Julian: Hey everyone, thankyou so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have YegorSak co-founder at Windscribe and Control D Windscribe is a leading internetsecurity and privacy company. Control D is a DNS filtering and productivity platform.Yegor is so exciting to not only to chat with you about your experience as afounder, but also the products that you're working on are so interestingbecause, I think , they not only serve, a, a purpose in, in terms of, theability to access information and, and do you know what normal people want todo, the freedom to to access that without, as you, I'm sure you'll extract the,the, I guess, boundaries and, and I guess bad actors that we face in theinternet.

But before we get into all. You've mentionedin the show notes before the episode that you have this backyard bunker. Whatis going on with this backyard bunker? Tell me a little bit about the thingthat you've created.  

Yegor: Yeah. Well, yeah.Yeah. Thanks for having me. I look forward to our chat. Yeah, I mean the, Iguess that that's an interesting way to start off.

Yeah. Chat, I mean, yeah. The, thebackyard bunker. That was a little project that myself and another wellco-founder of, of Windscribe that we did before Windscribe even existed. Sowhat we did was I bought a shipping container and then we've kind ofretrofitted it from the inside out, like all, all the way, on the inside,reinforced it on the outside in the process, learned a lot of trades,everything from, welding to drywalling, to attaching carpets to the ceiling,like all kinds of stuff.

It was like a pretty wacky, wacky thing.The only thing we wouldn't do was the electrical. and that's basically what,what doom did in the end. Perfect. I, I, yeah. I live in an area where there'sa lot of groundwater and I actually get water from the ground. I have waterwell at home, right? I'm up to any city.

So in the springtime, there's a lot ofmelt water and what ended up happening is basically the whole thing gotflooded.  

Julian: No man.  

Yegor: Yeah, no, there werecontingencies in place cuz we expected that to be the case. There were, therewere multiple pumps that were going to pump the water out. However, the primarypump failed and I didn't notice it in time.

So by the time the backup pump ran outof batteries because the backup was battery operated, the whole thingflooded.  

Julian: Oh man. Is it stillthere?  

Yegor: I can't confirm ordeny that cause the, the city wanted me to get it out.  

Julian: Well, we won't askanymore questions about it, but that's a, that's an amazing story.

And tell us a little bit about what youwere doing before you started Windscribe?

Yegor: All right. So I mean,I, I've been doing all kinds of stuff before Windscribe. Like, I mean, if westart, real early, in the early two thousands, I was quote unquote a webmasterof a whole bunch of websites that I've, built and operated, one, one personoperation.

You come up with an idea, you make it,you host it, hopefully someone visits, and then you can put up some ads. Imean, that was pretty much the only way to, to monetize at that point. sincethen I've graduated to doing. Not doing rather operating a software developmentcompany for a while.

Yeah. Building other people's ideas. Butthen I kind of got sick of it, just working on other people's projects anddecided, hey, I should probably do something on my own again. And came to beabout a year later.  

Julian: Yeah. , yeah. Uh,General interesting in terms of, building other people's ideas and that wholeprocess, because I've, I've seen it from the other lens, when founders come to,my company and, and because we, we connect founders with developer talentthere's a lot of intricacies that either go really well with, with, working witha team of people who develop a product and things that you know, may not gowell and then there's a lot of debt that's accrued during that whole process.

How do you kind of, work with foundersand work with other companies building those products to make sure that notonly are you reaching or, or building what they're expecting or, or whatthey're looking for but also that the whole build kind of goes successful and,and can transition maybe into an internal team.

How, how do you go through that buildingprocess with the founding?  

Yegor: Right. Well, I mean,that, that was a long time ago and I honestly, I hated every single moment ofit, so I'm not sure I, I could give you any kind of like, good insights onthat. I. , you, you want to be able to like fully understand what the hellyou're building and ideally you wanna kind of like build it for yourself,right?

Yeah. As if you are gonna be using it.If, if you're building a product that you intend to use yourself you have amuch higher chance of succeeding. Yeah. Whether it's it's a contract job forsomeone else or whether you're working on your own startup. Right. I think alot of people kind of like develop things like, oh, this will be useful tosomeone, but they themselves are not that someone, and that usually results ingarbage being built that no one really wants to use.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. How manyof the products do you think you, that you built that that you felt maybedidn't have a, a, a big enough time to actually, warm a build?

Yegor: I mean, the vastmajority of the projects that I did, I wouldn't really call them products cuzthis is, you know mm-hmm. like a while ago.

