LOCATION: London, UK
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: Russian, Mandarin, English, Spanish and French
CURRENT ROLE: CEO and co-founder, Beamery
BOARDWAVE ROLES: Nextwaver and Mentor
Beamery’s CEO and co-founder, Abakar Saidov, has a good stock of resilience, a natural affinity to change and he possesses what he calls a student outlook on life – meaning he is always curious and always learning.
When Saidov and his brother, Sultan, set out to launch a business that would help people find work to match their qualifications, not their passport, they didn’t think it would become the billion-dollar firm it is today. The pair launched Beamery, an AI-powered HR start-up, along with co-founder Mike Paterson in 2013 to ensure that fairness of opportunity came first – a goal inspired by their parents’ own experience when they moved to the UK. But the route to success was not easy or straightforward.
For the first 10 years of Saidov’s life, the family divided its time between Moscow and Dagestan. The latter is located in North Caucasus and is one of 22 republics that are part of Russia. It is a remote place to grow up by anyone’s standards. But it wasn’t only geographically removed. “Dagestan is part of Russia but culturally it is much closer to Central Asia, Iran and Turkey. In Moscow, I never felt Russian. Kids from Dagestan get bullied because they are not ethnic Russians. As an adult, you are made to feel like a second-class citizen.”
When the family moved to the UK in the mid-1990s, those feelings of exclusion persisted. Saidov’s parents couldn’t find jobs that reflected their skills and qualifications. His mother had been a doctor and a neuropathologist in Russia, but her degree was not valid in the UK. Instead, she became a shopkeeper and their father, a theoretical physicist, had to retrain and take a desk job. “Suddenly our food budget for the four of us was £28 a week. I remember that Tesco Value bread cost 14p. My father couldn’t afford to take the bus and had to walk three hours to work,” he recalls.
“You can feel like life is unfair, or choose to see it as motivation to go and do something about it."
"We saw how hard our parents worked to give us this new life and new opportunities, and we wanted to do everything possible to seize every opportunity
in front of us.” Saidov and Sultan responded to the difficult economic circumstances by attempting to make their own way in the world – and so their voyage into entrepreneurship began.
The start of success
For their first job, a paper round, the brothers lied about their ages. They then used the money they’d earned to open a school sweet shop, swiftly moving on to imported electronics from Japan, perfume from China...the list goes on.
“We didn’t see it as entrepreneurship at the time, we just wanted to make some money so we could afford to do things. Even buying books was too expensive for us,” Saidov says. “I spent a lot of time at the local library because spending £6.99 on a book was too expensive. I think this gave me such a huge appreciation for the value of money, especially when you earn it yourself.”
When he first moved to the UK, Saidov could not speak the language. “I got bullied because I didn’t speak English. We don’t tend to think of white kids being subjected to racismin the UK. However, there is quite a lot of racism directed to children from Eastern Europe who move to the UK. You are different, you don’t speak the language. Kids can be mean,” he says. “This really gave me motivation academically. I wanted to show them that I could get better grades even if I wasn’t born here. Initially I felt competitive with kids in my class, my school, then my university. Eventually that grows into competing with yourself – what is the best version of you that you can be?”
Learning on the move
At age 18, Saidov relocated again. A self-confessedlanguage nerd, he decided to study Mandarin in Beijing. His entrepreneurial streak, of course, followed him to China. “I had multiple part-time jobs while I was there, including teaching golf to Chinese children. I had never played golf before so the only reason I was hired was because I looked Western.” Ironic given that, for much of his life, Saidov hadn’t felt Western at all. The rest of his spare time was spent trying to sell cement to Europe.
“I was calling up cement factories to try and export it because Chinese cement was relatively cheap and high quality, and if you put it on a ship rather than sending it over rail, you could make better margins.” He failed to make the scheme work but failure is something he has always been determined to see as a positive.
In fact, his move to Beijing was prompted by failure. His baccalaureate results meant that he couldn’t get a place at a UK university, so had to re-evaluate his options. “I think this was the first time that something really slapped me in the face and said, ‘Hey you failed’,” he says. But, while accepting the failure and figuring out other plans, he suspected that he hadn’t done as badly as his grades suggested. After a remark confirmed his hunch was true, he applied to a UK university.
Nothing in Saidov’s life is straightforward. While he left China for a university in the UK, he didn’t just apply to study maths and economics at Warwick, but secured sponsorship for his degree from the Royal Air Force. But the racism that had dogged his life came back to haunt him. “It was just after the London 7/7 bombings and I have an Arabic name, come from an Islamic part of the world, and speak Russian and Mandarin which, they said, didn’t quite fit the profile of pilots at the time.”
The rules had recently changed too,meaning only UK-born rather than naturalised citizens could become pilots.Saidov took no time to wallow andbegan to plan the next stage, this timeinspired by a book that he still cites as having a huge influence on his life: Poor Economics. Written by two MIT academics, the book examines the cycles of poverty that plague some nations. It goes on to explain how access to work, education and healthcare can help solve the problems – something that personally resonated with Saidov.
“Poor Economics really highlighted the birthplace lottery– referencing the fact that where you are born has such a profound impact on your life and livelihood. It was something I really wanted to learn more about. And I wanted to find a way of making a dent in it,” he says. Saidov decided that he wanted to apply for a PhD under the tutelage of the Poor Economics authors Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo.
The year was 2007 though, and investment banking was the job on everyone’s mind. So, he thought, why not apply to the place where everyone seemed to want a job – Goldman Sachs?
