9×90 Episode 17

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About this episode

Growth Hacking Across Cultures: Insights from Google, AI, and Supercomputers with Nadezda Kopievskaya

In this inspiring episode of 9×90™, host Adi Soozin is joined by Nadezda Kopievskaya—a powerhouse in international marketing and product strategy. Nadezda shares her remarkable journey, from launching Google’s international billing system and working with PwC to leading projects for one of the world’s top supercomputers and co-founding a successful tele-health startup.

Together, Adi and Nadezda explore:

• How cultural upbringing influences leadership and marketing strategies.
• The power of aligning global teams across continents and disciplines.
• Growth hacking secrets and navigating uncertainty in rapidly changing markets.
• Why keeping the big picture in mind leads to long-term success.

Dive into behind-the-scenes insights from their collaboration on an upcoming international marketing playbook and discover actionable strategies for launching and scaling products in diverse markets.

Whether you’re scaling a startup or leading a global team, this episode is packed with wisdom, humor, and valuable lessons. Don’t miss it!

The Transcript

Adi Soozin: Three, two, there we go. Hello everyone and welcome to a very special episode of 90X9. I was recently hired to write an international marketing playbook, textbook, indispensable guide, whatever you want to call it. and when they told me about this book, I was like, “This sounds fun, but I don’t like winning things alone. could I bring 40 friends from the marketing world with me and they could share their stories that way when I’m traveling I can be speaking with other friends and it’s a cool group. It’s like winning a soccer game together when the book does. They’re like they just have to meet two really high bars. So one of them had to have worked with a Fortune 500.

The guest we have on today has worked not only with Google but also with PWC and then they have to have worked with a hyper-growth startup and we happen to have a woman here ladies and gents who has worked on the 16th supercomputer in the world. Is that what it is?

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. Yeah.

Adi Soozin: And so when she reached out she’s like hey we both went to the same i.e. business school. By the way, I’m of Eastern European descent and Israeli and Jewish and everything else just like We will be best friends. I was like, “Oh my god, this is awesome.” So, obviously, I had to have her come on the show to meet you all so that you realize she does exist.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. Hi Adi. Thank you for inviting me. That’s a really great pleasure to work together on the book first of all and…

Adi Soozin: Of course.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: to be your guest today. cool. yeah.

Adi Soozin: Of course. Do you want to just walk us through a few of the things you’ve done because I know I just mentioned the 16th supercomputer in the world, which is amazing because it shows everyone you’re absolutely brilliant. But just go through a few of the other things.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah, let me quickly explain myself. Originally I came from a consultancy. I started my career at PWC and it was a fascinating journey with a lot of great multinational projects where I started work with Google and I helped them to launch their international billing system. That experience later was even used in LAM to launch the building system there. and that’s where that’s the school where I studied to switch quickly in between different markets and I deep dive into different topics a lot in finance and a lot in starting the new big projects.

So with this experience I entered business school journey and had an experience with my own startup which is three-sided tele health platform because I’m a big fan of sport and I’m believe that sport is something that helps people to be successful within their life to be not only healthy but also to feel the beauty the sense of their life and to use that for multiple fields. So the long story short, we launched it, we pitched it, we won one of the competitions and sold the technology at the very very early stage and then I returned back to big corporates. That’s the point where I helped first the local and now start.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: And no actually is this supercomputer which you are mentioning but our core mission is actually to develop the AI market. We are helping builders to train to finetune deployments to experiment with AI as fast as possible. We have an AI studio, there’s inference as a service and a lot of cool stuff is coming.

Adi Soozin: And you’re originally from Riga?

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah, I was born in Riga. This is in the Baltic. I grew up in Russia. So I started in Spain and I live in the Netherlands. quite wide geography.

Adi Soozin: Riga has beautiful architecture.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. Yeah. It’s treated to be one of the capitals of Latvia. So highly recommended to see that.

Adi Soozin: And how often do you go back there?

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Not as often as I would like to but once a year I’m traveling there. The majority of my friends live somewhere around Europe or…

Adi Soozin: Yeah. Yeah.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: or even in the US…

Adi Soozin: Yeah. That’s the same.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: but yeah Yeah.

