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.

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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?

Eric Lay

founder & ceo | b2b gtm for vertical saas

Building virio.ai

A done-for-you content service and AI coworker for B2B companies to turn LinkedIn into their #1 GTM channel.

Founding Partner

Hosting private dinners, socials & events for Toronto's top VC backed founders. Partnerships with companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Collision, Elevate, Inovia VC, Forum VC & many more!

MrBeast just raised $200M at a $5B valuation.

They hit $400M+ revenue, and are about to triple down on something big:

For context:

2012: Jimmy Donaldson uploaded his first video from a bedroom in Greenville, North Carolina
2026: $5B valuation, 400M+ subscribers, 450+ employees.

They built verticals:
- chocolate
- burgers
- games
- analytics
- creator marketing platforms.

Each one becoming a distribution channel.

Here is the ops team behind all the hype:

Jeffrey Housenbold (CEO): SoftBank MD bringing institutional discipline to viral scale - projecting $700M across media, consumer products, and technology.

Noah Wieseneck (VP Brand Partnerships): 18+ years in creator-advertiser infrastructure. Now scaling Fortune 1000 partnerships.

Kelly Calabrese (VP Global Media): Ex-TikTok. Building cross-platform distribution legacy media can't replicate.

Sinan Deriş (Head of Marketing): Turned cultural moments into repeatable revenue at a multi-million dollar lifestyle brand.

Beau Avril (SVP Global Head of Media): Ex-TikTok/Meta/Google. Monetization across every platform, every format.

Corie Henson (President, Studio): Ex-NBCUniversal. Building scripted/unscripted pipelines that rival traditional studios.

Byron Kendal (VP Talent & Tech): The infrastructure guy making viral repeatable at 450+ employees.

Tia Silas (Chief People Officer): Building the operating rhythm for a "Disney-style entertainment colossus."

The pattern:

Feastables doesn't sponsor videos. It IS the product.
Beast Games isn't a YouTube series. It's a Prime Video production.

The analytics tool, the brand partnerships platform, the merch: each vertical's distribution compounding the brand.

So here's my prediction:

They've conquered consumer platforms. Next is professional.

LinkedIn is the last major distribution channel Beast doesn't own. And it's where decision-makers controlling millions of $$ live.

When Beast horizontalizes into B2B, creator marketing for enterprises, content infrastructure for brands, talent systems for scale, they'll need to reach B2B buyers directly.

That's LinkedIn content. That's your feed.

The B2B content playbook is next.

Founder & CEO @ Virio | The AI Marketer for Enterprise

I made $100k at 16 while failing high school and eating cup ramen.

Here is my story:

0: Born

5–15: Gifted program, skipped grades, was a straight-A student 

(Friend introduced me to League of Legends at 13 and was instantly hooked)

16: 
- Went pro and was top 30 in North America (0.001%)
- Made my first $100k
- Skipped all my classes senior year
- Failed highschool (had to take grade 13)

17:
- Almost failed grade 13 (would have without summer school)
- Dad bribed me with a gaming PC (got straight A's in the summer and graduated)

21: Top 3 highest grossing esports coach in NA & Europe

23: Consumer content agency ($50K MRR)

25: Co-founded largest startup community in Canada

27: Built more stealth startup ideas (failed, failed, and failed again)

28: Met Emmett, started Virio

29: Virio now adds over $1M+ ARR per month, building with a team of 15. You guys are seriously the best <3. I'm feeling more grounded than ever and I take my responsibilities very seriously.

Looking back, I'm grateful for the struggle.

Without failing alone, I wouldn't know I could survive it.
Without losing to addiction, I wouldn't understand what integrity actually costs.
Without twelve failed startups, I wouldn't have recognized Virio when the opportunity showed up.

I stopped running away and started building something that truly meant something to me. Fourteen years and probably 10,000+ hours of games played before work became intrinsic instead of just another distraction.

Took a long time to figure things out.
But weirdly, worth it all.

Grateful for you <3

Major milestone, just crossed 40k followers!