These are, I call 'em, websites thatgenerate traffic and then you monetize them through some, through some means.But I mean, over the years I probably had at believe maybe 50 to 60 projectsthat I've worked on, vast majority of them were complete failures and a wasteof time. However, you do learn what works and what doesn't and, you learn someprogramming along the way which, definitely helped me to later on.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Anddescribe, describe the technology and what was the inspiration behind goinginto building, obviously you wanna transition into something else, but whyWindscribe? Why work within this space? And, and also, I know you're runningtwo companies, Control D along with it, and, and as you mentioned before theshow, it's an internal product.

But what was the inspiration behindWindscribe? And, and that led to, this whole journey, what, six years later?,  

Yegor: right. So, I mean,that kind of started like when we're working on the very last project forsomeone else, which was a daily fantasy sport website. That, that was likearound the time when, DraftKings and Fandule just came out.

So we're billing basically a competitorservice to that. And I am not a sports person. I don't know anything aboutsports. I don't watch sports. I don't follow any sports . So. So getting, like,getting your, I guess, teeth into something that I have zero interested in?Yeah. It, it was very tedious.

We built something, it was, it waspretty good in the end, at least. I thought so. But you know, it didn't end upreally going anywhere for the person who commissioned it for us. But you know,at the time it was kind Okay. I. . I honestly, I, I dislike all of this andwhat do I actually enjoy and personally use that Yeah.

Is not the greatest thing. And, VPNscame to be that thing, I've used VPNs for quite a while before, probably forwell over 10, maybe, probably 15 years or so. Right. Yeah. And VPNs at the timewere very techy, oriented at you. People with very large beards. And I used tohave a very large beard too.

I shaved a couple of days, but anyway,it was, it was targeted at a very techy individual, not your average Joe.Right? Yeah. And then we thought that, hey, we can do better. We can makesomething, that's equally as well, not equally more, more useful than whatexisted out there. And make it accessible to, the average Joe that can justdownload an app.

Press big on button and just let it doits thing. And if you happen to be a technical user, I could steer myselftechnical user to still have all the features kind of be part of the service.If you need them, they're there. Yeah. But if you don't, you can just have avery simple experience.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And, andfor those users who, or for those in the audience who don't know what a VPN is,or, or, or, haven't, don't use it religiously. What is the, I guess, drivingforce to, use a VPN and, and use technology like that?  

Yegor: Right. I think in thelast few years a lot of people learned about VPNs because every single YouTubechannel seems to be sponsored by a VPN these days.

Yeah. Even channels that have nothing towith security or privacy or anything of that sort. But you know, most of themare willing to, sponsored by whoever pays the bills. Yeah. Which is fair, onthe part of the creators, but we, we kind of hook a very different approach tothis. Maybe I'm jumping my head on.

So whatever you've heard about VPNs fromyour favorite YouTubers a lot of those things are just not true. Right. That's.Sales. They're engaging in basic marketing of a product that should not bemarketed this way. Like at its core, what does VPN do? It basically changesyour IP address. Yeah. Effectively, you connect to a remote server and thatremote server becomes your. Call it your router, right? Yeah. So instead ofyour home router, I mean, I'm simplifying this, it's technically, this is notaccurate, I'm just giving you an analogy. Sure. But that server becomes yourrouter. So when you're browsing the internet, all your activity appears to beoriginating from that server and whatever IP address of that server is, andwhichever country.

That server happens to be in. Yeah,that's basically all of VPN will do. So that alone be like, oh, it changes theright P drives. Cool. So you're anonymous now, right? No. You're not. Like mostlike Vpnn will do actually very little for your privacy. Virtually nothingoutside of, a few niche use cases.

Yeah. Like, torrenting your favorite.Linux distro or whatever you might be downloading in those cases yeah, it'spretty clear and cut your is masked and you're not gonna get those DMCAletters. Yeah. But for anything related to privacy, that is not the case. Likewhy is that the case?

I mean, when you browse around and mostof the time you're probably on your mobile device using an app. This app or anysingle website has a ton of trackers built in. Right. In a case of apps, not,not only just trackers, but also it has access to your gp. It has access toyour microphone, it has access to your camera, probably if it's a messagingapp.

So with all these sensors that you knowthat they're accessible by whoever operates the service, your IP address isvirtually irrelevant if they can literally read your GPS coordinates that theapp is supplying. Yeah. All right. And as well as, track tracking services, wenever, we need to go on any single website.

