"No more black boxes" with Dmytro Grechko of Deskree

We welcome to the show Deskree Founder and CEO Dmytro Grechko. At Deskree, their mission is to make software development accessible to everyone by breaking down traditional barriers and empowering people to turn their ideas into reality. 

This can be a gamechanger for any entrepreneurs who may have the vision to build an amazing product, but lack that backend expertise. Deskree’s proven 5-step process for building an effective and scalable cloud infrastructure offers visionaries a seamless route for bringing their ideas to life in minutes—not weeks, months or even years. 

The TL;DR? Their solution enables founders to focus on creating amazing products, letting Deskree do the heavy lifting when it comes to technical nitty gritty. It’s an ethos that we mirror in our mission here at Boast as we strive to help  founders drive innovation without burdening them or expanding their already heavy workload. 

I’m thrilled to pick Dmytro’s brain on some of the exciting projects he’s executing at Deskree today, the unique R&D that goes into creating no-code solutions, and what’s in store as Deskree grows.

Boast accelerates the success of innovative businesses globally with software that integrates financial, payroll, and engineering data into a single platform of R&D intelligence.

Visit Boast.ai, sign up for our Blog newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn for weekly #InnovatorsLive sessions and the latest news to fuel your growth.

Intro and Outro music provided by Dennis Ma whose mixes you can find on Soundcloud at DJ DennyDex.

Transcript

Paul Davenport:

Hello and welcome to What the Tech? From Boast AI, where we talk with some of the brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually change the world. Today I am thrilled to welcome to the show Deskree founder and CEO, Dmytro Grechko. At Deskree, their mission is to make software development accessible to everyone by breaking down traditional barriers and empowering people to turn their ideas into reality. This can be a game changer for any entrepreneur who may have the vision to build an amazing product, but lack that back-end expertise.

Deskree's proven five-step process for building an effective and scalable cloud infrastructure, offers visionaries a seamless route for bringing their ideas to life in minutes, not weeks, months, or even years. At TLDR, their solution enables founders to focus on creating amazing products, letting Deskree do the heavy lifting when it comes to the technical nitty-gritty. It's an ethos that we mirror in our mission here at Boast, as we strive to help founders drive innovation without burdening them or expanding their already head at B workload. I'm thrilled to pick Dmytro's brain on some of the exciting projects he has executing at Deskree today. The unique R&D that goes into creating no-code solutions and what's in store as Deskree grows. So, without further ado, welcome to the show, Dmytro.

Dmytro Grechko:

Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Paul Davenport:

Awesome. Yeah. So, I know I gave a little bit of a background on Deskree, but I'd love to learn more about Dmytro. How did you get into the entrepreneurship game? How did you come to find Deskree and what drives you?

Dmytro Grechko:

Yeah. That's a good question. Actually, my story started when I came to Canada about 11 years ago. I came here initially with my wife, that I know since kindergarten, and my small brother who's 12. I was reading a lot of books about entrepreneurship and one day he was like, hey, you read all these books but you don't actually do anything yourself. Why? And then hearing that from a 12-year old, clicked something in my brain. And then we started building the startups. The first one we actually did together with my brother at that time, and it was also called Deskree. The name actually originated from his idea back in the day, and that's how the journey began.

Paul Davenport:

I'd love to know, tell me about the name. How did that name come about? A few different images come to mind when I think Deskree, I mean the obvious is just the phonetic, a tree from a desk, but what was it that went into naming that first business? And tell me a little bit about that first business that you and your brother derived.

Dmytro Grechko:

Yeah. So the first business that we started together was the idea of building a collaboration tool for agencies. And the idea behind that was that for any product to be successful, you got to do three things. You got to learn from others, you're going to collaborate with people and you're going to create. And we imagined that as three desks in an office where people would sit, you're learning, creating, collaborating sessions. That's why we called it Deskree. That came from desks. And this first product we built together, it's also how my engineering journey started because my background was not engineering originally, and me and my brother just landed here, didn't have a lot of capital at all. And we're like, okay, where do we find engineers? Because we got to build the product. And I was thinking, okay, where the best engineers are, well, they'll go to hackathons.

