Alex Jotic — Full Transcript

Welcome to Venture Protocol a podcast series where I sit down with exceptional founders investors and we discuss the winning protocols behind exceptional startups investment funds family offices and All of my guests are visionaries, building the next iteration of the world. My name is Anastasia Lukach. I'm a fintech executive with 10 years of experience. And let me welcome Alex.

Thank you.

So Alex Jotic is a perfect example of someone who is a visionary. You are an exited founder, and now you are building a company here in Dubai buy that helps founders and employees from high tax environments relocate here and this way save 30 40 percent of their taxes correct correct and the whole idea came completely accidentally to be

Honest so I need to thank people of sharjah for doing amazing job so what I did is in 2024 I sold I sold a small piece of my US business. Before this, I was in software development, custom software development. Our logic, I'm Serbian originally, so our logic was always, can we get in the deal? So we had a beautiful sales team in the US that did an amazing job in closing the high-end enterprise clients. But whenever you enter a high-end enterprise client, you need to be in the vendor list, and then you need to bid for projects. Projects. So what I did is I did a small arbitrage where you employ people from Europe, from Serbia to be precise, so we can compete on price. But how to get in these projects was the tricky part. So what we did is that we were bidding, of course, below anybody who has much more brand name behind what they do, but we managed to get small pieces of of puzzle for these big enterprise clients. And the trick why we focused on the market is because, and anybody who's enterprise knows this, is like once you're in on the vendor list and once you start doing projects, you actually, you're there for a very long time. So, sorry, that's like a multi, sometimes multi-decade type of deal. And the maintenance part was where we most interested in because once you lock in the maintenance part, you're not actually a service business. You are, you're still doing service, but your contractual value, let's say it's 10 years, so you have a guaranteed ARR in many, many years to come. And the company was growing, I sold a piece of it, and I was looking where to allocate my capital. And I was looking.

When did you sell your stake?

It was first time, 2023.

2023. Yes, correct. Which was already past the AI gold rush.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, way past it. But I sold it and I was looking like I had a freedom where I can allocate that money. And I looked everywhere. So I lived in Cyprus. I looked at Cyprus. Cyprus has some great options. It was not for me. I was there. I saw how everything works. I didn't like its EU, to be honest. I looked at Hong Kong, a bit far, to be honest. Then I looked at Panama. It was okay, but I always had a thing for Dubai. In 2022 when there was a world cup in qatar it was the first time actually I went to qatar through dubai and it's my first time I saw dubai and I was like okay that's really nice and I started speaking with lawyers from all of these countries and from the uae as well and I just realized that I can open a free zone entity so for people who don't know you have two types of companies free zone and mainland and if you open a free zone company it's like a a sole proprietary where you can basically receive money as a company and you get visa and all that things that go with it. And I can live in Dubai. So since I'm Serbian, Serbia has no world-class bank. Serbia has no local global bank or global bank that operates locally. And credit cards are not really a thing. Loans are not really a thing. And I was always admiring people from the U.S. Because I never had a social security number for tax purposes, that people who just have a social security number and they run a business, they can get loans. And if their credit rating is good, they can get endless loans. And I never had that. So whenever I was expanding business, it was just like pure hell where everything is cash flow. Everything is cash flow. And I saw Dubai and I saw all these massive banks and I saw a huge option where I can actually finally, first time in my life, I can actually allocate capital here, I can open up a company here, I can build my credit rating, I can start getting loans and like expand the business the proper West type of way. And the business was, I just, that was the whole idea. I didn't plan to do anything else that I really like to buy and a lady from Sharjah, because I need to explain what my company did in the US, and a lady from Sharjah called me after I had a company opened, I came here, I got my ID and all that, a lady from Sharjah called me and she was like, hello Alex I can see that you have, you had your company in the US, why don't you move some of your employees to UAE because you can save taxes.

And at the time, the vast majority of your employees were actually in Europe. In Europe, exactly. For labor costs. For labor costs, everything, yes.

And it was never my intention to continue doing that business here. It was like, just let's see how this life in the UAE will work. But she said, would you like to just move some of the employees here from Europe? They can live here. They can pay no tax, basically, from the employment standpoint. Point and because employment tax here is zero and it was I said no thank you like it's okay I don't need it everything is fine and a month later I was just sitting alone in my room and I was like hmm what if I suggest this service the same service what this lady suggested me so but But instead of employing my own people or moving my own folks here, I can just offer this as a service, where you have this endless amount of digital nomads, especially now because Europe is doing some crazy stuff. You have all these people who are actually German, but not living in Germany. You have UK folks that are not living in UK. They spend five months in Thailand, four months in Brazil, two months in Colombia, five months in Greece. And they live in their country for like three months, but they're still paying taxes in their home country and they don't need to that's the whole point

So for Serbia you have around 67% on top of the net salary that you need to pay

So if you look at gross salary, it's like 37% that you need to pay. And in Europe, like Western Europe, it's actually higher.

Really? Yeah. So what was the percentage in Serbia?

In Serbia, it was 37%. But, for example, in Germany, we had some employees, and it's like 42% of the gross salary. And it was just crazy that you're paying this crazy amount of money, and at the end, you're not – I mean, you're living in a good society, 100%. But I think your job as a person who lives in today's world is to try to save money as much as possible on things that are not contributing to you. So if you grew up in Germany and you paid your taxes to Germany for the first 10 years of your life, that's fine. But if you started living a bit here, a bit there, a bit here, a bit there, and spent three months a year in Germany, why are you paying 45% tax? It makes no sense. And what I started doing, just like approaching all these people who have very high salaries and just saying to them, okay, instead of U.S. Employer paying you in Germany, why I don't put my company in between us and have a service agreement between that U.S. Employer and you actually come here and live in Dubai and I can employ you and we are licensed to do this and you save like 40% of your money. And you know how hard it is for a regular employee to get like... So if you saved 40%, that means that from net perspective, let's say that you have 100 grand a year, your taxes is 40,000. In order for you to go from 60 grand to 100 grand, it's not a 40% difference. It's like 85% difference. So you know how hard it is to almost double your salary or to get an increase per year, like 60, 70, 80%? It's almost impossible.

