Tell us about yourself?
Serial entrepreneur having founded or joined in the very early stage 7 companies. Currently leading Flieber, a supply-chain tech company that is transforming the way retail operates.
What do you think is the single biggest misconception people have when it comes to startups?
People usually think that the more capital raised, the more chance of success you have. And that is fundamentally wrong. Scarcity is the mother of creativity and excess capital is a distraction that leads you into making bad decisions.
If you could go back in time to any moment from your journey, and give yourself one tip, what would it be?
Hold hiring as much as possible. The more people in the team, the more management complexity you have. And the more management complexity, the more distractions you have, which results in slower releases.
People usually think that adding a person to the team will add speed, but many times the opposite happens.
What makes you stand out as an entrepreneur?
My experience having built successful companies in the past. The amount of mistakes I made and lessons I learned along the way is certainly a huge competitive advantage.
What are some of the best working habits you’ve gained over the past couple of years?
The single most important one is the concept of letting fires burn. As an entrepreneur, you have to wear multiple hats and you’re all the time with many fires burning all over the place.
Choosing the right ones to put out and learning to live with the fact that others will keep burning is the most important lesson for any entrepreneur.
Give us a bit of an insight into the influences behind the company?
Seven years ago, I learned that online retail was only 8% of total retail in the US. That blew my mind and I decided to get involved in this industry.
After operating an e-commerce company for a few years and seeing that 80% of my time was spent solving inventory-related issues (relationship with factories, delays in production, booking of vessels, tracking of shipments etc.), I understood that inventory would be at the center of all complexities in retail moving forward.
Where do you see your business in five years?
Continuing its growth pattern and becoming more and more a standard platform for any e-commerce company. Also, increasing the participation in the offline retail space.
What do you think the biggest challenge will be for you in getting there?
Supply-chain has been historically neglected in terms of technology investments, which forced each retail company to develop their own internal systems and processes.
Operating in such a fragmented industry is by far our biggest challenge, as we have to integrate with heterogenous systems to collect data.
Talk to us about your biggest success story so far?
We’re solving a very complex and we had to start with a very simple solution, tailored to smaller retailers.
Moving from that to being able to serve companies selling $1B+ in only 3 years is certainly an amazing achievement.
This path taught us a lot about the power of fast releases with fast iterations to build something big.
How do clients and customers find you? Are you much of a salesperson for yourself?
Our main source of leads is referrals from current customers, but we also get leads from people to bump into our website (https://flieber.com) coming from different sources.
In parallel, we have a sales team focused on lead generation to go for target accounts.
What one tip would you give to fellow startup founders?
Persevere. Most companies that don’t succeed only fail because they didn’t persevere for enough time to make it successful.
In the end of the day, most businesses are feasible and it’s only a matter of perseverance until you’re able to make them work.
And finally, what do you hope the future brings both you personally, and your business?
I hope to continue founding business until the day I die.
The feeling of contributing to make people’s lives easier is very satisfying and is certainly my main addiction.