Adi Soozin: I think I used to go back once every six weeks and now it’s like every couple of months, once a year. But yeah.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. No, originally I grew up in Russia.

Adi Soozin: So let’s see what made you decide to get into marketing because you’re a Russian Jew too, wait no sorry Latvian Jew?

Nadezda Kopievskaya: I do hold Russian citizenship and…

Adi Soozin: So you identify as a Russian Jew like me?

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yes

Adi Soozin: All right. So, for those of you who don’t know, culturally Russian Jews usually our parents are very much about math, finance, wanting us to do something with numbers. In the US, a lot of us go into real estate. And then every once in a while one of us will stumble into marketing and people are like “What are you doing here? You’re the number people,” and we’re like “Marketing is numbers. Marketing is math.”

Nadezda Kopievskaya: It’s about understanding the market and all the stuff. I started with studying economics and I find economics a very fascinating subject which help us to understand the big picture and that’s actually the angle where I entered the marketing because my first project as I said there were a lot of about numbers actually in the finance part but then that the more I went through my career the more I was involved in launching the new products and that’s exactly where you need to understand the market how big is that what are the trends who are the competitors how it’s better to test the first hypothesis and repivot on them. and actually it’s a fascinating journey because I would say the core success factor is the speed of the learning curve…if the speed of the learning curve on the market and on the testing from the hypothesis that team brings.

Adi Soozin: Yeah, absolutely. So, for those of you who don’t know, if you’re applying to IE business school, you can take the GMAT or you can take an IQ test to get in. So a lot of IE alumni are MENSA or they scored in the top 1% on the IQ test to get in. So when people look at IE alumni and they’re like how do you guys take in so much data so fast, calculate out a plan and you’re ready to go when other people are still trying to find the data. And there you have it. This is what uniquely qualified Nadzda to be able to switch into marketing for a supercomputer and then for these top consulting firms and go through so many different markets around the world, work in so many countries. Now I know people are just super jealous right now…but what are some obstacles that you were surprised to face early on in your marketing career?

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah, actually that I would say a lot is about launching the products and keeping so many different stakeholders aligned. to keep in touch so for example when we’ve been launching the billing system yeah you can imagine that was an international team which was connected where we connected people from naturally almost every continent. and everyone has their own cultural code for sure. We probably were united with the same Google culture code I would say but at the same time we were experts in different subjects, some in finance some in coding engineering the other in the met in I don’t know operations…because it’s a lot about the operations and it’s hard to keep everyone aligned because everyone is expert they know for sure how it’s better to deal with their subject of expert advertise and then when they bring the results and it doesn’t match. So this is the pain point but it’s actually all about keeping in mind the final goal and the final results and finding the key points from each party and bringing that alignment and I think this attitude which I hold since my childhood keeping the big picture helped me in this journey a lot but such a diversified team is a challenge probably that sorry Yeah. Disappointing.

Adi Soozin: I think that’s something that’s like a cultural nuance that a lot of people don’t realize is in my family because my mom’s family is Russian Jews, but in the US stoicism is something that was taught to us from a young age. On my 8th birthday, my mom found photos and we all had straight serious faces. were sitting up properly and we were so proud of ourselves that at the age of eight we could sit in lace gloves properly drinking tea like what eight-year-olds have. This is a very Eastern European way of raising kids and even today I’ll be on a group project with people from so many different countries and they’re wanting to fight over the slowest the dumbest things and I’m just waiting for them to get all that out and then it’s like okay let’s look at the big picture let’s focus. So it’s funny to hear that even though we grew up in completely different spaces or places having that same cultural root has had such a huge impact on our marketing marketing experience.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Adi Soozin: That’s also something that’s a symptom of high IQ if you don’t look at one year. You look at the five to 20 year plan for relationships where some people would impulsively tank a relationship because they’re thinking about the next five minutes. People with a high IQ tend to have these strong business relationships for longer and they don’t get into the petty infighting that you’ll see in natural teams because they’re thinking, “Okay, this is counterproductive. I don’t need to express emotions right now.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah.