What you're doing here is very beneficial for both the founders of the companies running the business and for employees themselves. Because if I understood correctly from our first conversation, you struck me as someone who is very practical, very down to earth. And this kind of business is very matching this very well. So you're able to build a structure where employer gets to pay less and the employee receives more. More, exactly. Excellent. At the expense of Europe, in this case.

So let's say that you're a U.S. Employer paying a financial consultant in the U.K. $150,000 a year. Actually, it will make more sense for you to pay $120,000 in gross salary, and that employee will get like 40% salary bump, which is insane. And I make money in between. So it's actually a beautiful system. Of course, it has a limit. Like, it's not, nothing is ideal. There's limits, like he cannot, that employee cannot continue living the life of UK citizen. He cannot be a UK tax resident. So there's things that.

So there are some downsides. There are some downsides. What are they?

If you live as a digital nomad, there are no downsides, if you live that life. But for example, if you're a lawyer, that's not doable. If you're a doctor in a UK hospital, that's not doable. Because you cannot have your center of life events in that country, and you cannot have a family there. There's a bunch of things that make you a tax resident, not only how much time per year you spend there. So usually for most of the countries, in order to be a tax resident of a country, you need to spend more than 183 days in that country. But it's not only that. For example, in Germany, if you own a garage, you're considered a tax resident. So if you want to work with me as a German employee, employee, you cannot have any assets in Germany. Because Germany can say that even though you don't live in the country, you have a house, and we consider you a tax resident. And you don't want to go in a fight with any government, basically. So it needs to be super clear, super nice, super legal in order for this to work. But there are endless people today. Europe is doing us a huge favor. Because people are not feeling, in many cases, safe. They're not they have a feeling they're not the cost of living is going crazy high like I read the article 60% of people in UK live paycheck to paycheck 60%

Percent of their salary in a way, do they have to move to Dubai? Do they have to sustain this lifestyle here?

In order by the UAE law, in order for you to be a resident of this country and in order to continue being employable from a perspective of a UAE business, you only need to spend one day every six months.

One day every six months?

Correct. We encourage you to spend a full year here obviously, but in order for you to be employable first of all you need to pay one day over six months and you have a proper salary paid to your account directly every month like in order for everything to be in green but what what happens usually like people come here for taxes and it's been spent here like winters and when it's too hot they move out but we see a very clear trajectory where all of our employees are usually digital nomads so they already traveling a lot and they first first year they spent They spent one day every six months in Dubai, and then they started spending a month, and then two months. And now we're in a position where we can easily see that many people are actually getting homes, getting loans, getting cars, getting all of that things. And in most of the countries, people ask me, why shouldn't I open up a company? Because it's more expensive. Like, if you open up a company here, you cannot get a loan. You cannot get any type of mortgage. Any type of loan actually is almost outside of your operating area here in Dubai because in this is for most countries once you were a founder or a director of a business it's so so much so hard except the US of course it's almost impossible to leverage the financial markets in their favor and once you're an employee after a three month pay slip you can get any type of phone that you want. So yeah.

So the relocating to Dubai, not only on paper, but in practice, excellent topic, I can vouch for this being a reality myself, because being from Ukraine, originally, I've always traveled to Paramount. But before the war, after the war started, I basically left out of the suitcase for all this time, been to so many countries and met lots of amazing people, but it it gets old. And now in November I moved to Dubai and so many of my friends and acquaintances from the crypto industry, from fintech, they are also moving here. Yeah, of course. So tell us a bit more about getting approved for a mortgage through working with you as an employee process.

It's, we arrange on the terms, you come to Dubai, we make you a resident, we sign all the employment contracts and in our case we work a lot with HSBC, huge things from HSBC, they're I think one of the most amazing banks ever and after three months you can get a mortgage. So three months of salary and you can go to HSBC through and start applying for mortgages. In the UAE you need to get pre-approved in order to get a mortgage first but we always advise people like go to all the banks they They just need your payslip. And we pay all the sellers to something called wage protection system, VPS, actually WPS. And it's a very safe way for all the banks to know that you're actually getting salary on time. And it's three months.

So your company, Blueprint, you have established a direct line of communication with HSBC? And this way?

Yeah, one of the banks, but yes.

One of the banks, okay. And this way, the people who work with you, they can get approved for a loan with just three months basically instead of the six months that's most under you. Correct.

For credit cards, it's six months for all the banks. But, yeah, the idea is that if you're any founder from Eastern Europe knows this, getting a credit card and getting a mortgage is impossible. Home loan is not something we ever thought we were going to get. Like in Serbia, I was not eligible for anything ever. In the US, because I don't have a social security number, I was not eligible for anything ever. And here, I also have a problem because I'm the founder of the company. But all of my employees, not all of course, but like 40% of them are actively getting home loans and for the first time in their life. Because like try getting a home loan in Germany if you're working for a US company and then paying directly to your account. It's impossible. And even if you open a GMBH, it's the same thing. You cannot get a loan. And we live in a world where everything is going through loans. And the banks, the safest bet for any bank is a home loan. Because you're putting down payment and they own the flat until you pay it out, plus the interest.