So, what if we go to hackathons? So, I found, there was a hackathon called Hack the North, which turned out to be one of the biggest in North America. And the funny part was that I'm like, okay, to get there, we are not able to sponsor the event, so I need to get as a participant. And I learned that they are looking for people who know the rare programming languages. So, I learned Fortran and Cobol, in basically two weeks, which is one of the oldest languages out there. And I managed to get into it. And there, I met Vinit Khosla, he was one of the presenters and organizer of Hackathon. And I chatted with him and I told him, hey, I basically hacked my way into the hackathon. And he said like, wow, I admire what you've done. If you want to actually build something meaningful, you got to study engineering. It's not about the skill, it's about the method of thinking. And that changed a lot in my perspective. We didn't hire anyone from the hackathon. One thing was I got an invitation for interview for Google, but that was the only physical thing. But other than that, I think learning that engineering idea, engineering mind, was a big impact and that's became my passion and profession later on.

Paul Davenport:

I love how you literally hacked your way into the hackathon. That is incredible. And it shows, I think, that's the entrepreneurial mindset that I think is prevalent amongst founders. They go in and they try to do the hard thing first. I'd love to hear a little bit about that engineering mindset. That is really good advice that you got like, okay, you made it this far, but you got to start thinking like an engineer too. Could you speak to some of the differences between how you thought about approaching problems or how you approached entrepreneurship before you had that conversation? And then how it changed once you gained that engineering mindset and you've got some more of that developer experience behind you?

Dmytro Grechko:

I think the core thing about the engineering mindset, is the idea is that you have a certain set of resources available to you at all times, whether you're a software engineer, hardware engineer, doesn't matter. You operate within a set of resources that can deliver you certain outcomes. And the idea behind the engineering, is putting those resources together in a order or in a shape or form that can produce the most amount of results, in the most effective and efficient manner. So, I think what it changed to me a lot was the idea is that it's not about building the software at all. It's about how you assemble teams, how you assemble your financial resources, how you structure all of that. Basically, like Lego blocks or engineering concept, that helps you achieve your outcomes a lot faster and better. And I think that idea of engineering products, engineering solutions and engineering businesses, that was my whole journey even up until now.

Paul Davenport:

I love that. So, it's almost like pushing you to look through the lens of optimization at every step. So, to your point, even just about being efficient with your resources, it's making sure that you're taking that kind of engineering, I don't want to say discipline with you into everything you do, but that probably is the best way of looking at it. I know that we're going through transitions here at Boast. It's kind of awesome because we're getting people with completely different skill sets, impacting from the top down now here at our organization. And I think a lot of them have that R&D background that is really part and parcel with what we're doing here at Boast, in helping understand what the innovation is. But I want to go back to that point you made about, it's not about building the software, it's about looking at everything you have, all of your resources and using them to the best of your abilities to maximize the outcomes, which that is so awesome.

And I'm going to pull back to the learn, collab, create, and how that is kind of how you came to Deskree. Those are three different desks. It all goes up to one. And that was the original purpose. And you had also mentioned that it was originally a solution for agencies. Now how has it evolved from that original iteration? You hacked the hackathon, you got that developer engineer mindset, to today where it's not just an agency solution, it's a solution for other entrepreneurs to use and other startups to take advantage of. What has that journey been? What does that look like?

Dmytro Grechko:

That's been a long and eventful one for sure. When we started that collaboration software, I remember vividly that we launched it. We grew pretty rapidly, user wise, but we didn't know that there was an idea of investors capital raise or anything like that at that time. So, despite all the growth and everything, we're like, okay, we actually need cash. We need to survive in this country. We just came in. And what we started doing is since we built a software for agencies, we're like, okay, what if we become an agency? Would we collaborate with others and we start building software for people because we're able to build ours. How about we start building that for others. And that's how the journey continued, in a sense, because I started one agency which was mostly focused on marketing engineering per se. I ended up selling that one. But after that, I founded another agency, the idea of that agency was making R&Ds accessible to mid-market organization.

