An Olin robotics major who is driven to help society through entrepreneurship by innovating education.
Olin College Class of 2012
Majored In: Engineering – Robotics
Olin Activities: Tea Matte Shop, Product Design, T-shirt Screenprinting business
Known For: Being the Co-Founder of BrightLoop
Interests: Photography, Traveling, Camping
Locations of Employment: Olin College, BrightLoop, Educents
Life Philosophy: Engineer life – do as many things as possible and pursue them to completion.
All About Boris
Boris Taratutin is currently a full stack engineer at EduCents. He was previously a co-founding product lead and engineer at BrightLoop. His interests also include sustainable design, special topics in hippy-philosophy, and photography. Boris is all about travel, tea, and tales. He’s not a fan of tails, so don’t even ask.
“Having a great team to work with is one of the most important factors in being successful with entrepreneurship.”
― Boris Taratutin
Starting at Olin
At the beginning of his time at Olin, Boris didn’t have a strong conceptualization of entrepreneurship. As a result, he delved a lot into product design, extensively studying physical product systems and even self-tailoring his robotics major to fit his interests. In college, his goal was to do as many thing as possible in a day, as he believed that college was all about making connections. He would often be seen at major events meeting new people, participating in all kinds of activities around campus. He had heard about entrepreneurship, but never really did much with it during his time at Olin. He dabbled a little bit with it at Babson, and he talked with his friend Marco, who was really into entrepreneurship, but other than that he didn’t know a lot about it and didn’t spend much time on it. He did start multiple activities on campus that were related to it, such as running a bar in a suite, selling matte tea, and running small T-shirt screen-printing business. He mostly did these things for fun. However, after running all these activities for a while, he began to realize that entrepreneurship wasn’t as distant or as abstract as he thought; inventors are entrepreneurs, looking for problems in society and coming up with solutions to solve them.
Starting a Business: BrightLoop
Coming out of Olin, Boris was presented with a Fulbright Scholarship to India, where he could do novel work by helping developing cities improve their education systems. However, due to a “gut feeling,” he decided not to accept it. Instead, he left college and entered the real world without a concrete plan. He began talking to a lot of people, jumping around from contract to contract, until Marco finally introduced him to Brightloop. BrightLoop was a startup company that was founded by a kindergarten teacher who wanted to build tools for K-5 teachers. The company was based on the idea of creating a system for qualitative feedback instead of letter grades. Being passionate about education and sustainability and really wanting to work on a team, Boris contracted with BrightLoop as the head of the Product Team.
Boris worked hard and earnestly gave the startup his all. Over the course of a few months, he became a Co-Founder and built a name for himself in the education scene. The company managed to make it into several startup accelerators, including the famous Imagine K12 in California, a Y-Combinator associate. Things were looking great, and the company was gaining slow but steady traction with a consistent stream of customers. However, while all appeared to be well from the outside, the inside was much worse off. Due to communication and teaming problems, Boris and the other Co-Founder weren’t working well together. It got the point that one day the Co-Founder approached Boris and stated that she was cutting off his equity from the 4-year investment plan. Following the break up between the two Co-Founders, Boris left the company in pursuit of other things. The company itself fell apart soon after.
Starting Over Again: Educents
After the Founder drama at BrightLoop, Boris took some time off to really reflect on what had happened and why his venture with BrightLoop failed in the way it did. He realized a couple things:
- You need the right team with complementary skill sets: A company must be based on a team that works well together, as evidently that was the reason BrightLoop fell apart. The team should also have multiple skill sets to give different perspectives, as communication and collaboration are key.
- You need connections to people with at least 10 years of experience: A big thing that a company needs is domain experience, people with the power and knowledge to help make strong informed decisions. Companies like Instagram and Twitter that just skyrocket upon first launch are rare “like unicorns”; what companies really need is the ability to adapt and learn as you go.
- You need money: Time is money, and spending time arguing or meeting a lot takes away from actually building things. In addition to the baseline capital parachute, you need to be productive with your team and make stuff happen.
Having figured out what went wrong, Boris looked forward to what he needed to do. He came up with a list of what he wanted. He wanted to work for a small company, but he also wanted to work with people who had experience. He wanted mentorship, and he also wanted money. With this list ready, he then contacted everyone person he knew and told them what he was looking for. After every conversation he had, he proceeded to ask who else to talk to. Boris talked with a lot of people, constantly on the phone or on Skype, in hopes that he would find what he was looking for. And finally, he did. A friend from the Imagine K12 accelerator popped up one day and told him about Educents. After an introduction, Boris realized he had found a good fit and he signed on.