A news site, let's say a news website,you will go to get the news, right? Yeah. You'll end up downloading the news,whatever the content is on that website, but you're end, you're gonna end updownloading maybe like two to three times more tracking an ad code than theactual content and Wow. And then you're ba you're basically leaking yourinformation too.

Sometimes dozens in, in, in some extremeegregious cases to hundreds of different tracking platforms that collate allthis information to build profiles so they can target you through otherchannel. and AP address. There again has very little impact here. It's stillgonna be tracked regardless of now your aps in Japan.

Great means nothing for that. Yeah.Which is why the Windscribe kind of works a bit differently. So it is a VPN atits core. It do. It does all the things I mentioned earlier, but what I wouldsay it sets it apart is that we have pretty robust kind of filteringcapabilities, and by filtering, I mean you can kind of self-censor the internetfor.

But for good purposes, but you cancensor all ads and trackers from loading on your device, which is super handyon mobile, where you can install like, like you block or ad block extensions,which are super handy and desktop browsers, but you, there's no such thing formobile. So Powers works server side, so it strips away all this garbage beforeit even reaches your device.

And then you, if you can't access atracker, you can't leak your information to this tracker. That's, yeah, that'sbasically, . Well, yeah, that's part of it anyway. Yeah. Yeah.  

Julian: And, and describe forthose who don't know the restrictions that a lot of people may, may not beaware of in terms of if your IP address is in one country versus another.

What describe the differences in, interms of how things are regulated? Because I don't think people are very muchaware. Obviously if you think about privacy, you think about accessibility.But, we don't, I don't think a lot of people think about the restrictions that,that they don't, that they have on top of that.

Yegor: Right. Well, it reallydepends which country you happen to live in, right? Yeah. If you live in thewest, like North America or Western Europe. Yeah. Most people that use VPNs,they do it because they just want to be more private. They don't wanna leaktheir informa uh, their browsing history to their isp, for example.

Yeah. And ISPs do collect browsinghistory in United States and Canada and many other European countries. Thisdata's stored for many, many months. So at some point in the, in the future,someone. This, this account right here, I wanna see every single website thatthey visited in the last six months.

And that data is available and will behanded over by most ISPs. So in the West, people are, okay. I, I don't wantthem to have this information, I'm gonna use a vpn. Just out of, they don't, ifit's a personal preference, if you happen to be living in other places in theworld, like, China, Iran, Russia.

Most of the Middle East, some Africancountries. Yeah. Where internet is heavily censored and monitored andinformation is restricted, yeah. Heavily restricted in, in many cases,including those countries that I mentioned. People over there don't really careabout their privacy or not speaking stuff to their isp.

Well, I mean, they kind of do what theirmain thing is. They wanna be able to access information that is not availablein the country because, they go on BBC. that the website does not exist inRussia, for example, or many, many other Western services and, and newsagencies and Wikipedia, all of that is just not available for literally likebillions of people worldwide.

Yeah. So those who want access toinformation that we deem Grant for granted. Use VPNs in order to do so. Right?Yeah. As well as, if you happen to be any kind of like dissident or doing anykind of activism in those countries, Being caught doing those things Yeah. Canresult in jail time and in some extreme cases worse.

Right? Yeah. So VPNs are one of thetools that, people in those countries should use to, enhance their level ofprivacy. And by, by no means is it the ultimate bulletproof solution that youjust put on the VPN when you're good. It is not, it's just one of the toolsthat you should be using.

Great deal of other things that oneshould be aware of if that's the situation you happen to be in. Cause using mebe on the loan will probably land you in jail if you're not careful. .  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And when,when you're using a vpn, are you able to toggle between the different types ofcountries that the, the servers going to be hosted on?

What, what amount of flexibility do youhave when, when, I guess working with Windscribe in particular.

Yegor: Right? No, I mean,most of VPNs work very similarly. They give you a list of countries that youcould connect to and, and many of the cases, the, the server itself would bephysically in that country that is not always.

some VPNs will lie about their serverlocations and say, oh yeah, you're connected to this country, but the server isactually not in that country. It, it just, it just looks that like it is basedon, the IP information but it's physically not in that jurisdiction. So thatcould be dangerous in many place in some situations.

But people who are in living inrestrictive countries, they just want to be able to connect to any place that'soutside of their country. That's basically the only thing they're looking for.You want to connect to a place that has open internet. That's basically what,what you're looking for.