Essentially, if your organization that, in any industry, which is more traditional brick and mortar, from window cleaning, logistics, all the way down to hotel management and so on. And what we're doing is we're creating, solving their problems that they're experiencing their day to day, using technology and reducing the barriers or the spend or the other things. And essentially the idea of Deskree originally came from that agency. We realized that at certain point, our engineers were spending more time on not on solving the problems that our clients were trying to solve, but on creating the infrastructure, running the tests, the security networking, figuring out which cloud to deploy. We had to keep people who know AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, those are different people. And the overall auxiliary part of software development was becoming a lot bigger than the actual problem solving. And that's how we came to the idea of what if we simplify that process and allow engineers to focus on solving the problems, versus trying to create the infrastructure and all the other things.

And we essentially did that solution internally. And then what happened is our clients started reaching out to us and asking, can we use the tool, instead of paying for the service. My original feedback was like, oh, we got a service issue. People don't like the service. But it took me a few months to realize that no, in fact we have a product opportunity. And I remember I came to my wife, and at that time we just got a kid, and I'm like, hey, I have a great idea. We're about to fire all the agency clients, reduce the team size down to five and build a startup. So, that conversation didn't go well initially.

Paul Davenport:

You don't say.

Dmytro Grechko:

Yeah. But later on she got on board and 2021, in the summer, we transitioned, all the clients to other agencies and so on, and we started working on this as a product. And that's how the journey of Deskree of what it is, actually began.

Paul Davenport:

That is so fantastic. That's actually really interesting. We very rarely get to talk to folks who have gone from whether it's an agency to a full-fledged service, to maybe a more tech enabled service, to a full-fledged platform for other startups to use. To be honest, that's kind of the journey that we're on here at Boast, because in that same vein, we don't want folks focusing on the auxiliary parts and for that to take up the lion's share of the work that they're doing, when they should be focusing on deriving a unique solution. It's the ethos of why we help teams maximize their shred outcomes. We don't want them spending upwards of 60 hours working on an R&D tax credit claim, just to cover the wages of their employees who are helping them get that claim. It's just time wasted when you're not problem solving. So, I love that that's the ethos behind Deskree. And I love that too, you pivoted when you saw the opportunity. That's something that I think a lot of entrepreneurs, well maybe not entrepreneurs, but people who fancy themselves as entrepreneurs, but they actually don't reach that level of success, fear, they don't want to kill the baby.

They view it as something so drastic, when you're not actually killing the baby, you're evolving and you are just bringing something better to market. You're getting to the heart of that problem solving that you were talking about. You want Deskree to help those mid-market clients do on their own. So, I just love the simpatico between our business model and what you guys are doing there, and how similarly we're trying to get the actual tech in the hands of the users, but again, without putting the burden on them. Making it so that they can use it, they can get their solution out there and they can see their dreams take lift. So, I love that.

Dmytro Grechko:

And that makes perfect sense. Especially, speaking of Boast, is I remember vividly when we are working with, because we're working already for our clients and every time that when it came to the Shred claims, every single one of our customers are struggling with that a lot because to showcase the proof. Especially when they work with contractors and so on, it was extremely, extremely difficult. And when I actually learned about Boast, it's like it's just clear because the idea makes so much sense. It's not what the company should focus on. They should focus on the R&D and everything, and if there is a solution that helps them automate the person, organize the things around that, to make that claim process and everything easier, that's brilliant.

Paul Davenport:

Absolutely. And it's kind of like getting into the development and the engineering of it all too. It is a skillset that people don't have out of the box and you don't necessarily need to expect them to either. You don't have to be an entrepreneur who knows the tax code but also knows coding. It's not complimentary and it is too much for one person and you miss out if you try to do it all yourself. And you're going to lose that opportunity and lose that momentum, and you're not going to have time to focus on exploring white space, for instance in your market. You're not going to be able to focus on actually talking to your customers. It can become a full-time job and we don't want that to be the case. Now, the unique R&D that you guys are actually doing yourselves at Deskree, could we talk a little bit about what is unique about the platform, without giving away the secret sauce and some of the unique research and development that's gone into building what we have in market today?