Now, still working at Educents, Boris believes he’s found the place where he belongs. His team is strong and works very well together. Everyone is on the same page and communication through the company is fluid. The individuals are experienced as well; the CTO worked with building teams and hiring people, and the CMO worked at an education company before. Therefore, they know how to grow the team culture and how to make important decisions. The team is balanced and cohesive, and Boris believes this is what is making Educents successful. So far, they have raised $3 million in seed funding and built a 10-person team. Today, they are progressing far better and faster than BrightLoop ever did.
Entrepreneurship Through the Times
Throughout his life, Boris has been through a lot with entrepreneurship, sometimes without even knowing it. With his experiences, Boris’s view on entrepreneurship also changed with time. Here’s a timeline to show how his mindset changed over the years:
Before Olin:
He had the inventor’s mindset, it was a sketchbook with cool ideas.
During Olin:
He believed that entrepreneurship was about money and business.
He didn’t believe it was for him, he just created stuff for the heck of it.
After Olin:
He believed that startups were the new hip thing.
It was the ultimate way to express your passion.
BrightLoop:
He believed that entrepreneurship was a learning experience.
This was his pitfall.
Educents:
Entrepreneurship is a lot of hard work and opportunity.
Entrepreneurship is finding your way to be happy.
Life Advice from Boris
Drawing from his numerous experiences, Boris was eager to talk about the lessons that he learned throughout his life. Here are the most important pieces of advice that he left us!
- SELF-CARE. You need to take care of yourself before you can take care of other people.
Starting a company is 5% luck, 5% timing, and 90% hard work. Nowadays, startups can take up to 10 years to start, so if you’re not 100% on board, you might want to think twice.
Once you’re committed, though, err on the side of persistence. Separate large problems into smaller chunks, and keep setting concrete goals. Focus on taking small steps forward, learn as you go, and only give up when you stop progressing or learning anything from the experience.
Don’t burn out when you hit a brick wall- take a step back, reassess the situation, and approach the problem from a new angle.
- TEAMWORK. A team is one of the most important factors in being successful as an entrepreneur. In order to form a good team, you need to try to make connections and work with as many people as possible in as many meaningful contexts as possible.
A good team should include people with whom you work well. Communication is very important! You and your teammates should be complimentary in your different skill sets, and your different perspectives should add to your team dynamics, not take away from it.
When you’re working at a startup, it’s not unusual for you to be the smartest person in the room, but this could be a bad thing. Anywhere else, you can usually learn from people who have had 10-15 more years of experience than you. Ideally, in a startup environment, each person should have at least 10 years of experience in their respective field and in other technical fields.
Have an exit plan prepared ahead of time. What happens if someone wants to join your company? Or if one founder loses motivation? If there’s no divestment plan for company stock, your company can easily tank as the resulting team drama axes productivity.
- COMPETITION. Competition can be beneficial. It’s a sign your idea has potential.
99.5% of ideas out there have been already been thought of by somebody. The key difference that makes or breaks a company is actually their execution.
Don’t be intimidated by large competitors. If you’re a small company, you’re probably more agile than they are. You can implement company-wide changes quickly, and pivot rapidly, which means you can easily outmaneuver your larger competitors. Keep your finger on the pulse, find out what your customers really want, and then give it to them. Niche markets are especially useful to smaller companies in this respect.
Keep your ultimate goals in mind. Do you just want to make a certain amount of money? Do you want to be bought by a larger company? Do you want to be the largest company in your field?
4. STARTING A COMPANY. The foolproof formula for success!
Finding a job or starting a new company is tricky, but here’s something that, based on personal experience, is known to work. First, stop and reflect on things. Ask yourself, what do I want, and why. Then start talking to people and asking them about the things you want. Eventually, you should be able to find it. Always remember to ask for other people to talk to after you’re done talking with one person.
The process of entrepreneurship is simple: start with an idea, take the smallest version of it, make it happen, and continue to improve on it. Try to look for signals, and either keep going or try another idea. Err on the side of not giving up; if you can keep seeing progress, then continue, and only stop when you can’t learn anything anymore. For instance, for my Matte Shop, I just brewed some tea, went into a lounge, and asked if people wanted to buy it. 3 people bought it, which signaled to me that it would be a good idea to continue. At some point you’ll just know that it’s time to make it big– when people’s eyes start sparkling and you’ve reached a critical mass. The important thing is to try, iterate, and learn. A good way to make sure you do this is through Sprints, as they constrain you to produce something by a time limit, which is good. Always remember: you can build incredible things, but if you can’t communicate, then it just sits there. Focus on progress, and eventually, you’ll make it.