It doesn't really matter if it's, Canadaor Netherlands, or. Some other European country. Ideally you wanna connectsomewhere close by where your performance is not gonna be impacted too much,but you want that place to be, a lot freer than the country that you're in ifyou happen to be living in the west.

One of the other kind of major usecases, I would say for VPMs is bypassing geographic restrictions where there'sa lot of content and streaming services, or just general websites that arerestricted. , those who are in one specific country or region, if you don'thappen to live there, you can't use, can't use that service.

Yeah. There's a lot of, expats livingall, all across the world. They want to be able to, consume their home contentor have access to things that require them to be physically in the country. Sothey use VPNs in order to kind of like spoof their physical location to appearin that place in order to do whatever they.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Anddescribe to us Control D. How did the idea and the concept kind of grow? I knowit's an internal product, but, describe what that does in particular, and alsohow is it running two companies at the same time? Because I know the difficultyof managing one, I can only imagine how much more difficult it, it would bemanaging two.

Yegor: Right. Yeah. No, it's,it's, it's, honestly, it's, it is too much work , it really is. But no, ControlD was kind of born out of Windscribe. So Windscribe is primarily targetingconsumers, consumer users, your average Joe's. We do have some, businessclients. We do have team, team offerings for, if you wanna secure your wholeteam.

Yeah. But that's not really our breadand butter. Our bread and butter is, get working with consumers. Mm-hmm.Control D is not a VPN service. , it's not meant to be used in, if you'reliving in a restricted country, it, it's an entirely different type of servicebased on how it works.

It's a DNS level service. So I'm, I'mnot sure how familiar you're with DNS services, but what DNS really does is,when you type in google.com at dns server will tell you what the IP address isof google.com, right? Okay. And then your computer just connects to Googlebecause, google.com has no meaning to computers, so ask scheme things.

So that's pretty much what Control Ddoes. However it's customizable and, and so you can create your own policies ofwhat things you want to be resolved on your network and what things you do not.So the use cases being, you can use it for parental controls, if you're notkids on your network.

Block porn sites, you can blockgambling, you can block all kinds of stuff or create, screen time of like whereyour device simpy is not gonna be able to access the internet. When you shouldbe working as not working, doing school or, yeah. Or sleeping. And for,business level use cases, public wifi school schools and smaller organizationsthat manage, smaller networks.

We're concentrating on, smaller organizationsright now while we're building out the. . But yeah, we have a pretty lengthyroadmap in terms of what we're gonna be offering there. And so, yeah, currentlywhat's available is very much beta for power users. And then we're gonna beevolving it into a highly business-oriented service in the part of 2023.

Julian: Yeah. You mentionedone thing in the notes before was that which is, it is just fascinating to meas, as a founder myself which is the ability to become profitable, and, and Ithink month two is, is what you said, which was shocking to me because mostcompanies, don't see profitability for a while.

What in particular was, I don't know ifthere's a secret sauce or an advice. Was it bootstrapping? Was, was it focusingon one particular thing? What advice would you give to founders who are lookingto. Reach that level of success and such more short amount of time and level ofsuccess is just meaning, not having to, to think about your burn all the time.

So your runway money doesn't run out.?  

Yegor: Yeah. Yeah, prettymuch. So. And Windscribe never raised any money. Right. So we're a hundredpercent privately owned, the The initial investors were myself and the othertwo co-founders using the money that we've, earned doing other projects before,right?

I mean, we weren't up, we weren't weweren't doing stuff for free before, we did have revenue and, we saved a lot ofit to do other stuff in the future. So we've kind of financed it ourselves for,joint development, which took about a year. Right? Yeah. And what I mean, likewhen we became profitable month, I mean, it paid for its own serverinfrastructure and whoever else was working other than the co-founders.

Yeah, we were still. getting paidnothing. We were only able to kind of like start, declaring some salaries,several months after that. And, and those were, just enough not to like starveto death basically. Yeah. . But yeah, I mean, in terms of how to do it, I mean,we did a lot of the work ourselves.

I mean, we're all technical. Like wedon't have any non-technical co-founders. So. We did everything that wepossibly could ourselves and things that we couldn't do. That's the only thingthat we would kind of get external, yeah. Outsource help. At that point it wasmostly contractors. Not to keep anyone permanently, but as soon as we started,generating steady revenue, that's when we started kind of scaling up apermanent team in Canada.

Julian: Yeah. . Yeah. So it's,it is amazing that you, you and your co-founders are all technical because ofthe ability to not only build, but then test and, and then reiterate on, onimproving the, the product over time. When, when you, when I, when you thinkback on that journey is there anything that you know now that back then youwish you knew sooner?