Dmytro Grechko:

Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest thing that was powering Deskree from day one, was the idea that we don't want to build a solution that will become a burden for people down the road. So, in our sense that was the idea of if we have a tool that creates the infrastructure and helps people to manage that, it shouldn't be a black box, it shouldn't limit people and people's ability for future growths of their product. So, we envision ourselves to be a first step for people to start working with big clouds such as Google Cloud, AWS and Azure. And the idea was that we automate the infrastructure creation, specifically for them. So, what was cool was initial version of Deskree and still is, is that each project create is a completely independent project within large cloud provider. So at any point, if a user would like, they overgrowing us as a feature wise, and they now need to expand and they want to have access to their infrastructure, we're not holding them back.

They can always access at any point in time. In this sense, we're like the first step to do that. But the second component of that was that lighting moment, was that, when last year we stumbled upon a problem for ourselves, which was when we grew, our entire system microservice based, and we managed, there's 150 microservices that power the system, and that was deployed at more than 50,000 instances. So, it's insane volume. But the problem became for us to manage all this technicality. We looked at it and like wow, for us we're now spending more time basically maintaining the system, than developing new features. And we came up with something that we later on learned that is called atomic computing. And the idea of that is very simple. So, instead of you writing a large piece of code, what do you do is you divide your code base into very small pieces of code, that we call notes, which are basically micro reusable components. And then you can orchestrate your business logic, like Lego blocks, using those components. And that idea, when it came to us, it dramatically improved our internal operations. And then once we saw the value of that internally, we decided to go ahead and launch that and make it available to everyone. That is something we now call ion and it's a part of our platform as well.

Paul Davenport:

That is awesome. And I just get really excited when I hear terms atomic computing too. It's very visual. And on my marketing side, I love when we can talk about something that's deep tech, but I can digest it. That is so cool. You break it out into nodes, it's like Lego blocks. That's awesome. And that is unique. And I also love to that you're not making it a black box for startups. I think that's really important to the folks you're working with. They're going to know what's going on and they're going to be able to touch and feel what their actual solution is. Even if they don't have that technical prowess in their back pocket, it's not something that's completely unapproachable for them, which is so, so cool. And now I know we did talk about working with Boast a little bit and how we helped you learn a little bit about the shred environment and just working on your R&D, and tapping into non-dilutive funding. But can you tell us a little bit about how you actually heard about Boast in the first place and what the partnership has been like since we've joined? I know that the guys on our team are huge fans of yours, so I'd love to hear your take on us.

Dmytro Grechko:

Absolutely. It was very interesting how we came up on Boast because... the first investor that invest in this, was Jonah Midanik from Forum Ventures. To me, I considered this person to be a saint in the startup world. He helped me a lot on, not just on as a mentor or investor, but also as a friend in a sense. And I respect his decisions a lot. And when I call him back last year and he's like, how's it going? I'm like, yeah, we're just waiting for these investment to come in. But we were a little bit short on cash and he's like, have you heard of Boast? I'm like, Boast? He's like, you should talk to them. And every thing that Jonah tells me, I'm like, okay, that needs to be immediately done. And that's how we sum up on Boast. It was recommendation from him and we started working and I realized one thing, there is a huge difference between, I would say an agency and consultant business, or the people that are here to support you, because that's what immediately felt from Boast.

Because every time we would share these struggles that we're going through, let's say on the shred financing side or like, hey, we got an audit from Syria, but I don't know what to do. And the amount of help, on the human level, that we received from the Boast scene was enormous. And I even remember when one of our managers approached me like, hey, there's some people that want to talk to us about shred. I'm like, no, no, no. We have Boast because there's that level of trust and help that we are able to build you. In a such short period of time, it's fascinating. And from all the providers of any type of service and products, I've never seen this before up until this day. So, huge shout out to you guys. This is incredible.

Paul Davenport:

That is so cool. Like I said, we really, really share an ethos with Deskree and that we want to make sure that teams can bring their solutions to market. And you hit on some of the key points that are music to my ears. Honestly. We are a team of technologists. We really, really want to make sure that you guys know that we are elbow to elbow with you, in understanding what you're doing too. And being able to speak that language of innovation that is unique to each one of our customers. I'm impressed by it. I've been here for over a year now. Every day I'm impressed when I see what our technical support team can do, when I see what even our CS team can do, because again, it merges that skill set of being able to speak the tax code but also truly understanding innovation, speaking that technical language.