Here's the growth framework you can use at each stage:

0–1K: Look like a real person
- Maxed out connection requests (500/month)
- Connected with everyone I knew IRL
- Cleaned up headshot and banner (this is your digital handshake)
- Simple goal: have more than 500 connections so you are credible when someone checks your profile.

1–5K: Document, don't create
- Posted personal updates tied to founder-life (in this phase, you are the moat, people will follow you for you)
- Hosted 3 dinners / week and shared results publicly. Attendance numbers, what went wrong, what surprised me.

5–10K: Study patterns obsessively
- Started researching what actually goes viral in startup content
- Experimented beyond my own events: broader industry/cultural trends, storytelling frameworks, capitalizing on news cycles
- Heavy TOFU to cast wide and learn fast

10–20K: Capture intent with lead magnets
- Introduced comment-to-receive frameworks and playbooks
- Turned passive scrollers into active leads by giving away real value upfront instead of just building awareness

20–30K: Build in public + announce loudly
- Shared our launch out of stealth through storytelling rather than product pitches.
- Big announcements tied company milestones to broader market narratives: why this matters for B2B GTM, not just what we shipped.

30–40K: Go niche AND go big simultaneously
- Pipeline-generating ABM posts targeting specific accounts led to meetings booked directly from content.
- Viral authority posts on major trends happened from a position of credibility, not just chasing noise.

Here's what will make this work for YOU:

You need A/B testing discipline and enough volume to either find and/or create your own formats. 

It's become a cliche at this point, but just click the post button. There's a quality aspect to volume. Put up the shots and you'll develop intuition for what great content looks like.

– some additional notes:

1. I invested in support early. As we scaled, it was became more difficult to handle ops without a dedicated team.

2. 90/10 rule: content generally works on power laws - one format will get you 90% of your results. For example: one post hit 7,900 comments and ~1 million views. Drove about 10,000 followers in a single week.

Can't replicate that week on demand but I can replicate what created it.

Grateful for all your support :)

What stage / type of content are you posting?

Most people didn't believe our $500k-$1.5M TC Head of CEO Content role.

We filled that position 12 weeks ago. Today, we're quadrupling down.

Virio is hiring Content Engineers to join us in our San Francisco office, immediately.

Max Rascher (124k followers) joined Virio 12 weeks ago. Since then:
→ $50M+ in pipeline generated for clients
→ 3 Content Engineers already hired
→ $1M ARR added in 30 days

Our clients are B2B Founders and executives at the fastest-growing companies in the world. They need content that drives pipeline and we need more people to keep up with demand.

That's where you come in.

Writers, liberal arts majors, because with the amount of AI slop...

Taste matters more than ever.
We're looking for someone who has an instinct for what looks "right". 
Someone who deeply understands the art of storytelling.

What you'll do:
- Write daily for founders and executives who need to drive revenue, not just engagement
- Operate systems that turn thought leadership into meetings and pipeline
- Grow Virio from $XM - $100M

Who we're looking for...
• you have the "it" factor
• you're a top 0.1% writer
• you understand how content actually drives B2B demand gen

This is an in-person role in San Francisco. We cover relocation, sponsor visas, and pay monthly wellness stipends.

Comp: $150K–$Uncapped TC (we will go all-in for top tier talent)

If you're a storyteller who also happens to be a top tier operator looking to grind for something larger than yourself, apply in the link in the comments.

Let's get you down to SF.

This is Virio's org chart.

Some fun details about it...

→ Max number of direct reports: 6
→ Former founders on the team: 100%
→ Biggest team: customer success
→ Newest team: customer success
→ Fastest-growing team: customer success

(Yes, our CS team is exploding, our customers are always #1 priority)

We're a very flat company and have been expanding the team like crazy over the last 2 months.

Content is a hot market with a lot of demand, so we're hiring aggressively. Here's our priority list:

1. Content engineers
2. More content engineers
3. Actual engineers
4. Chief of Staff
5. Account Manager

If you want to be part of a rocket ship and work with incredible people, apply in the comments.

