're probably working on the wrong things right now.

Does this sound like you?

100 emails sent.
5 meetings run.
1 new initiative started.

Every day feels full, but every week you go:
"What did I do?"

What's the difference between moving forward and running in circles?
Well — direction.

Motion without direction is just expensive wandering.

To help with that, I've adopted this habit:

Every morning, before opening Slack, I ask myself:

"What would I do if I could only work 2 hours today?"

"What moves us closer to $100M ARR?"

"Is this urgent, or just loud?"

I'm serious - I tend to ignore 8/10 of the inbound I get, (even from my teams).

Sorry y'all I know you're reading 😅

5 minutes of thinking saves 5 hours of wandering.

Now when I journal, it's not about what I did.

It's about whether what I did actually mattered.

Most founders act too much and think too little.

We confuse being busy with being productive.

The best talent I've hired all share this trait:
They pause before they sprint.

What would you stop doing if you could only work 2 hours?

Price isn't just revenue. 
It's a filter.

For customers. 
And for your team.

Early at Stan, we picked $29/month. 

No deep methodology. We just wanted to feel premium.

Then we had to live up to it.

That meant obsessing over the first 100 customers. 

Fixing bugs on the call. 
Shipping overnight.

Pricing sets expectations. 
Expectations force standards. 

And standards attract a certain type of person.

Builders lean into hard problems. 

Bargain hunters lean into discounts and exceptions.

Same principle applies to talent.

Last month, I ran a hackathon with a $20,000 grand prize. 

It got the top 1% of builders out of the house.

4 hires. 2 days. No resumes.

We don't price based on cost. 
We price based on value.

What's one thing you'd price differently today?

Headcount doesn't fix slow execution. 

Clarity does.

When execution slows, the reflex is: 
"We need to hire."

Most of the time, you don't have a people problem. 

You have a clarity problem.

Here's what I did:

I used to take meetings all day. Felt productive. Wasn't.

Now I auto-decline everything before lunch. 

7 hours of deep work. Zero interruptions.

One calendar rule deleted dozens of daily decisions.

Speed is subtraction.

List your recurring weekly decisions. 
For each one, choose:

→ Delete it. 
→ Delegate it. 
→ Automate it. 
→ Assign a DRI (directly responsible individual).

We used to debate tool purchases in Slack. 

Now everyone gets a $5K card. Decision deleted 🤷‍♂️

Less flexibility upfront. 
More speed downstream.

What decision could you delete this week?

In 1846, astronomers had a problem.

Uranus was wobbling in space.
And nobody could explain why.

Every calculation said it should move one way.
But it moved another.

Most scientists thought Newton's laws were breaking down at that distance.

But Urbain Le Verrier, a French mathematician, had a different idea:
"What if there's another planet pulling on it?"

He spent months calculating where this invisible planet would need to be.

Then wrote to Berlin Observatory:
"Point your telescope here. You'll find a new planet."

They thought he lost it...
But they looked 🔭

Neptune was sitting there.
Exactly where the math said it would be.

Le Verrier discovered a planet using only pencil and paper.
2.7 billion miles away.

I think about this whenever we're stuck at Stan.

When something doesn't make sense, we work backwards.
There's always a hidden force.

We just have to calculate where to look.

What's wobbling in your business that you can't explain?

Creator Partnerships Manager @ Stan | Non-linear Career Advocate | No Longer in Retail, but can Still Rock a Fit 😎

From thinking I'd be an ACCOUNTANT to helping Creators build 6-figure businesses — my career path looks like me trying to draw a snowman blindfolded 😅

For real though, I spent YEARS forcing myself into boxes that didn't quite fit:

⚖️ Accounting (sorry papa, I tried 😭)
🧩 Project Management (Gantt Charts? ehhhhhhh)
🏢 Traditional corporate path (the voices in my head sounding like Shia LaBeouf: JUST DO IT!!!)

Plot twist: Every "detour" on the side was actually leading me to exactly where I needed to be.

👖 Those retail jobs at lululemon and Saint Laurent? Taught me the POWER of genuine connection
📱 The content creation at Alexander Wang? Sparked my obsession with the creator economy.
💜 Starting off in customer support at Stan? Changed my entire LIFE trajectory.

Today, I'm a Creator Partnerships Manager at Stan(Shoutout to my mama for advocating the relationship management path).