But when you already have the real estate in your name, you can use it as collateral and further access to capital. One of the best protocols is stop paying unnecessary taxes, not inviting anyone to do tax evasion, of course. Of course, tax optimization is, yeah. Invest in assets that you can use to get access to capital.

Exactly, exactly. And we live in a world where it's never been easier to open up a company abroad. It's never been easier to move your residency. It's never been easier to use the advantages of all the systems. And you can see that, obviously. Like, how many people have companies in Delaware and Wyoming?

A lot, from all over the world.

How many people have free zone entities in Dubai? How many people have some kind of structure in Estonia, on the e-company, or however that's called. It's easy. And these countries are winning in that game. But you, as an entrepreneur from Romania, or an entrepreneur from Brazil, you don't need to work from Brazil. Even though you're in Brazil, you're living in Brazil, but your setup doesn't need to be in Brazil. When I opened up a company in the U.S., I never visited the U.S. I opened up it online and then I got a visa to go there and actually get a bank account and all that stuff. So I encourage all the people who are entrepreneurs that just read about it. Like go around, ask things. Because if you do the setup right in the beginning, it solves a crazy amount of issues that come later. Because if you're locked in a country where you have payment issues, you have transfer issues, you have bank issues, and just area is not suitable to doing that type of business, why would you do it?

This is an excellent point. In financing, it's been New Year's recently and everyone talks about resolutions, but one other thing I noticed is so many people in general, not just founders or investors, they keep following the same patterns that are very inconvenient convenient just because they don't take the time to do an audit of where am I paying extra taxes, where am I not making enough money, why am I always hitting that corner in my apartment. Maybe there's something that you can do different.

And especially today, and you can see this huge, huge number of people just not actually living on paper in Western Europe, but they're not living in Western Europe. And in my head, when somebody says, I'm a digital nomad, I live six months a year in Thailand and Vietnam, and I sail in Greece for two months, and I live in my country for four months, I always thought, okay, but you also leveraged the financial angle of it. But it turns out, like 90% of digital nomads still pay taxes at their home base. So one thing is that you want to pay it. I don't get it, but I respect that decision. It's your money. Do with it whatever you want. But if you want to be as efficient as possible and get a huge bump in salary, you shouldn't do it because you are already in a position just to play the system a bit better and save a lot of money for yourself, for your family. Just imagine this. Let's say that you make 100 grand. You are working for a New York startup. And you're German, but you're actually living in Vietnam. Thailand, whatever you prefer. You're a bit in Greece, you're a bit in Spain, you're a bit in Italy, and you're a bit in Germany. And you suddenly hear what I'm saying right now and you start working with me in UAE. And instead of that employer paying you 100 grand, they start paying you 90 grand. And you just made 85,000 a year instead of making 60,000 a year. If you invested that difference, just that 25K difference, so live the same lifestyle, don't spend any more money. But just invest the difference instead of giving it to Germany to do it for you and Put it in the safest like you put a bit of in gold a bit in Bitcoin That's not safest but like a bit on Bitcoin and you put an S&P 500 And leave it and we all know this like it's not a science that we all know that in 30 years you have more money that you would have in Germany and substantially more But for some reason, people are not, because I think it's, people do not believe that they can actually change these big things. They're not big, because you're already living the life in a way that this is doable for you. You don't need to change anything. It's different if you are a doctor working in a German hospital. You need to change a lot of things to leverage how much you can play with taxes. But in this case, it's easy. It's easy, but you just need to go around and read.

It's very inspiring what you're saying. But talking about efficiencies, what about the dream? What is the big vision of Alex from Serbia, who now has moved to Dubai, who sold his stake in his company, now you're building a business that helps other founders and employees save money, travel, invest. The big vision.

10,000 employees, 10,000 people who would come here, and 10,000 salaries that instead of going to whatever the home countries of my employees are, and my employees are my clients as well, so 10,000 people that I helped save tremendous amount of money and also help them invest that money. We don't do investment consulting, but it's very obvious, like, if you open up this bank account and put this percentage here in 30 years, based on all the factors, you will get this. I think that's a huge impact. Because, for example, I come from a city that has around 60,000 people. That's my hometown of Užice, a small city in Serbia. And if you look at how many people actually make decent salaries, you're not only helping one person, because that person comes here, and his whole family, exactly. He can send home money abroad. Imagine this, you have German parents that are not living good, and you do this set up. You can use the difference to send money directly to them. And that's tax-free, because it comes from a first kin. And it's crazy. And 10,000 people, I think a huge impact on this country. And I just hope they don't change the immigration laws. So that's the only thing. But that's the big goal. And then we're playing a completely different game, just from the perspective of how much money we can move around. And we're becoming sort of a financial institution, more than we're actually a payroll processor. But that's a big goal. And then hopefully sell the business to some big local player.

So before we move back into the business stuff and acquisitions and so on, I just want to clarify one thing. So when you're talking about 10,000 employees, it doesn't actually mean that it's 10,000 people working for you per se. But it's other employees of other companies, other founders who are registered as your employees in a way for them to not have to pay taxes in their local country. But they can operate their businesses as usual? 100%. 100%, yes. So, big acquisition. Now, you mentioned that you were able to sell a stake in your previous company. Tell us the story. What was it like building the business and then taking a decision to sell?

