Meet The Disruptors: Max Firsau and Nick Tuzenko of Accel Club On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
“You need both humility and ambition to achieve great results.”
Humility and ambition are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, we need to be both of that to be successful. Be real and open-minded because we do not know everything and there is always something we can learn from others. It is okay to take a backseat and let others do what they do best. It is equally important to be driven and challenge the status quo.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Max Firsau and Nick Tuzenko of Accel.
Nick Tuzenko is a co-founder and Managing Director at Accel Club. He was previously Managing Director at Busfor marketplace for intercity road trips (acquired by French unicorn BlaBlaCar for c. $100M), and has spent several years at The Boston Consulting Group. He is a multiple winner of international physics and mathematics competitions.
Co-founder: Max Firsau is a co-founder and CEO at Accel Club. He is a serial entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience in e-commerce. He was the founder and CEO of Yandex.Eats and Head of Yandex’ food-tech services (Y.Eats, Y.Lavka, Y.Chef) — the leading food-tech marketplace in the CIS.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Max Firsau:
A mantra I have is to create value for people and the community. Whether it is a service or a product, it should add value to people’s lives by increasing their quality of life or improving efficiency through digital technology. That purpose led me and my friend to build our first startup, Foodfox, in 2015. It was the very first food-tech marketplace with its own logistics delivery platform in the CIS, and was backed by Target Global. Foodfox was later acquired by Yandex in 2017 and morphed to become Yandex.Eats where I stayed on as CEO.
For an entrepreneur, the desire to create and build something new was too great! I left Yandex.Eats in 2020 to spend time with my wife and children, and to work on my next business plan. During this period, I observed global shifts in eCommerce and the economy, and saw opportunities to bring value to consumers in the Aggregator space via improved market efficiencies, economies of scale and technology. I got to know Nick Tuzenko in early 2020 and we quickly realised we are very similar in our outlook toward technology and how we can disrupt the digital economy meaningfully. We envision Accel Club to be more than just an Aggregator. We are a data-driven and tech focused “club” of brands on Amazon and DTC ecommerce.
Nick Tuzenko:
Since I was a child, I enjoyed problem solving and tend to be curious about how things work, and it is imperative that I become excellent at what I do. That mindset and level of curiosity enabled me to focus and master subjects such as Physics, and during my younger days, it led me to partake in numerous international physics and mathematics competitions. This experience interacting with different cultures contributed to my outlook in life and my career. Exchange of ideas and contributing to a community is extremely fulfilling.
During my professional career, I had the privilege to debble in management consulting at Boston Consulting Group, and developed solutions and strategies to business problems. I later went on to become the Managing Director at Busfor, a bus transportation marketplace which was acquired by BlaBlaCar in 2019. Collectively, Max and my journey as eCommerce entrepreneurs provided invaluable insights into the way e-commerce merchants operate and what difficulties they face on a daily basis. This knowledge allows us to efficiently structure our transactions, and to swiftly unlock value post integration and acquisition.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Max and Nick:
We see how quickly the e-commerce market is changing, when classic consumer goods companies are losing online space to small independent brands that provide the same or even more value for customers with their products. We are building a global tech-driven consumer products platform that will offer significant value to millions of customers across the globe by leveraging our expertise in technology, marketing, operations and supply chain.
We choose to instead focus our resources on building an A-team of data scientists, analysts, developers, supply chain specialists and marketing experts to realise the true value of the brands entrusted to us by their founders. Besides unlocking capital for these founders by acquiring their brands, we aim to further unlock the value they’ve created and build on their success to deliver value to consumers through product development, more geographical locations and platforms.
At Accel Club, we have a department dedicated to marketplace efficiency. They analyse data, develop proprietary tools and build customised dashboards using existing technologies in collaboration with marketing and operations departments to optimise sales planning, inventory, pricing, and inform on our acquisition strategy among many others. On top of that, we invest in in-house capabilities for new products and creative development. We want to pave the way forward in enabling online marketplaces to become more efficient and benefit consumers.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Max Firsau:
Processes are an important cornerstone in every aspect of a business. Even the most banal workflow is not to be overlooked. And that common sense is not so common. I learnt that at my first startup, Foodfox, a food delivery service.
Many would know first hand this uncontainable excitement and anticipation of hot crispy crust pizza with all your favourite toppings delivered to your doorstep. I mean, you can almost feel the warmth of that pizza box in your hands as you wait for the delivery guy to arrive.
Imagine opening your front door and you put out your arms to receive your pizza box, and the courier guy hands it over Vertically as if it is a shopping bag! The pizza is crushed and floppy. That is exactly what happened to a customer of ours who happened to be our investor as well!
With that experience, we immediately implemented protocols and training for our couriers, not just for pizza delivery but handling of food.
