Because Oleg Golynker never stops. After his previous company's mind-blowing Nasdaq IPO, he started all over from the very beginning, as innovators and serial entrepreneurs are prone to do, and founded Trueli start-up, an app that seamlessly organizes your digital clutter into meaningful memories and exchanges them with people who you’re with in real life. You live your life. The app does the rest.
When asked what drove him to build Trueli, Oleg said “I’ve witnessed the birth of smartphones 15+ years ago and how easy they made taking photos. But this easiness has a nasty price tag attached. We capture and share thousands of photos each year and the more we do, the deeper our beautiful moments are buried in the digital chaos and forgotten. Trueli is here to make sure you never miss moments again - neither yours nor your friends’.”.
Most of the photos are lost in people’s cluttered galleries and messenger chats, while 90% of photos aren’t even worth sharing at all. And try to find them two years later? Forget about it. Imagine if you could go to a concert, a game, a birthday party with your family or friends, and your phone would create a shared memory from photos and videos taken by you and others without the need to select, send or beg to be sent? What if your phone gallery would contain only meaningful moments you want to relive? No documents, duplicates or nonsense? That's why Oleg Golynker, a veteran tech innovator has once again rolled up his sleeves to create and found Trueli.
After earning an applied mathematics degree in the 90s, the Russian born Trueli CEO moved to Israel and started his career as a web developer. With a lot of vision and some luck at the young age of 27, Oleg became CTO at a company. “It was at the peak of the dot-com bubble. The timing was good, and I happened to love that particular industry. So, I literally grabbed that opportunity with both hands. And the company went public on the Israeli stock Exchange in Tel Aviv.”
Not bad for starters, and while Oleg calls it luck, it was probably his savvy entrepreneurial intuition that told him to get out. “The dot-com bubble exploded, and that company was impacted. I started to really understand the business and realized this company wasn’t going anywhere, so I left and joined my first online and print media start-up as their co-founder and CTO.” Oleg’s next start-up, in sports media, was selected as one of the Top Three Israeli startups in 2007, but the 2008 Global Financial Crisis killed it.
Oleg’s visions and ideation couldn’t be contained, so he started one more, a contextual marketing product. He admits that he learned some painful lessons. “We had crazy traction but we didn’t capitalize on it.” Oleg adds with a chuckle, “We basically made all the top ten founder mistakes that you can find on Google. We checked all the boxes.”
Oleg was down but not out, and he was certainly wiser. He joined another start-up, a cross-border e-commerce solution provider called Global-e, in 2013 as their first hire and founding CTO. “The three founders started the company, and they managed to raise pre-seed funding pre-product, pre-CTO, pre-everything. It was just a PowerPoint presentation and a Word document. That's all they had. And obviously there were some adventurous angels who were behind it.” Oleg was given the task of taking that Word document and turning it into a product. “They gave me the keys, said ‘go ahead and drive, and it has to run by November. We have a deadline.’” Oleg got the keys in June.
Oleg took the challenge. “We hired a top notch team. We did it.” But as Oleg can vouch, the challenges were far from over. “I was very much involved in external facing technology, meaning globally. The product required deep integration with a merchant, with a client. So making it fully secure and light touch for the client was a make or break. We had to provide the required comfort that this new system would earn them the new business and that it wouldn’t screw up the existing one. I had to go one-by-one in-person to join the sales team for all the biggest tickets and explain how exactly it was going to help them and not mess anything up.” Oleg adds, “We had to make an extra effort to get them comfortable from a security perspective, from an operations perspective, from our business continuity and everything.”
While Oleg was given an almost impossible challenge, he managed to surprise everyone, including himself. “The early days with Global-e were tough, …from the first day I started with this crazy assignment, until the time when I left 7 years later.” But the company is a big success. It’s trading on Nasdaq and was valued around $12 Billion at peak so far. And he adds, “We are all still very good friends.”
Now, with Trueli, Oleg plans to utilize all the important lessons he has learned through his serial entrepreneurship. “The main lesson is to go raise money when you can. When you feel that the product is good enough, you have to try to speak with investors. Even if you don't raise money, they will push you to make all the necessary adjustments to make it fundable.”
That’s exactly what Oleg has done.
The second and third most important lessons that Oleg has learned on his journey is to invest in the product before you try selling anything (most people just misunderstand the respective lesson from ‘lean start-up’ books). And definitely don't hire the salesman before you manage to sell yourself. It's like the number one rule that I had to learn by myself.” He jokes, “I didn’t have Google to find out which mistakes not to make.”
Oleg Golynker’s entrepreneurial journey has had some setbacks amongst many successes which reflect his resilience, adaptability, and a relentless pursuit of important innovations. With experiences from the dot-com bubble to ventures with Global-e, Oleg brings a lot of wisdom to the Trueli start-up. The lessons learned underscore the importance of strategic fundraising, product investment, and personal conviction in entrepreneurial success. With Trueli, Oleg not only fills a crucial gap that exists in digital memories, which we can’t wait to learn more about, but it also puts a shiny gold medal on his entrepreneurial endeavors.
To find out more about bringing your memories to life, go to Trueli.
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