As I think any entrepreneur can identify with this, but any start, especially like the first time you're starting a company, you don't know so many things. And I started as a Serbian company, then we opened up a U.S. Branch of it and that became the core business. And it was just so, so tough to get into, like first of all to figure out the business model that we want to have. And it took us years. It takes years to identify exactly what you're doing. And we always did services. And I always envy people with product. But then I saw how much they're struggling. And it's like, OK, maybe services make more sense, because the cash flow is much better. And getting started is the toughest thing. When I say getting started, I don't mean like you open up a company and having a good logo and whatever. It's actually getting cash flow exactly to make money and being able to live off. And I did something very smart unintentionally is that I didn't quit my day job. I worked for a software development company from San Francisco and I didn't quit that job until my company got to the point where I have 19 employees. So it was a pretty like decent mid-size.

You were the sole founder at the time.

I was still a founder at the time. And then a partner came in who was much more experienced on how to do business, and he helped me scale it to the U.S. But I then realized that in any service business, especially custom software development, that you cannot, in order for you to go bigger, you need to acquire companies. And then we had our first acquisition of a managed cloud company. And we just started and that was extremely stressful again because you're working with people you're changing management and I was like in the bits of all of that and I just realized that I don't want to do that anymore like on a big scale and I cannot see myself doing that for the next 10 years because I already spent 10 years doing it and I had a lot of friends doing doing very efficient things where they had five to ten employees and managing huge sums of money or in some cases just leveraging the technology around them so they have all the support and they're selling products like crazy on some e-comm on a global level. And I just said, okay, it's enough. And I didn't sell, it was not external exit, it It was internalized, so I sold to my business partner the stake, and we arranged a deal where I'm still involved in the business as a consultant. But it just made sense. And again, nothing crazy. It was not like crazy, but again, have in mind that in the business where we set it up in a way that I had, I think, the most amazing life anybody can have from the position where I started. And also, that's a huge, it's very relevant to where you start. Because I met a lot of very depressing people that started in a very noble family. And I'm also a member of an organization called ICE, it's called Emerging Young Entrepreneur Society, and they're coming to Dubai here in March. And you can see, that helped me understand how big you can build your business with a small team. And especially today, with AI, with everything that's going on. And I would advise all the entrepreneurs not to chase the hype just figure out what you're good at and and just leverage that because if you're the best whatever like software developer don't be a manager don't build your own companies be a software developer at the at the great company that pays you a lot of money that's that's the way to go and all these hypes there was a crypto hype There was a, what do you call it, the JPEGs, the, what was the thing where you buy a JPEG for NFTs and all these hypes. And I saw, unfortunately, a lot of people around me were just going from hype to hype, from hype to hype. And that doesn't end well, ever. I was the one chasing hype in crypto. I lost a lot of money there. And at a time where I didn't have the money. So it was just...

It was more significant. Exactly. It's like a painful loss of time.

And the time, and the effort, and the reading, the documentation, and the going through it, and talking with people. And people don't realize, the biggest asset we have when you're a younger entrepreneur is time. And you don't have a, I mean, now I'm 33. And I can feel a difference when I was 23. It was a different vibe. It was much easier for me. Like now I know more but then I had like much more energy to do stuff and if you invest every two years in the new hype you're losing on average like 50% of your time going some bullshit that will not can we but it's it's it will not end anywhere and just the advice for all the entrepreneurs like you don't need to build like the most successful company ever you just need to find what you're good at and things will come to you for example with this whole uae setup thing I didn't um it just came naturally because I was always interested okay where can I open up a company where can I save money in taxes where can I like leverage things and just advice is figure it out on your own do stuff that makes sense for you don't chase the next hype don't chase where the money is like how many ai chat bots were being pitched every day as like the new thing and it's just like chat gpt covered. Don't do it. Yeah, that's it.

Let's talk about software businesses because we are both from Eastern Europe and Eastern Europe is well known for good developers. When I was growing up, my mom was very adamant about me going into software development and I was interested in economics, investments, so we found a compromise. I did a financial programming course course but there were many guys and girls but mostly guys running software agencies. What was different about what you were doing that you were able to scale into the US and what most people trying to start a software agency right now get wrong about this business?

I'll start from the end of your question what most people get wrong is that when you put it on paper Let's say your developer costs $3,000, $4,000 a month. That's the Eastern European cost in general. And you say, OK, if I find a client that's going to pay $7,000 a month, that means that I keep, I have $3,000 margin for every person. So if I have 100 employees, I have $300,000 in my pocket every single month. The problem is that that's never true. And once you start going into details, then you see why it's not true. First of all, you have actually the cost of doing sales, and that's the biggest cost of any of those businesses. Like the moment you start scaling, that goes exponentially. So, for example, we calculated in order to close one enterprise deal, you need to invest hundreds of thousands just to get on the vendor list, not even to get a project. So what happens very often is that you start, you find one or two clients. Clients, one client is a good stable client that's going to get 50 employees and he starts scaling and scaling and scaling and he's late on one invoice. And you have so much on the line for that one client that like that cash flow suddenly starts like burning you up. And usually these companies are built in Eastern Europe where you can very hardly leverage with banks that they can step in give you loans and that kind of things.

So you're on your own, you're solely relying on a few clients and you don't have the bank system supporting you.