Yegor: I mean, this probablydoesn't also answer your question, but it's kind of like an additional thing.Don't use cloud. If you wanna, run stuff on the cheap and not burn crazyamounts of money it might be convenient. Oh yeah, cloud, I can just get allthese VMs and all these nice button pressy services.

That stuff costs money. And for thatniceness, you're paying at least three x in some cases, 10 x of whatever wouldcost if you just got some bare metal machine. Set them up yourself, virtualizethem if you'd like and run your own little cloud. But you can convert your timeinto huge savings long term.

Yeah. I think a lot of people kinda likeraise money, like, oh yeah, we're just gonna spend millions of dollars on thiscloud thing, but hey, maybe you don't need to burn that much money if you, hiresome competent people to manage your infrastructure for you or yourself,ideally. Cuz then that's the cheapest option by.

Julian: Tell us a little bitabout the traction. How many users do you have using Windscribe, and then howmany do you expect to, not only the traction up to now, but what is your, your,what's the excitement level for the next year and, and what you're looking tobuild and, and map out?  

Yegor: right now a lot of ourmetrics are actually public. We I to be as transparent as possible. And thatcomes from like all, all our op, all our software that, runs on your machinesis open source. Yeah. find all of our clients open source that are GitHub andour kind of activity numbers are also public On our website, you can find alittle.

I think we're, I think we are past like50 million users a few months ago. Might be close to 55. Honestly, I haven'tlooked at it in, in a while. Yeah. Obviously that's not active users, sure.That's kind of how many people have ever tried Windscribe? Our active usersare, a subset of that total.

But, and most of them are free usersbecause we do operate in a premium model where vast majority of people don'tpay us anything and only single digit percentages. End up, paying us forpremium subscriptions and that's kind of what finances everything, includingfree offerings.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah.

And what are the biggest, challengesthat Windscribe scrap faces today?  

Yegor: I, I would say, Imean, that's a good point. I think. , like VPN market and just the industry ingeneral. I would say it's a very toxic industry in, in, in terms of how it'smarketed and promoted. There's a lot of players in it. I would say there'sprobably.

Hundreds of VPNs. There's probably like10 major ones and probably five of them you've heard every single YouTubechannel, most likely. Yeah. So this, it's like a very crowded industry. Andit's being like the marketing angle of it is what really annoys me because wedo not market at all. Our, our ad spend is zero and pretty much has always beenzero.

We had an affiliate program for a while.We've discontinued the affiliate program a few years ago because we, we foundit, it's kind of like, it's a very kind of dis dishonest practice in a sensethat there's, there's a parasitic industry that exists alongside VPNs. It's calledthe VPN review industry.

Like, you will type in, best vpn, you'regonna see. a lot of sites that will rank them based on all these scientificallysounding metrics and they're gonna go talk about stuff. All of that is totalbullshit. The only metric that they rank VPNs on is cpa or who pays the mostfor signed up if I send you a click?

Yeah. Right. And you don't have to takemy work for it. I mean, I, I do write quite a bit of stuff on our blog and wedo publish some very button buttoned persi kind of content about the industrywhere basical. telling it how it is with proof of Yeah, what I'm talking aboutis true. Yeah. That is how, in fact, VPNs get ranked on vast majority of VPNreview websites.

They're not all like that, but I wouldsay 99% are. Yeah. And in many cases, if you actually dig into the numbers,some VPNs were acquired, some large VPNs that you've heard. We're acquired forless money than VPN review sites that review them. Wow. Just think about that.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah, yeah,yeah. It's fascinating.

I wanna come back. No, I, I'm just gonnajump on it. This whole I think a lot of founders are, are working towardscreating a lot of educational content and becoming very much, informative. Ithink there's a huge. In the market now, especially where companies are reallyinvesting and educating the customer base and, and those potential customers aswell.

For founders out there who are, maybetrying to focus on other multiple aspects of the business but don't you maybe,spend enough time. Edu creating educational content, what would, what advicewould you give them in terms of that creation? Obviously you've been in thespace while you, you intimately know your product and, and the space.

But is there any structure, any strategythat you use when developing this content that that other founders can kind oftake, take on themselves? I'm asking the selfishly as well. , yeah. Yeah.  

Yegor: So honestly that,that's like creating educational content that, helps educate and hopeful.Potential, like a little bit of entertainment as well is precisely what, whatwe're working on right now.