So, I love to hear that we've been able to help you guys. And like I said earlier, we're big fans of yours, but that's how we feel about all of our clients. I'm not trying to say we pick favorites here, but we've had a blast working with you because we see the truly unique innovation that's going into this. And again, what you guys are doing for the community as well, the larger community globally. I know we're talking about Canadian tax credits here and we're talking about Canadian founders, but it's news for everybody that you really do need to partner with members across the community to get some of these innovations to market. Whether it's for actually helping you do your R&D or if you're doing it yourself, financing it, or if it's a mix of both. Again, go to experts who can help you mix and match, stack those capital strategies, so that you can work with partners across the ecosystem. So, that's me giving a little bit of sage wisdom, unprompted, to the founders in the audience. But before we sign off Dmytro, I'd love to know, what is your take on the current state of steps in any wisdom that you'd like to share with other founders out there, who are looking to get going today?

Dmytro Grechko:

I would say one of the big most impactful thing for me was, when you're a first time founder and one of the things that you're looking for initially, like fundraising, and to me fundraising was an achievement. It's something that make you proud to get this name of the investor on board, or this name. And I think the core thing that I realize is that once you get it, your life really doesn't change, in the sense that for some reason, I thought that when you get large investor on board, all the doors are open for you. Your product somehow by miracle will be a lot better and so on. This is not really the case. The case is you get people, ideally, you get partners on board that have the expertise and knowledge that you can learn from, but it doesn't mean that your product will be more successful.

It doesn't mean that all of a sudden, all the doors are going to be open to you. And I think that's a big misconception that a lot of founders have when they start fundraising and they hear about the startup raise this amount of money from this VC and so on. I think the whole thing is a lot... there's over glorification in that, and I was a victim of that too. I remember second time we did fundraising. My goal was to raise money from certain types of funds and the only reason for that was because I knew the name and that's it. But what I realized, it's not about the name of the funds, it's about the name of the partners and people behind. And actually being able to connect with them because by the end of the day, you're going to be working with this people, you're going to be married to them technically, and for the next 5, 10, 15 years, you're going to grow old together.

And that's what Eric from Hustle Fund said, is like VC partners, you get on board, you're going to grow with them. So, I think that was a thing that was the most impactful for me to digest, is that the funding or VC, it's not about the money, it's about the people you work with. Choose them carefully and know what you want, know who you want to get on board and get the most out of it. That's pretty much it.

Paul Davenport:

I think that's fantastic. And I'm just going to repeat what you said there too. It's not about the money, it's about the people. You're going to be married to them. Again, it's not a romantic relationship, but you guys are going to be going through every single one of the headaches that you would, if it was a normal marriage. And you need to be with somebody who has your back and who also shares your values. And I was very happy to hear when you named up Forum Ventures. I know we're not going by the individual names, not neccasrily the broader names of the funds themselves, but I'm a big fan of a lot of the guys over on that team. They're good folks, they're good people. And I'm so glad that our communities were able to cross paths and that we can continue to collaborate together, Dmytro. I can't thank you enough for hopping on the mic.

Dmytro Grechko:

I think, yeah. The only thing to say is thank you. First of all, thank you for having me. The second thing is, the thing about Boast that I also really appreciate, is the educational piece that you guys provide. And one of the things that happened to us, once we started working with Boast, is the way we're organizing internal operations. It's changing and it changing for very good. And I think that it's not even about the tax credit, it's not even about the Shred program, but it's about... basically the pie product of that is keeping your engineering team more organized, more and more, I don't know, efficient at working and documenting things. So, that is the second part I appreciate and just wanted to bring it up.

Paul Davenport:

Oh, I love to hear that. And that actually is really speaking to some of the new product features that we're actually rolling out too because it is all about making sure that your R&D system is set up in a way that you can maximize not just access to tax credits, but all sources of non-dilutive funding. Not to go straight to the funding angle, but it really pays off. If you are organized and you're making sure that your team is working most efficiently, it improves the quality of the innovation that you're doing to, while unlocking access to non-dilutive funding. So, I'll get off of my soap box, but Dmytro, thank you so much for throwing that in and thank you so much for hopping on the mic with me today. This was an absolute pleasure.

Dmytro Grechko:

Thank you. Likewise.