Adi Soozin: I just need to wait for everyone else to calm down. So, I’m glad to hear that you have that on your side as well. So what made you decide to share the stories you selected in the book? And I have to say I love how you did it because a lot of people just shared one random story and you went through all of chapter 10’s headlines and you took people through an entire journey. So that chapter 10 is one of the most unique chapters in the book because we started off with your story from start to finish. This is how one company took every aspect of this section of the marketing funnel and this is how they applied it to their business. Now dive into the chapter. In other chapters, we had random stories under each headline that were completely different.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: I think that the core idea of the book is hacking the growth and nowadays kind like if we would remember this first idea keep in the big picture it’s important but nowadays it’s incredibly difficult because we live in such an uncertainty the situation changes completely within one year it might change completely three times four times and just the other key success factor is the speed and how quickly we adopt. I thought it would be really cool with this chapter which is one of the only tools actually for growth hacking to bring on one hand this complete picture but on the other hand to take the hand of the reader and to go through each of the details…how that was and how you could experience this or that tool. So that was the core idea. I hope people will enjoy this.

Adi Soozin: I think so. I think Yeah, I absolutely do. You’ve had a lot of success with diverse product launches from Nebus, one of the world’s top supercomputers to telehealth platforms, AI services, the holy grail of Google, the greatest tech company out there according to some people. What are some of your favorite strategies that you have found work generally well across different industries and different regions?

Nadezda Kopievskaya: So I would say it’s really interesting to see one case if the core thing how people vote for the product or against the product is the money. So the key success factor in any product launch. So you need to find the first clients. and in this journey finding the first clients it’s very easy when people stick to being clients and it’s logical and starting going to the direction determined by these big clients. But the core question is this type of the target audience scale So sometimes it’s not. So if we would think over it, I would say product led growth is one of my favorites where you rely on the clients but you always keep in mind how scalable the target audience is and you observe a lot how they actually use your product and go with the patterns of the scalable target audience. Across the cultures, I would choose this one. And quite often that always but often that might bring you to the segment which does not have that big checks or that big margin but gives the biggest scale.

Adi Soozin: The economies of scale.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Vote for this.

Adi Soozin: Okay. That makes sense because user acquisition once you have the users in, you can always upsell them to something later and their companies are either going to die or they’re going to grow.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly, and nowadays when markets are changing rapidly so much with no boost with our cloud AIcentric platform we constantly monitor more than 200 competitors and every day the market is changing. but that’s fascinating because I’m actually voting for the fair competition. Yeah. Which means that we learn from each other. We actually help each other to develop the markets and as a result if we find a movement strategy.

Adi Soozin: I hate it when we go into a new market and there are no competitors because then we have to do all the R&D and…

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yes. Yeah.

Adi Soozin: It’s so expensive to test all these new things. Whereas when there’s at least four or five competitors, you can just sit back, watch what they do, and then replicate their best stuff.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah, some Yeah, exactly. Some of them become partners, some of them you just share the value chain, the way how you bring the value for the clients overall on the market and you can study. I will bring an example from the marathon. Recently I ran a marathon actually and that was for me absolutely the same story when you run within thousands of other people and people nearby are not those who you are competing with, they are those who motivate you. So I would bring this to the way we look at the markets and the competition.

Adi Soozin: To the startup space as well. Yeah. What are the most expensive mistakes that young marketers should avoid at all costs? Yeah. They’re like,…

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Putting everything in one basket. I would say that’s the most Yeah.

Adi Soozin: “I watched this thing on Udemy and I think we should go all in.” And you’re like, “No, no, no.”

