Hi. I’m Roman. Nice to meet you.

Hi there!

I’m Roman Grigoriev, Hustler in Chief at Splento.

If you are Splento’s current or potential:
– client
– employee
– investor
– stakeholder
– supplier
– or even competitor

You may be interested to know more about the person who runs the company.

I am – what they call – a serial entrepreneur. Just as boxing is in the blood for Joe Frazier, entrepreneurship is part of my DNA.

I have set up and co-founded numerous businesses in the past 17 years. Some were destined to fail – like selling Oxygen (don’t ask!). Others were profitable, but unscalable – like the mobile apps development studio RevelMob, which I closed a few years ago.

A couple of businesses are still going concerns and don’t require any of my time (Prime Central London property agency LonGrad and Estonia’s largest language school AtlasNet).

Two companies I inadvertently ran into the ground due to lack of startup and management experience (pan-European Groupon-like voucher-site Rewel.Net and gaming studio GuessMate).

If you have plenty of time on your hands, you can get a good idea of what makes me tick from various interviews (including BBC & ITV), but to save you time searching through hundreds of links and photos online trying to understand who Roman Grigoriev is and what makes him tick, I’ll lay it all out here, so all of us are literally and metaphorically on the same page.

In my view you only need to know 7 key factors to develop a clear picture of who I am. Not a full picture, but a picture clear enough to make an educated evaluation.

1) Efficiency, Productivity & Data:

I care deeply about my efficiency. I don’t do social media, computer/mobile games, TV, general (non-business specific) news, as I feel they all are an unnecessary drain on my productivity.

Furthermore, I love data. I really do. And when you analyse how much of your valuable time all these activities take – you may decide to stop doing them, too.

Paraphrasing M. Edwards Deming – my maxim is – “In Her Majesty we trust, everyone else must bring data”. I track and analyse whatever’s possible both in personal life and business.

2) Team & A-Players:

I used to believe that you can solve any problem with people. Then I changed my mind. I fell in love with processes. Then I changed my mind again.

Truth be told, if facts are compelling enough, I’ll change my mind in a heartbeat.

These days I’m rock-solid confident that success in business comes from having the right people with the right skill set (A-Players) in the right job at the right time for the business problem that exists.

In simpler terms: success = (A-team) x (processes) x (strategy) x (market conditions)

3) Honesty, Integrity and Reputation:

I took to heart Warren Buffett’s maxim “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it” when I was very young, and have lived by it ever since.

4) Financial Prudence:

You may call it “stingy”, but I call it “financially prudent”. I don’t buy fast cars or expensive watches. I reinvest everything I make.

It holds true for both my personal and business finances.

5) Sport & Health:

I’ve been blessed with friends & family who are very active and tend to eat healthily.

On top of that I love sports and am crazy about running. I run marathons with a PB of 2:53:41. 7 hours a week of strenuous exercise is the norm, but I wish I could do more.

6) Family, Friends & Work/Life Continuum:

I love my family and friends, but I also love my work. I don’t believe work and home represent some kind of a zero-sum game and one should exclude the other.

For me work and home are parts of the same continuum, but I don’t multitask. I work and rest in focused sprints.

When I’m doing work (whether in the office, at home or on holiday) – I’m 100% in. When I’m with my family, say, playing with my daughter (whether in the office or at home) – I’m 100% in.

7) Lifelong Learning:

I love being the dumbest person in the proverbial room… because I get to learn. I love learning, but I don’t learn for learning’s sake.

To get maximum satisfaction from lifelong learning, I need to apply what I’ve learned, which means on most occasions I tend to study work-related stuff, not general academic knowledge. You may be surprised by my outright dim-wittedness when it comes to celebrities and trivia.

That’s about it. However, if you think you still don’t know me, feel free to read through all my posts under the CEO Letter series – they’ll give you a much clearer picture.

Beyond the Wall

Investor Feedback

The 10x Value Proposition

Please stop saying: “It won’t work”

What you sell and what your clients buy – are two very different things

Freudian definition of a great investable business

Please don’t ask: “What do we need money for?”

The tale of Splento’s Obsession with Numbers

Investors are like London buses

Smartphones revolutionized how to get from A to B

We don’t learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience

A Nifty Trick to Manage Stress