To his surprise, the investment banking group offered him an internship at what was an interesting time – 2008, the year of the financial crash. “You knew that you were very fortunate to have a job. And you also knew that you had to work incredibly hard to keep it because there were people being let go left, right and centre,” he recalls. It was, he said, probably the hardest he had ever worked and the two most stressful years of his life. “I think I put on 10 kilos and probably averaged two or three hours of sleep a night,” he says.
The banking world changed entirely too – gone were the bonuses, the excesses and the parties. “I didn’t experience any of it. They wouldn’t even pay for my taxis home when I was working until 3am.”
Saidov was working in the natural resources team when his lifelong passion for tech resurfaced, something that was reflected in the markets: tech stock was hot. He had tinkered with electronics as a child, soldering his Nintendo to be able to play pirated games, and he always sought the next new thing, like the early MP3 players before the iPod entered the scene. It had been a decade since the dot-com boom and bust, and tech was on the up. So he used his student loan to buy shares in Apple.
Saidov wanted to learn how really smart people invested in technology so he joined Francisco Partners, a technology buy- out firm, as a private equity investor. It was an incredible place to learn about how software companies worked – and what it took to make them successful. But it also meant sitting on the sidelines while somebody else built a business. This fired up his entrepreneurial spirit and he began to realise that, rather than backing others to build amazing things, he wanted to be the one driving new technology innovation forwards.
The American dream
Beamery began very humbly in his parents’ kitchen. “We had people working on our kitchen table and in our living room. We had people come for interviews at our house and, if they were coming from abroad, they would sleep over as we couldn’t afford to pay for hotels,” he says. Just a few months after he and his brother founded Beamery, the firm was accepted onto AngelPad, an accelerator programme in the US. Again, Saidov was required to up sticks.
“It was crazy because we applied just in case there was a small chance we would get accepted – and wemanaged to get into one of the top twoprogrammes in the world. They called us on 3 January 2014 and said, ‘You’re in, and you have to be here in New York in four days,’” Saidov says. “It was a big decision to uproot everything so fast, but one we never regretted for a second.”
Once Stateside, Saidov once againfound himself working long hours.“Our days were starting at 4am andgoing on until about 10pm. I hadn’tvisited any of the tourist sights in NewYork – no museums or the Statue ofLiberty. It’s kind of embarrassing to say you’ve lived in a city for six months and seen none of it,” he says. “We were just incredibly focused on survival.”
He admits that running a business has had many tough moments – at one point, he even had to sell his car “just to make payroll”. He recalls having high hopes for investment when he and his brother went to the accelerator programme’s demo day in San Francisco, about six months after they moved to the US. Buoyed by tales of start-ups raising vast amounts of money at such events, they thought this might be the turning point. Unfortunately this didn’t come to fruition and, although they had more than 80 meetings throughout the day, they were unable to secure any capital to continue their venture.
Plans needed to change once again. They had burned through their savings and headed back to London on the cheapest flight they could find, which involved a layover. “We couldn’t even afford a hotel. We ended up staying in one of those hostels where there are 30 people to a room.” It was, he says, a “depressing low point”. Before admitting defeat, their last port of call when they returned to the UK was seeking angel investment from friends, family and former colleagues.
Finding funds ahead
Luckily, they managed to raise just enough to keep the business going, and then secured larger rounds of funding that enabled them to start building the product in earnest. In 2015, Beamery won its first paying clients. But these were small recruitment firms, and Saidov had his sights on large enterprises. “We were torn because, on the one hand, these people were paying us and we could keep building on that. But, on the other hand, that’s not what we set out to do,” he says. “We ended up walking away from those clients, which was really hard.” It was a risk but it paid off: in 2016, Beamery secured its first large enterprise customer, VMWare, shortly followed by Meta (then Facebook).
Today, Beamery is a global enterprise – it has 160 enterprise clients in more than 100 countries, with three quarters being US-based. “We made an early bet to go into the US. In fact, we hired our first US employee when we had only 13 people,” he says. “We recognised that was where most of our market was. From very early on, we had a big US presence. We’re made in Europe, sold everywhere.”
Saidov was determined to bring personal values from his early life into the business. “We lived in a two-bedroom apartment that always had far too many people living in it. We always felt that we were surrounded by family and friends, and everyone was welcome. There was a lot of kindness and generosity,” he says. “That is why one of our important values as a company is acting with kindness. You can have an environment that values performance and where people can do their best work, but you can also be kind and generous.”
Tips From The Top
What are your tips for a successful business?
1. Resilience because there are so many constant ups and downs and, even when the organisation gets larger, people look to you for leadership on how they should be dealing with adversity. Nobody likes a leader who is volatile.
2. Curiosity. You should be constantly asking questions, seeing new perspectives, and seeking to understand those of others.
3. The student mindset, especially for a CEO, is reminding yourself that you don’t need to have all the answers and see every new situation asa genuine opportunity to learn.
How do you relax?
Sometimes you want to be in your own head to think things through and sometimes you want tobe totally absorbed in something. I try to do a bit of both, through reading, long bike rides and going for runs and walks with my dog.
Can you tell us something surprisingabout yourself?My favourite sport as a young boy was judo. Wrestling is the national sport in Dagestan and judo is similar. When I moved to the UK, it was something that allowed me to stay connected to my roots.
Is there a piece of tech, other than your phone, that you could not live without?I will pick two. My smartwatch because I love to track my exercise and sleep, and my Kindle - I take it everywhere.
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