We, we've kind of, significantly wrappedup our content production from blog writing, video work. We, we have like afull in-house animation department where we produce all content internally.None of it is outsourced. because we want it to be kind of like, like fit ourbrand, like our, our comms and just general PR is very not traditional in, in asense of of how most other VPNs kind of communicate with their customers.

We're extremely informal. We, we domemes, our promotional emails if you can even call them that are, there's a lotof lunacy in them. And I would say like most people really enjoy the amount ofeffort that we put into these borderline insane promotional emails, . And bysaying how, I mean, because the deals are so great, I'm talking about like whatwe talk about and how we talk about a lot of this is actually a post in ourblog, so you can get a taste of how ridiculous they are, but yeah, yeah, likescaling, since we cannot pay people to talk about us because we find that kindof dish.

And we don't market. We have to kind ofgenerate our own eyeballs and, creating content that is helpful, that educatesthat amuses and hopefully has some kind of type, tie it into your company andyour services. It seems like a, a really good approach and I'm, I'm not gonnatell you that it's, it's, it's amazing and everybody should do it cuz we'reliterally in a process of of of, of kind of like scaling all of that.

Up to, up to, I would say a year ago weweren't really doing any educational content. Yeah. All over all of our growthwas pretty much word of mouth and just us talking to our, our users andbuilding things that they want us to build and kind of having this like, veryclose dialogue. Like we maintain a very active discord server where a lot ofour staff hang out and and sort of our users, yeah, like thousands of them atonline, at any given moment.

And they can talk to the staff, they cansuggest ideas, they can tell us what sucks, what's broken. They happen to like,so, QA are, latest and greatest versions of all our applications. We can getdirect feedback and iterate faster and. , people really appreciate it when,when the found, when they can talk to the founders or, or the developers Yeah.

And their suggestions get takenseriously implemented and resolves their problem or gives them somefunctionality that they requested. Those people will be cut your customers forlife and these will be best brand ambassadors that, money can't buy.  

Julian: Right? Yeah. Word.Word of mouth I think is something that most founders covet as, as, what theywant to get to in terms of the, the referral network and the process behindthat.

Yegor: Yeah. But at the sametime, like we don't advertise, but advertising clearly works, yeah. Ourcompetitors who do spend a lot of money on ad advertising and sponsorships incpa, they're bigger than us. Right? Yeah. We're not the biggest kid on theblock. They're bigger than us. They have more users than.

They have more employees than us, butwe're kind of, we're more interested in, in sustainable and honest growthrather than, yeah, paying a hundred million to everyone to say false thingsabout the capabilities of our product. And then make it impossible to cancel,which is the status quo of the industry.

Yeah. But not with us. You can totallycancel it. You can cancel a service without talking to anyone. You can press abutton. No one's gonna harass you. You know you don't have pay us money. Fine.Be our gas. I love that. Everything's above board.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah, you coulddefinitely tell that you built the product for yourself as well, because I'msure as as somebody who uses weekends, you, you, gone through that experienceand, and really, make, make it a point to not have that user experience, whichI think is very admirable.

But also, I think that's the right thingthat most founders should do is, is build that product so that they can have,as easy of a journey through the life cycle of it as, as they would wantthemselves to go through.  

Yegor: Absolutely. Yeah.Yeah. And yeah, every single suggestion like, Hey, would.

Do I see value in this? Or what Ipersonally use to myself? Like, yeah, okay. No. Maybe like I wouldn't use itevery day, but I see there's value in this suggestion as opposed to, oh, thatperson suggested, okay, let's better build this. Yeah. Maybe whatever thatperson suggested is only needed by that one person on this entire planet, andyou're gonna be then chasing, feature suggestions, which are useless toeveryone other than one person, right?

So you also have to have, criticalthinking and being a user of your own. And building it basically for yourselfhas advantage. . Yeah. Yeah.  

Julian: I'd love to go intothis next section. I call it the Founder FAQs. So I'm gonna hit you with acouple rapid fire questions and, and then we'll, we'll extract some, some ofyour knowledge that that other founders can, can can utilize.

First off, what's, what's the hardestpart about your job?  

Yegor: I, I mean, the hardestpart is the fact that I have probably 15 jobs, maybe more, and kind of. Fittingeverything all in one day and then not having, 24 hours in a day is verylimiting for me. Yeah. So to kind of basically juggling a lot of things andbeing hooked in, into every single team and, communications and quote unquotemarketing and yeah, finances and everything else, just juggling all this stuffat the same time is probably, probably the biggest challenge and the biggestkind of detriment.