Profound just raised $96 million at a $1B valuation.

Here’s what their data is showing about how LinkedIn content affects AI search.

In November 2025, LinkedIn sat at #11 on ChatGPT's citation rankings. By February 2026, it was #5. A 2x increase in three months.

In their latest report, Davis McCain and Brandon P. wrote that LinkedIn is now the #1 most cited domain for professional queries across every major AI platform. ChatGPT. Claude. Gemini. Perplexity.

Here's the part that caught my attention.

The growth isn't coming from your website. Profound's data shows the sharpest jump is in posts, long-form articles, and newsletters. Organic content created by individuals. That slice went from 27% to 35% of all LinkedIn citations in 90 days.

Your CEO's quarterly reflection. Your Founder's weekly growth stunts. Your PM's product update. That's what AI is reading, citing, and treating as a source of truth.

Most companies publish executive content once a month (if at all). The AI citation window is 7-14 days for trending topics. If you're not in the feed consistently, you're not in the training data.

→ The window is open right now and the brands that move will build a compounding advantage as AI keeps leaning on LinkedIn as a trusted source.

Shoutout to some of the awesome people behind Profound who are building the  edge to win in the AI search game: Trevor Pyle, James Cadwallader, Dylan Babbs, Mark Ebert, Nick Lafferty

We've closed over $1M ARR in the last 30 days at Virio.

Here are the 5 pillars of our Linkedin-only GTM strategy:

For context: We're an AI-native service. Our product helps executives and their teams build LinkedIn presence that drives pipeline.

–

1/ BUILD FOR THE ICP THAT CLOSES FASTEST

Before the first outbound message, we pulled our own data. Which accounts converted fastest? What did they have in common?

For us, this meant $10M-$25M ARR vertical SaaS companies selling to legacy industries (fintech, proptech, data infra). Most had already tried content before, either internally or with an agency. Some failed, some with okay.. success.

A failed attempt is better than no attempt. It means they've felt the pain.

We quickly future-opp’d accounts that didn’t feel a strong need and focused on high-intent.

–

2/ YOUR FIRST CUSTOMERS ARE YOUR PROOF, BUT SO ARE YOU

Most companies build case studies after closing deals. We didn't have that luxury.

So we built our own content engine first.

-> 20M+ impressions
-> 200k+ followers
-> $50M in pipeline generated

When we got on calls with prospects, we could say: "Here's exactly what we did last month. Here's the pipeline it generated."

Enterprise buyers are risk-averse. Show them you've already run the experiment on yourself.

–

3/ SHOW PROSPECTS WHAT THEY'RE LOSING TO

In one of our $100K ACV deals, we kept getting polite interest but stalled decisions. The champion liked us. The CMO was cautious.

Before the next meeting, we researched their top 3 competitors. One of them had a CEO with 50K+ LinkedIn followers driving consistent inbound pipeline.

We brought that to the call. As a market reality (and FOMO tactic)

"This is what your competitor is doing. This is the gap. Here's what it's costing you."

We tied ourselves to something leadership had already committed to: winning their market.

–

4/ MULTI-THREAD BEFORE YOU NEED TO

Most deals stall because you're talking to one person. They gets busy, go on vacation, or leave the company.

We started multi-threading on day one. 

We mapped 4-5 stakeholders to each of Virio’s accounts:

CEO = Eric
CRO = Melissa
CMO = Jeremy
…
Head of Sales = Jonathan

We created content and outbound messaging that spoke to each role's specific pain.

Competitive positioning -> CEO
Attribution -> CMO
Warm outbound -> Head of Sales

By the time we asked for a meeting, 3-4 people in the account had already seen at least 1/5 accounts with Virio’s name. When we finally got the decision-maker on a call, they'd say: "Actually, I've been seeing your posts, my {champion} mentioned you last week."

The result: $1M ARR in 30 days.
From a replicable system on the most underutilized gtm channel in 2026.

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Eric Lay

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The Battle

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Eric Lay

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