Now I get to witness MAGIC every single day:

🙆🏻‍♀️ Women teaching others how to conquer binge eating
👔 Finance Bros selling their budget templates
🎨 Creatives selling their art across the globe

I've spoken to hundreds of Creators and witnessed every single one of them create a life they were truly meant to live by starting their own business leveraging their expertise. 

What lights me up:
✨ Helping creators realize their "weird" passion is their million-dollar idea
🗣️ Talking/Yapping (catch me at Re:Create Summit 2025, Sep 6th!)
🧥 Fashion babyyyyyyy - still bringing the fits from my retail days
💪 Anddd movement, I hate sitting still, enough said

My journey in a nutshell: Trad. mindset of School to Corporate path ->Luxury Retail → Customer Support → Creator Partnerships

The lesson: Your path doesn't need to make sense to anyone but YOU

If you're feeling lost, pivoting careers, or think your skills are "random" — we should definitely chat! I've been there, and I promise those breadcrumbs are leading somewhere beautiful 🥹

Let's connect and share war stories about non-traditional paths 🤝

P.S. Yes, I still rock my fits at Stan, so don't you think you'll catch me wearing any Patagonia 🫵 😤

Jonathan Tsugawa

early day bathroom crash out, but make it a fit check

Your outfit already started a conversation before you even said a word 👀

People don't realize this.

The right fit doesn't just look good, but it PULLS people in.

I'm talking about that outfit where someone walks up to you at an event and goes:

"Okay, I HAVE to know where you got that jacket."

Or they're staring from across the room trying to figure you out.

That's not luck. That's INTENTION.

When you dress with personality, you're basically wearing a conversation starter. You're giving people a reason to approach you. A reason to be curious.

It's like your clothes are doing the networking FOR you 😂

Here's what I've noticed:

→ Generic outfits = generic interactions
→ Bold fits = people WANT to know your story

Because when you show up looking like you actually THOUGHT about what you're wearing? 

It signals something deeper.

Confidence. Creativity. Someone who's not afraid to stand out.

And that energy? It's magnetic.

You don't need designer everything. You don't need to follow trends.

You just need to wear something that makes YOU feel like THAT person.

The one who walks in and the room notices.

What's a piece in your closet that always gets people talking? 👇

I've always trusted the flow.

Lululemon → Saint Laurent → Alexander Wang → Stan

Every move felt right. I didn't overthink it. Fate would strike and I'd just GO.

But lately? I'm questioning EVERYTHING.

Maybe it's because I'm 27 now. Maybe it's that voice in my head saying "you need to get SERIOUS about your trajectory."


I don't like it.

I feel constricted. Like I have to make the "right" moves now or I'll fall behind.

The weird part is I KNOW this pressure isn't healthy. I know going with the flow has literally worked for me my entire career.

But knowing that doesn't make the feeling go away.

So here I am. In the messy middle. Not lost exactly, but definitely not as certain as I used to be.

No clean takeaway. Just the truth of how I'm feeling.

Anyone else feel that shift from "I'll figure it out" to "wait, should I have figured it out by now"? 👇

when life throws you curveballs and you’re in a rush to get ready, just wear your favourite pieces and GO

the bathroom has become my safe space, so why not make it a fit check too

Someone told me to take a breather.

Zoom out. Reconnect with friends and family. Find that passion for life again.

At first I was like... nah I'm good. I got things to DO.

But then I sat with it. And I realized something.

I've been running the same routine for so long that I forgot to ask myself WHY.

Wake up. Work. Scroll. Sleep. Repeat.

No wonder I've been feeling stuck 😅

So I'm disrupting my own life right now.

Restructuring my days. Trying new things. Actually making time for the people who matter.

Not because I have it all figured out. But because I WON'T figure it out if I keep doing the same thing over and over.

Sometimes you gotta break the pattern to see clearly.

→ New morning walks instead of jumping straight into emails
→ Saying yes to random plans with friends
→ Actually sitting with the question: what do I WANT?

It's uncomfortable. I'm not gonna lie.

But it's also the first time in a while I've felt like I'm searching for something instead of just... going through the motions.

Maybe clarity doesn't come from grinding harder.

Maybe it comes from creating space for it to show up.

What's one thing you've changed recently to shake up your routine? 👇

taplio

The Battle

Vitalii Dodonov

Jonathan Tsugawa

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreVitalii Dodonov's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreJonathan Tsugawa's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Vitalii Dodonov

Jonathan Tsugawa

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Vitalii Dodonov's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreJonathan Tsugawa's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreVitalii Dodonov's LinkedIn Performance