Right now, which I'm kind of likeactively working on to reduce my workload on, on these random areas. Andthey're all important, but I feel I need to kind of like, dedicate more timetowards things that like, kind of like a bird's eye view as opposed to, beingin a trenches. And I'm in a trenches, quite a bit dealing, like I'm, I'm stilltalking to customers.

I, I, I do support every once in awhile. Even though we have a, a fairly sizable support team, I still find itvaluable to, talk to people who have issues with the product. Yeah. Or. Orunhappy about something to figure out. Okay, like what can we do to make thisbetter? And I do that too much, I would say to my own detriment where I'mconstantly contact switching and yeah, it's, it's tough.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ifyou were to build a new technology today, or a new product today, whattechnology would you build it out? in terms of the languages you'd use, theframeworks, the, I know you said you're against the cloud service group, sowe'll, we'll stay away from Cloud .  

Yegor: Does it have to be a techcompany?

Julian: May, maybe not.Nope.  

Yegor: I, I would do achemical company right now. Is that right, ? Yeah. And, and specifically Iwould disrupt the toilet paper industry by eliminating the need for someone to.wipe their butt after going number two. I, I have an idea. And honestly, if I,once I have more time, I'm totally gonna do this.

Julian: I love that . I lovethat. Yeah. Fr for founders out there where do you go to hire a goodtalent?  

Yegor: Referrals. Yeah, we'retrying to like, we have like a very, I, I mean, I would say we have pretty goodwork culture and we have external kind of like HR companies that kind of likehelp us with hr. Yeah.

And, I don't want to toot my own hornbut we did, several kind of like surveys and she's spoken, to everyone in theteam. She said that from the response rate that we had, the highest and themost positive response rates of any company that they've ever worked with interms of the responses from the team, how, how, how happy everyone is with whatthey're doing.

And, are we perfect though? We'reobviously not, but we, we had pretty high grades in terms of you. , the companyhealth, our work culture and everything. So when we, when we kind of like, wheneverybody's so happy and pleased yeah. They obviously want, people who aresmart, who are their friends or colleagues Yeah.

From previous jobs to also come workwith us. Yeah. So that so like, kind of like referrals has been our kind of abest hiring channel, but not the only one. We work with head hunters. We do, wedo everything that everybody else is. But referrals has been our best source ofnew talent.  

Julian: Yeah. How do youmaintain a strong work culture and, and is, is your team remote or most ofthem, most of them in office.

How do you kind of maintain the, the,that, that your employees are being fulfilled and I think fulfillment is thebetter word instead of happier, satisfied, or whatever. Because I thinkfulfillment it, it, it hits different layers of, of the life cycle of anemployee.  

Yegor: Yeah, so I mean,before Covid this office that I'm sitting in used to be full because well, wewere primarily in Canada based.

We did have a, a couple extra likeforeign contractors. But before Covid we were primarily Canada based, workingphysically out of the space that I'm in. However, since Covid, we've kind ofopened the flood gates for, remote work. Everybody's remote now, pretty much noone shows up at the office other than myself, another co-founder and theoccasional person.

is tired of sitting at home. So peoplewill come here every once in a while, but, on an average day there's like twoto three people here. Yeah. So we do have a lot of space. I mean, we can runcircles here and we do have a bunch of amusing things at the office. But yeah,it's, yeah, but we're pretty much remote, much like most other companies thesedays.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And how doyou maintain that culture, to still be intimate and still be cohesive?  

Yegor: We, we do like, yeah,I'm not a huge fan of meetings, but, they are. Necessary in, in a sense that,especially if you have a remote team for everybody to get on a group videocall. So we have group video calls, every week basically, company standups,each team has their own, individual standups.

But, we have company-wide once everysingle week, every Friday where, everybody gets a chance to speak about, whatthey did that week. What was interesting, what wasn't, do they have any liketrouble? So everybody's kind of aware. Everybody's working on, everybody seeseach.

We, we do, get togethers, in the realworld every once in a while but since you know about half the team at thispoint is in Canada, the other half is distributed all, all across the world, itmakes it a bit more challenging to, get everyone under the same roof.

And by challenging and it's pretty muchimpossible to get everyone under the same roof but. . Yeah.  

Julian: Yeah. If there was ifyou had a magic wand what, and, and you were to have one wish what would beyour wish for what your company would need right now?  

Yegor: Hmm. Okay. No, that'sa, that's an interesting question.