2 learning points:
- Things you assumed are a given are not necessarily the case for everyone else. Never assume anything.
- When you’re building a company from the ground up, processes are not always in place and that is okay, you can’t wait for everything to be perfect. We learn and improvise along the way. Sometimes we just got to be brave with a touch of madness to make it succeed.
Building a startup can be akin to jumping out of a plane without a parachute and making one on the way down!
When we embarked on our very first fundraising campaign, we didn’t yet have a company name and we had to conjure up one quickly for our pitch deck so we came up with ‘Tiger & Tiger’ in jest. Although we successfully raised a few millions dollars in that first round, we quickly realised that ‘Tiger & Tiger’ might not be the best name so we went back to the drawing board and agreed that ‘acceleration’ best described what we aim to do in this space. “Accel’’ also sounds like excel which is short for excellent. ‘Accel Club’ then became our company name. We are tech and business people so branding is not in our wheelhouse. Of course now, we would advise entrepreneurs to give consideration to branding from the get-go. It is about forming your identity.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Both of us do not have mentors in the traditional sense. In this digital era with information readily available at our fingertips, we all have the opportunity to discover other founders’ journeys, and learn from peers as well.
Max Firsau:
We could talk about what shaped my thinking and helped me embark on my entrepreneurial journey. In earlier part of my career, I joined a startup in the oil and gas industry, and I was probably the #10 employee. The founders were 32 years old at that time, young and dynamic, and they started from scratch. Within 2.5 years, they brought the company to IPO in London with a USD 2.5 Billion valuation. My time there gave me the first glimpse of how to build a start-up and what it entails. More importantly, it left a deep impression about hiring the right people. As an entrepreneur and employer, it is paramount that I enlist people who are team players, who possess the right qualities to move the business forward.
I’m still on this journey of educating myself, keeping an open mind, absorbing ideas and learning about how the world works through observation, interaction and reading resources.
Nick Tuzenko:
Who we are today is a cumulation of our experiences.
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) built the discipline in me to build processes in a systematic manner on the go, to see structure and patterns within massive information and data, and educated decisions.
Looking back, I appreciate the opportunity to catch on to the entrepreneurial spirit from the founder of Busfor. As the Managing Director, I worked alongside the founder and as one team, we propelled the company forward. The experience was very different than at BCG. At Busfor, I gained exposure in what I call intuitive decisions, using data and leveraging sense of the market and experience to make quick but informed decisions. You can only understand how the market works through building relationships with partners and every entrepreneur should know they don’t work solo but in a larger community.
In today’s context, our mentors are not limited to who we know. With knowledge so easily available in the last decade, I could learn from multiple leaders and peers in different industries and cultures, how they make decisions and how they deliver value to stakeholders, customers.
I think as society and the way of working evolved, it is less about mentorship in the traditional sense, but more about talking and engaging different people.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Max and Nick:
The world is accelerating way faster than before, the status quo, “standard” market practices or systems become irrelevant quickly and we’re disrupting this status quo. Though, we must add that disrupting in itself is not the goal.
Disruption also happens in the way we compete with big conventional brands. We cannot compete with them in physical retail stores. But online, we can. Small businesses can. There are already successful digital brands born out of TikTok and thriving. New digital channels and technology change the way the next generation consume information and influence consumers’ needs and habits. Online marketplaces have influenced consumers’ purchasing journey and getting people to trust smaller brands through reviews. Disruption is only possible if we provide more value than existing big businesses.
Brave people challenge the status quo.
For us as a start-up, we believe “disrupting” is to challenge or create a hybrid of market practices in order to be more productive and efficient. The mindset of being flexible and pivoting is important, we’d change the business model if required and to think out of the box. For instance, there is no precedence for the due diligence process in acquiring Amazon FBA brands. We have to innovate, review in-house core competencies and service providers to be efficient with our process, time and cost. When it comes to M&A, the common market practice available in the market is costly given the specialty and tools. This challenge poses an opportunity for us to build something new, to accelerate growth, and use technology and software to expand and interact with different markets.
We are guided by our goal to add value to our community and users, our customers and Amazon sellers whom we work with. We assess how best to meet their needs and demands using technology. It could be creating something new or improving an existing process, product or service. Building a sustainable business model is the goal, from a business point of view. And we must stay flexible and continuously evolve. When people come together with a common goal to contribute to something greater than themselves, it will ignite a change whether we intend for it to happen or not. We are lucky to have a team of dynamic talented people at Accel Club who are not only experts in their fields such as data scientists, analysts and supply chain specialists but are enthusiastic to create a positive impact in the ecommerce space.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
Max Firsau:
- “Diversity strengthens a team.”