Exactly and you're in illusion that business is doing extremely well but it's not and from perspective of anybody who wants to buy that business usually that founder is tied so firmly within the company that if the founder gets sick for seven days the company is on shaky legs. And that's what people don't get wrong. It's like the cost of doing business is actually much higher than the actual margin that you're making. So that's why all these companies, like as the wave goes of the investment funds and the venture funds in the U.S., the number of these employees go up and down and up and down. And that's very obvious because the moment – so I got great advice, for example, how to figure out how good these companies are doing is you just say you want to buy them out. And that's what we were doing a lot of times just like you say hey we want to expand we want to get

Whatever 15 just not just not we didn't need the customers we were doing very well with the with

The sales aspect but you just say hey I want to buy a business and the first thing they need to do is open up their books and suddenly it's not that shiny and we were just doing that all the time and then you figure out that this business is much tougher than it looks like because on paper if you had like one software developer that's really good and had five of his friends and he's making double their salary on a monthly basis he's living like a king but the moment he starts bringing in like mid-level management adding marketing getting sales start traveling meeting clients it just goes down the drain and then you realize when you have 80 people that that you're not responsible for 79 people, 80 people, 80 families that you need to deliver the money to their account every single month. And suddenly it's not so fun to be in that business. And you're not making any. Because let's say that the company makes, in January, 300 grand in profit, and you have 60 employees. So you made like 5 grand per each employee. And then what happens in February is that you cannot take that money. Because why? Because you know in February somebody will be late, you have minus 200 grand, sales didn't go through, you need to go to the US, you need to go to visit the conference, you take five potential clients on a lunch in New York, like it just adds up so quickly and suddenly you're not doing well. So what we did is that we, and this is I think the big advice, is that we scanned how we can do it very slowly and in the most stable way possible. Why? Why? Because again, I'm from Serbia, huge leverage in terms of the talent we can get. And we were just looking, okay, so who are the best companies? It's not hard to find them. They're very visible. Okay, how to get to those vendor lists? You need to be recommended. Okay, how to get recommended? And we just, okay, this is the angle how to get recommended. For example, in order to get a deal with a big U.S. Bank, you need to be recommended by the internal procurement and that these people, you can see them online. These are people there so just how to leverage that network around them and you pay the entrance like basically you pay introductions you pay like you go to consulting firms and they help you get to know that and then you're in but then you need to have a strategy how you're going to set up your business so our strategy was always just get to get the small project and once you're there when you start working meeting those people like if you do a good job they will start giving you more projects And again, this is a multi, like a decade long game. It's not a quick money. So it was just very slow, very painful, very day to day, like daily grind. Would I do it again? No, 100%. I think that's the, it's a, when you're young, when you're 19, 20, and you look at the people who are like successful around the European group, usually those are people who have some small level, mid-sized agencies, small agencies who are making whatever, more money than you're making, and you're making none. And that's when you start, again, aiming in the direction with just no plan. And then you're 45, 40, and you're still in the same business. You still didn't make any money. You're still super, like you're living super unhealthy lifestyle. You're stressed about everybody around you. I wouldn't do it again. Never again. I mean, I mean, I told myself that after this service business, I'm no longer looking to be in that type of business because it's not scalable. And that's the only difference is it's not scalable. And you can see it so clearly today with e-commerce that one guy can make $20,000 a month by himself. And that life that he's going to have with that, that expertise that he's going to have with that is amazing. Of course, he's going to try to go to $100,000 and he'll fail. But that's fine and there's so many better ways to leverage your skill set than to open up an agency.

That because of AI developing software, my costs are gonna be close to zero, then I charge a client 7K and I pocket the whole 7K. But what you're saying is in a software development business, the best majority of effort and success is in the sales and building the relationships and the protocol behind, not just delivering the product, but also getting the customers.

And just 100%, but on your first point, if that is true that you can just have AI writing code for you and you can pocket a person's salary per month, do you really think that those companies are that stupid? That your client is that dumb? People always underestimate how the client sees you. That's why these business relationships break all the time. We never lost a client. Well, I had a company. Never. Because we invested so much into the relationship. And the moment you think that you want to, like, fool, in a way, your client, you're done. And code is becoming a commodity. Developers are not going anywhere. It's just a different way of how they do business. We will not need that many developers, but we'll always need the good developers. And AI is useful but not amazing. Like it's not, it doesn't do wonders. Because now you have, for example, whenever we try to build something completely out of AI, we spend more time fixing, figuring it out, like what was went wrong in the development of that from the AI standpoint.

Tell me more about that. How did you start leveraging AI in delivering your client product?

Your employees start doing it by themselves. Sauce. If you have a software development company and really think that your own people are not using all the AI tools that will help them be faster, you're just not in the right business. And we welcomed it because if that's going to help us deliver better service, that's amazing. Faster quicker everything is better but the problem is then that if you have a I writing the whole code and then you need to deploy it and there are some bugs and you need to do a new version and she's like they're adding things things on top you're gonna get a smush of code and then you need to have people looking at code forever to figure out like what went wrong so you cannot rely rely on AI completely. It can help you, but it will not do the work for you. Maybe in the future, but I really don't think so. And when you see all these models, they're not, I mean, they're good, of course, but this latest JGPD is not that better from the previous JGPD. In some areas, yes, but it's not a game changer. Do we now live really that differently from two years ago?

Well, most average, most regular people, they are not very involved in the AI gold rush as much as people on Twitter think.

And people are freaking out about all these bots and stuff. Like, it's great. Like, if you have all these robots doing stuff for you, like, we need labor. Like, it would be great to have, like, in my hometown, we need doctors. Like, you know, send these robots.

Real people, you know, for doing the service work and build relationships, for that matter, in sales. If you were to start a business around software right now, you said you wouldn't do the same thing. Have you ever considered creating a venture builder? Why I mentioned this? You own the customer relationships. So you understood very well what those large American businesses want in terms of software. And now with AI, again, what's very common, something you can hear online, is people want to build products themselves, all in the software, and expand the client list to some subscription-based services, and something in this realm. Have you ever thought about following that path?