Honestly, look, it would be money. Likewe don't need it kind of like, investments or anything. . I don't know, likefor, honestly, for all our efforts that we're putting in into kind ofeducational content, Kind of like distributing what kind of what we stand for,like our ethics and everybody's aware who is aware of these things.

Like, oh yeah, this is like superamazing. And that's one your customer for more people to kind of know what westand for and know how, what makes us different from, your run of the mill VPN,that your favorite YouTuber is hawking. Every single video with a limited promocode that gives you X percent off, which nothing is off and nothing is free.

It's all. Yeah, .  

Julian: I love that. I lovethat. Last question is, is whether it's early in your career or now, what booksor people have influenced you the most?  

Yegor: Hmm. Well, honestly,I'll, I'll, I'll be frank. I, I don't really do a lot of like, like business orlike self-help books. I used to for a time and mostly an audio form.

And what I realized it's. . Yeah. Imean, there's some good points that every single book makes, but I mean, thosepoints can be summarized in a one to two page document. Yeah. And a lot of itis common sense. So, whenever I do read or listen to something, it's, it'salmost always science fiction at this point.

And as, as a means to not learnsomething new because I'm learning something new every single day while I'mworking 12 hours a day at the computer. Like self-education has been a linchpinof my quote unquote career over the. I've, I've never had any formal trainingin anything it related at all.

My university degree is in politicalscience. All right. So self-education is secondhand, is is self-educationsecondhand to me? So yeah. Whenever I do like, like. Science fiction kind ofallows me to disconnect from being constantly in this world and thinking aboutwork, work, work all the time, every day on the drive home, on the drive back,on the weekends, it, it's, it's a healthy kind of like pallet cleanser.

And then once you come out of that, ,you, you you have, you're kind of like a, fresh state of mind that allows youto think in, in, in more unique and different ways, which pays dividends. Iwould say long term. I mean, that's, that's just me personally. I don'trecommend this for others. Whatever. Do whatever works for you.

If you deriv value from Many, many bookswritten by many, many people, by all means it's helpful material. Sure. But a,a lot of it can be distilled to a blog post usually.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It'sfunny, I, I always ask this question, I get such variety of answers fromfounders, but there's a couple camps, there's the camp that is really investedin, in the business, in startup books which they find success out of.

But then there's the other. That is verymuch, in line with what you're talking about, which is kind of stepping awayfrom the day-to-day learning, but also, being, able to take your, take yourmind away and get a little bit more creative. It offers a little bit differentsense of creativity that, that you get from that experience right.

Yegor: But if you, I, I mean,if I were to give like one book that I personally kind of like, which meansit's kinda useful, what have I read that like, was not like immediately obviousthen that, implemented at least partially or Yeah. Had in the back of her mindthat had some sort of an impact.

There's a book called Who? H. Mm-hmm. .The w h who by something smart, just basically just Google who hiring bookbasically. Yeah. You'll find it. It's a short one and it talks about, hiringand the, like, the interview process and. What it, what it takes to build likean 18, so to speak. Yeah. There were, there were some actionable points that I,I found useful, but amazing.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Iknow we're at the end of the episode here, but I always like to give my guestsa chance to give us your plugs and let us know where we can find you, where wecan use your service. Te let us know your websites, your LinkedIns, yourDiscord channels. Where can we as an audience, and even maybe as, as potentialcustomers, find you and be a fan and also use the technology?

Yegor: I mean, our website isa good place to start, that's Windscribe.com for obviously for Windscribe andcontrold.com and you can, reach me via good old email at, my first name ateither one of those domains or Windscribe Press Control D and you can alsocheck us out on Twitter, especially the Windscribe Twitter.

It's it's very unusual in, in I lovethat for, for, for a company or especially. A VPN company, so you could hit usup at Windscribe com. That's, that's the handle.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Amazing.Well, yeah, it was such an interesting conversation, not only describing thetechnology and, and VPNs and really kind of, I guess taking down the, the, the,the mystique of what a VPN is and, and boiling it down, but also the benefitsof, of going with the service like yours, where you know that, that have thedifferent filters that allow you to control the privacy and the data that youknow.

Trackers are, are extracting from yourIP address. And that a fascinating conversation, but your journey as a founderwas incredible. The, the lessons about bootstrapping and where to spend yourmoney, I ultimately, I enjoyed the conversation, but I hope you enjoyedyourself and thank you again for being on the show.

Yegor: Yeah, it was nicespeaking to you.  

Julian: Of course.

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