With diversity comes multiple perspectives. When a company comprises team members of different backgrounds, ethnicities, cultures, and experiences, they are more likely to be innovative and engage in creative strategic thinking. This is how we are building Accel Club.
- “It is okay to be wrong.”
We all make mistakes, what is important is that we face the truth, acknowledge it and do better.
- “You need both humility and ambition to achieve great results.”
Humility and ambition are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, we need to be both of that to be successful. Be real and open-minded because we do not know everything and there is always something we can learn from others. It is okay to take a backseat and let others do what they do best. It is equally important to be driven and challenge the status quo. I believe this mantra contributed to the success of my first venture, Foodfox.
Nick Tuzenko:
- “Be proactive to the ebb and flow of business.”
As entrepreneurs in a culture of innovation and disruption, we have a tendency to go against the flow. But if you see something is working or a talent is performing, invest in that. It could be scaling a process or giving the employee more responsibilities to grow and excel. Leverage and build the momentum. If something is failing, cut the loss and stop. It can be hard to quit when you have invested so much resources and we want to be different. We were objective and proactive.
This leads to the second word of advice I live by;
- “Do not be afraid to pivot.”
Do not be afraid to admit when things are not working out. In a startup like Accel Club, every team member has the opportunity to shape the company and their contributions are tangible and it can be highly fulfilling work wise. However, working in a startup comes with uncertainty and it is critical for each member to be brave and have the right mindset to join a startup. If over time it has been proven that individuals don’t fit within the culture, we have to come to a point to admit it is time to let these individuals go respectfully.
- “Conceptualize your business to be laser focus”
What this means is to strategically organize your business, articulate the growth plan and enable team members to focus on key metrics and goals that matter. And this is an iterative process. As we grow exponentially and have more employees joining us, and acquire more brands, we structure the company organization into different pillars and performance metrics to align the people and bring focus. We can’t give out long pages of business plan. When concepts are clear, everyone in the company will understand one another, and move forward in the same direction.
For instance, in acquisitions of brands, there are many metrics we can look at to value a business but while we should work the fundamentals, we should not get overwhelmed by details and data, as such we focus on key metrics that matter e.g. sales volume, profit margin, and potential growth.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Max and Nick:
We aim to become the tech wizards in this eCommerce space and continuously leverage technology to optimize our processes, sharpen our marketing tactics and automate our supply chain. To do so, we are now focused on financing buyouts of great online brands and scale them with our operational excellence and generate growth opportunities for these brands which sellers have entrusted us with. Our next step will be to launch new products, which could be digital tools and consumer products, leveraging our expertise and technology to bring the best products to markets. We’re excited to share more in due course.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
Max Firsau:
For me, the book that comes to my mind is “Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time” by Howard Schultz, ex-CEO of starbucks. He shared his quest to make great coffee part of the American experience, his spirit of excellence and principles to create an impactful and sustainable company inspired me to go out there and create something of my own. Well, it did take me about 8 years after reading this book to start my own company.
Nick Tuzenko:
“The hard things about hard things” by Ben Horowitz. He delivers the hard truth on running a business and I highly recommend this book for aspiring CEOs and entrepreneurs. His sharing was easy to grasp, gave insights on how it is like to be a founder (“it can be a lonely job”) and how we can be one small step to success or failure. There is no formula per se to success and as a founder, I make decisions the best I can.
That said, I do think reading and learning of different stories shape the way we think, and different stories give us different perspectives.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Max Firsau:
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” This is a quote from Steve Jobs.
To me, this means you can change the world even if you think you are not the smartest person in the room. You can make a difference.
Nick Tuzenko:
Nietzsche once said “There are no facts, only interpretations.” How true! It is all about perspectives, isn’t it? In life and at work, we can be provided with data sets but it boils down to how we interpret reality and live by our truth.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Max Firsau:
People’s voices matter. Everyone deserves to be in an environment where they feel empowered and feel safe to be bold and voice their thoughts and opinions without repercussions. As more people find their voices and take a chance at pursuing their aspirations, society as a whole can benefit from the creativity, innovations, and positive change that come with it. This is not just in a workplace, but at home, across communities etc. I have 2 young children and I would love them to grow up being able to find their voices to speak up for themselves and for others.
Nick Tuzenko:
I think the world will be in a better place if we can put aside our differences and solve big life issues that people face. This could be about healthcare, financial challenges or societal problems. We are a global community today thanks to technology but we are still very much divided. We can achieve much more together and do good for society if we can innovate and figure out solutions collectively.
How can our readers follow you online?
We’re both on LinkedIn and are more than happy to connect, exchange ideas and learn.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxfirsau/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-tuzenko/
Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success on your great work!
Meet The Disruptors: Max Firsau and Nick Tuzenko of Accel Club On The Five Things You Need To Shake… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