I don't think I have the skill set for that. I think that's the main reason for it. Because I'm extremely good at, I'm not a software developer. I'm very good at deal making, sales, and just figuring out like how to hack a certain system. But that multi-software setup, I was never into it. I saw many people doing it very successfully actually, but I think just my skill set is not there. So no, not really. I think you should know your strengths this was the one of the topics that I had yeah and is that there are endless ways how to make good money endless ways and especially today and you need to find where you're good at and stick to it I have for example a lot of people like serbian I have a lot of people in trucking industry in the us they're making crazy crazy money with trucks nothing fancy you have a drivers you have dispatchers and you move stuff around the US I made why because they're good at it they're good at that type of logistics type of work and not everybody should go to software and just know your strengths stick to it I fell in love with these tax loopholes there I'm not trying to distribute to everybody but yeah just find your strengths

In your journey of managing your capital?

Well.

Give us the good, the bad, and the ugly.

So the good is that finally I realized that any true capital appreciation or a capital growth comes slowly. That's the biggest lesson by far. Nothing comes overnight. One year goes up a lot, it's not good. But just don't expect for miracles to happen. And if you are not fully, again, time. Like if you're not fully invested and you're not an active investor or actively active hedge fund manager, don't try to beat the system or beat the market or anything. Just invest in the most safest thing. World's greatest 1,000 companies, 500 companies, whatever you want to do, any index fund that you can do it, just go there. Why? Why? Because if Coca-Cola and Deloitte and Nvidia and Tesla and Microsoft suddenly go to zero, the world is ending. It's not possible that that can happen just by itself. So these companies, if the world continues to exist, will still be there. So just put money there and do not think about it. Do not try to make a thousand percent return in one year. That's That's the good.

This is the good.

The bad is that we will always have trends. Now it's the AI trend, and now it's more and more people are getting into the stock market, of course, like listening to all this pitching and trading and a bunch of different things. And I think that's inevitable in terms of that. That will always happen, and just try to be disciplined and not follow the hype, and many people cannot do it. I was the one who was not able to do it when the crypto thing happened. And that's the ugly part is that you cannot, it's very hard to earn money and very easy to lose it if you don't know what you're doing. And with all these trends and how you can invest your capital, how you can put money in, it's really not going well. And the ugly is that I lost like 30 grand when 30 grand meant a lot to me. I lost 30 grand in crypto just like literally overnight. Night like just like I was not rock pulled or anything just like shitty coin or whatever and my friends were like oh my god it's gonna be the greatest thing ever we're gonna change like how people use internet and blah blah I was like oh my god great like I put some money in it and it went up and I was like up like 400% but I wanted to be a thousand percent up and it's like and I lost everything and again it was it was very stupid but a big lesson learned there Big lesson. And also with anything. For example, now everybody wants to buy a property in Dubai. That's like the new thing. And off-plan is more expensive than the ready properties. And just if you don't know about it, just look at the incentives of all the people who are saying this. If you speak with any real estate professional here, they will say, like, buy off-plan. Why? Because they make 6% commission off-plan.

And they will convince you that when you buy real estate... Everything will go up yeah you will be able to earn so much more yeah exactly and you put like

A bit of money every month and then you get the property and you can sell it before it's done and that and it's the same as crypto if you remember when people were telling speed talking and pitching crypto coins like you buy now and like the coin goes up and you sell it to the next one and and now it's just property and like of course there's demand there's everything everything's going well but it's like if you don't know the market and this was my point like if you don't know what you're doing and you really don't have people around you and you spoke with only one person who's pitching you that just don't do it so it's very very hard to make money and your biggest and they've been just said this is so sure like you're your biggest vehicle of like your own wealth generation is your own income so do whatever you can to increase your own cash flow every month and the rest be very careful about just like invest slowly So I do something that's very basic because I don't need to think about it. I have an Excel sheet that basically says how much money I need per month and that money is on the left column and on the right is how much I make and what is the between is what I invest and I invest 50% of it. So I have a play fund, so I have what money I need per month, how much I make, and the difference is 50% is invested. That's invested between gold, crypto, bitcoin and ETFs. Very simple, nothing crazy. And ETFs, the majority, like 80% is ETFs, 10% is bitcoin and 10% is gold. And that's it.

So it's very consistent, very stable approach. Every month. Just ensure you don't lose money. Because as entrepreneurs, sometimes, for example,

And everybody entrepreneur knows this, sometimes you don't make that money. You have no money to invest. If you need $20,000 a month to live your life and you make $20,000, you're not going to invest in it. But if you make $40,000, you're going to invest $10,000. Because the difference is $20,000 from what you need to what you made. And then invest half of it. And half, just put it on the side. Have it as a fun. You need to spend money as well. You need to enjoy life.

Do you own a supercar?

Actually, I like to drive them, but in Dubai, I actually see no point of owning a supercar. Like, you're stuck in traffic all the time. I do not, I have a driver, I do not go with, I don't drive. I don't see a point of driving in Dubai. Because in Dubai, you see all these supercars, but in reality, you're stuck in traffic four hours a day. And if you're going to be in traffic for two to four hours a day, sit in the back and do your work. I think just much more sleep, whatever. Don't be nervous about it. And that's why I don't like, yeah, I don't own a car.

You're talking about venture protocols and capital protocols. The most important is actually the time protocol. How do you win as much time as possible doing all the things you like and making as much money as possible too?

I think a lot about it is about logistics. So where you live, where you work out, where you, like, just your, like, micro environment. And I think I nailed that because I live in JBR, and people, like, if anybody knows JBR, it's the, you cannot get in and you cannot get out. But once you're there, like, you're not affected by the traffic because you can do everything by foot. And I go to WellFit in Marina, five minutes from my house. I have my family's always in kindergartens around that area and I try not to go out that much to the city and back. And that's why I have all the time that I need. When you ask me when I'm free, I'm always free. Because you just figure out a way how you can set up your life in a way that you don't lose time. And I think people don't realize, like if you go to work every day for two hours and come back for two hours and you're the one driving the car you're losing four hours a day and not only losing your energy is getting drained you're being super nervous you're you know the guys are honking you're pissed about it like it's so much stress and you didn't even start and like why would you do that of course I know why but like the point is like can you live closer to your like let's just try to save time because like it's believing in the world where it's gonna only get gonna get worse you're not gonna have more time in five years so you need to have like your setup now just go to the welfare gyms I think it's exactly what you're saying you go to with the sauna and hey guys, what you do? It's yeah, 100%.

What about wider geographics? When I think about founder protocols, the protocols for people who are driven, who want to achieve something meaningful, do you think it's important which country, which cities they live in? Because we've all come from smaller cities in Eastern Europe. But moving abroad for me was a huge, brought a huge change in the kind of people I'm meeting, the kind of projects they can do.

So I don't know if this statistic is clear, and who said it, but there was a line that 70% of economic growth that's going to happen in the next 20 years is going to happen in 20 major world cities. That's all you need to know. Because that means that if you're not in those 20 big cities in the world, that that whole economic output that's going to happen, you're not going to be part of it. You cannot be part of it. Again, maybe you're some voodoo entrepreneur that builds some crazy stuff and you can do it online from your bedroom. I think 99.99% of people are not. So you just need to be, you need to be in the right place in the right time. Like if you were in New York in the 90s, if you were in Dubai 10 years, and now, if you are in Dubai now, you don't need to be like a brilliant, one of the wizards of whatever you do to succeed. You just need to be at the right place at the right time. And just do good service. Be there, be present, and do your stuff.

Talking about the right time, Alex, what are your productivity protocols? Everyone talks about morning routines, but I think what's more important is the mental frameworks. What do we tell ourselves about us, about what we are set to achieve. So what was the secret for you to stay sharp and never stop going forward towards your goal?

I think gratitude. I'm huge with that. Because again, I come from a very small city, very shitty economy when I was born. 90s, wars, all that stuff in Yugoslavia. And it's just, for example, I have no morning routine. I think a single person can have a morning routine. Routine, but if you have small kids and a lot of noises from 6 a.m., you cannot have a morning routine. So, yeah, no routine. I wake up, my daughters usually wake me up, either crying or yelling or wanting to eat or whatever, and you just get up and you're grateful that you're here, that you have a great family, that you have great friendships, that you have great relationships with your parents, great peers around you, and you do do the breakfast, you make breakfast for everyone, then you do go ideally work out if there's time. If not, figure it out when you can do it. Just not like no, it's life. And all this point, like I wake up at 5 AM, and I'm like, that's not true. I mean, if it's true, then you're a psychopath. I mean, I don't want to insult anybody, but it's not doable. Like if you have a normal life, not running a billion dollar company, but like a normal life, you cannot do it. It's not possible because if you have a family if you have small kids and everybody who has small kids know this you cannot plan your day like your morning there's zero chance either you get up and run from the apartment or house but you cannot plan your day and this whole idea of like what I eat for breakfast yeah sure you can try and give your best but yeah I have no routine I just get up you're grateful you try to take care of your body you read when you can and yeah just don't drink don't do drugs no of course not when I started that's when I had all the time like then I could have had the routine or whatever I was like no I was living very unhealthy very unhealthy life like I was smoking a lot I was just you know when everybody tells you like you need to work out every single every like four times a day four times a week lock in achieve your best self and like don't smoke don't don't go to parties like I know I did everything I went to parties I smoked I did all the you know and now if I could go back I wouldn't change that this was the beautiful part of the 20s like you know all the people in the 20s were like oh I need to lock in like well no just enjoy life like because you you're in your 20s only once and like in your 20s you need to figure out what you want to do in 30s you need to lock in in 40s I don't know we'll see but but people are so obsessed with framework. Just, I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm crazy, but I think I had, you need to save yourself from stress. And one of the best ways to save yourself from stress is to make money. And the best way to make money is to figure out what you're good at. And once you figure out what you're good at, you can be better at making money faster because you're good at it. And then you can add in a bit of healthy aspects of your life and then hopefully you'll build a family because that's the most important thing you can do and once you do all of that you'll be very grateful for your life with daily stress and everything but overall you're going to have a beautiful life and you don't need 500 million dollars to have a happy life that's also a lot of baloney. You just need to figure out what you're good at, what you want, and to have people around you that support you. Because we live in an area where people are committing suicide all the time, they're so lonely. The biggest demographic in Europe is single men with no wife and no kids. Biggest growing demographic in Europe, yes. And something is not good, you know, and what we eat, what we do, how we spend time, what is promoted to us. And I don't know. I think don't put too much pressure on you. Live your life the best way you can do it. Work hard, but figure out what you want to do in life.

Do you think it's important for an entrepreneur to have a family?

100%.

What change does it make for you?

Everything. Focus. Because you think you're so busy, and then you get kids, and then you understand you're not that busy. And then, because people don't realize, like, when you get kids, we think that, you know, when we were in 20s and party hard is that, like, I can do a lot of things without sleep. And then you really understand what means not being able to have a full night rest for six months or eight months or a year. And then you understand, okay, this is a different way of how you live your life. And then you still figure it out. And then you become more efficient, and then you figure out, okay, these connections in my life I don't really need, these time wasters I don't really need, and you just start focusing and building your life in a way that you're focused on providing for your family. And the need to provide for your family is much bigger than the need to make money for yourself and will always be. And that way everything makes much more sense.

What do you tell to people who think that first they want to build a career and then they will focus on family?

Yeah, what, I mean, are they male or female?

Either.

It's a big difference. I mean, I don't want to go into that world of like men, women thing, but you just need to be honest with yourself. Like, how old are you? What's your goal is? How good you really are? And if you miss for one gender, if they miss, I think it's much harder later.

Some things that often comes from men wanting to lock in the career and not wanting to be distracted with family, but it seems like you had a different experience.

Yes, I was very lucky to meet my wife at the right time in my life, but I think, again, the biggest growing demographic in the world is single people with no kids and no family. And I think that's very, very wrong. And why? Because true fulfillment comes from connections that you build around you, not from the money that you spend. And you need money to be safe, to be secure, to, of course, have a bit of luxury here and there, sometimes more luxury, it depends on how you want to live your life. But I think whoever decides that they're gonna just lock in stay single and just make more money and that will like whatever Make them better partner or more desirable like Money helps 100% but try being rich in Dubai and find a wife. I Think that's Pretty girl and find a husband in Dubai. I think it's super hard and anywhere nothing not knowing the Bible anywhere because it's not But if you think you're young and don't have money, and that's preventing you from finding a girl, you're not looking for right girls.

I'm also a co-host of Tech Tuesdays, our weekly event here in Dubai. And when I do the community introductions rounds, when I go around the microphone and allow people in the audience to present themselves, One question I ask is who are you looking to meet, who are you looking to connect with here at Tech Tuesdays? But Alex, how about you tell us what kind of people or businesses would you like to connect or attract through this episode? Maybe there is someone in the audience who would like to learn more about what you're doing. What do you want for those people to look like?

So I was only one sometimes and I think that was the best invested 4 or 5 hours of my time in Dubai so far just a bunch of people that are many have to offer amazing advice especially in Dubai because many people are very we all came here, we're not local so we don't know the city, we don't know how things work work. And even if you live for four or five years, you don't know the city well enough as somebody who's doing events for the last 15 years in Dubai. And what the event did for me was, first of all, I met a lot of real estate partners, because I was always looking to find good real estate partners. And that's the first thing. The second thing is that that I found out this beautiful group of people who smoke once a week. That was absolutely amazing. And just a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of banks. Because, for example, let's say that you want to meet five people from five different banks and four entrepreneurs and to meet owners of real estate companies and a guy from a fund that's a local fund that invests one to two million a month. You cannot find that. And you come to Tech Tuesday and they're sitting talking. You just need to find the right angle, how to talk, how to speak, not to be annoying. But I think it's a great event. And people should go for it. Again, you don't know what you can get. I was in a few conferences here in Dubai and I got less in four or five days than I got in four hours in Tech Tuesday. We met there. And I was on one event. So let's see the next events, but it's a very very cool concept by far the best invested time so far

It's all about community after all.

Again, very good and very big recommendation from my side for everybody who come here. Not even to live here, but just come here for a week or two. Come to TechTuesdays and you'll see the best of Dubai. Of course, I mean, of course, there are people selling everything there. But if you're old enough, you very easily see who is interested, like who's there that you can actually like build a real connection with and potentially do business and one of the guys that actually made a partnership with them two days ago from tech use it real estate crew from from Denmark they approached me and they were like hey do you smoke yes smoking cigars yes yes smoking cigars and we yeah we met and then we went to Hamptons here it's Habna's Cafe and build a partnership for many, hopefully many years to come. Because again, many of my clients slash employees that are looking to sell here for a very long time are looking to buy very nice properties. And again, as I mentioned, if you listen to a random real estate agent, he will try to sell you the angle that makes the most money for him. And I really want to avoid that, especially if I'm giving my recommendation to anybody about anything here in Dubai and these guys are doing God's work in terms of the how they present opportunities the plus and minuses of each location because as you know like where you live means a lot in Dubai and yeah just that happened from four hours of tech Tuesday so go go Go.

I wish you a very fruitful partnership. Any closing words?

No city is ideal, but every city has its peak. And if you need to find a city today that you can move to, that you will be welcome to, where you'll meet a lot of people who are grinding every day and also enjoying life life to the fullest every day, no city like Dubai today in the world, 100%. And as somebody who over the last year visited more than 30 countries and spent a lot of time in the US and West Europe, this is 100% true. So statistics show that many people are moving here, but if you've never been here, come here, and if you want to figure out a way how to leverage your tax options, let me know. Thank you.

Thank you, Alex. Thank you very much. This was Venture Protocol. My name is Anastasia Lukach, and I will see you in the next episode.

Thank you.

Excellent.

You like it?

It's really good. I could tell that you'll be good on camera.

Oh, you see this? You put it like this.

Oh, my God. How long? Two hours? I think this is really good. I mean some parts are just... Blabbed. What? Any notes? No. Can you send me before you put it online? Yes, for sure. Also, a heads up, the timeline is approximately two to three weeks. Okay, so those are the episodes I'm recording. We're looking for the highest caliber person to be the first episode. I'll let you know if it's you. Okay. Please let me know and I'll just go over the video and let you know like maybe some part is just... Yes, excellent. But I think this is really good. Really good. Yes, excellent. Lots of advice for entrepreneurs. Very good. Thank you. Thank you.