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Hahaha Yeah. Yeah. We made all the resources to be completely sure this should work. Let’s put that’s the most painful because if the strategy won’t work and unfortunately just because of the statistics because of all the uncertainties involved the probability of the fail is quite high. So the team needs to be resistant to test hypotheses then scale if that works good or just retest something different if that didn’t work good. So because putting everything in one basket might mean whether the company will survive or not. So that’s why for me this is the most expensive

Adi Soozin: Yeah, I was consulting at this one company a few years ago and their team was across 13 countries and the head of the marketing department came in and I’m sitting with one of their teams meeting with them and he goes, “Come here.” And I was like, “What’s wrong?” He’s like, “I need you to fix this.” I was like, “Fix what?” He’s like, “Just come here.” So I go into the other room and there’s a laptop set up and there’s someone in the Asian region and someone in Europe and they have this “great idea” that’s going to cost millions of dollars to implement and he points to the computer and he goes “Fix this” and I was like “Do you want to tell me what it is?” He was upset beyond words and just said “No, just fix it.” So I sit down at the computer and was like “So, what’s going guys?” And they’re like, “We have this problem and we figured we could fix it by building out a 13 person team in Japan and it’s going to cost a few million dollars because, we have to get all their salaries, office space and office equipment.” And I was like, “No, you need one web page that only gets traffic via one set of paid ads. That’s it. You don’t need to hire another marketing team for yet another country.” That’s young marketer logic: “We have a multi-million dollar solution.”

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is like you need to go with it. You need to scale the solutions while the idea of the market is actually scales. Yeah. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have focus. No. The team should have focus absolutely but it should be ready as well to test different hypotheses most likely this will be the case.

Adi Soozin: And look at a few different things before you decide on the many startups struggling with international growth.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. yeah,…

Adi Soozin: Can you share a bit about your approach to launching products globally and what you believe is the key to adapting in different markets around the world?

Nadezda Kopievskaya: That’s a really fascinating topic because we went through this with the Toka and the core thing that was of my focus in with the global launch.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: We went through this with nervousness and I would say okay you need to understand the core of the product as of now on the market which was the original one. What are those care pain points which the product solves and for which clients are paying and then okay you have this basket then you go to the other market and you need to find the most relevant and cheap ways to test this because what some of them will work but some of them for sure not and there will be something else like as a key factor which you should add on to the product for the other regions maybe you will have to adjust a bit the target audience.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: 

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Maybe you will have to adjust a bit the channel and for sure you do go through the initial desk research before you go. You do small tests while I don’t know about digital tests before you go there…

Adi Soozin: Yeah.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: but going physically to this market to the conference to business meetings gives a completely different perspective. do your homework digitally the core capabilities test them but then go there and be ready to repeat with that again because while we go into the new market we go for small digital tests go for the conferences and then repeat the project again and that helps to scale the growth way more efficiently.

Adi Soozin: No, I agree completely. Next up is mentorship, you spend a lot of time mentoring young startups?

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Adi Soozin: Especially initiatives focused on diversity, supporting immigrants in business. I think that’s brilliant. I love that. Economic empowerment I think prevents so many crimes like the rising crime rate that you see when immigrants come into a country. Economic empowerment gets rid of that completely and we see that all over the world countries where they are focused on economic empowerment for immigrants their crime rate is just so significantly astronomically lower. So what made you decide to get into that? What organizations do you connect with to actually make that happen?

Nadezda Kopievskaya: So I would say everything that we love comes from the personal story and I should say that nowadays there are several hot countries all over the world unfortunately. And people there face a complicated choice whether they should leave everything to start from scratch somewhere else or they should somehow adapt.

Adi Soozin: Yeah.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: And a lot of decided to go somewhere but usually those who go they go with at least nowadays they have brilliant education they have brilliant experience they might have or have not even the capital and they go towards the board and they can bring through the diversity because they have this other angle that this other experience to this new market something really cool, some really great project products and projects on one hand.

Adi Soozin: Yes.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: On the other hand, if they would have this infrastructure, the rates of their success would be higher. So, everyone would win. So, those people would have higher probabilities to succeed to grow their economy where they came from and to give more space. So, I find this really fascinating.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: 

Nadezda Kopievskaya: I know people who noticed so many projects which went through this journey and now are setting up something new in the other countries. and just sometimes helping to connect those people to some other proper people in this market changes the picture, you just need to have the meeting point for them.

Adi Soozin: Yeah.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: So that’s where we tested and made a couple of events for pitching such startups. and yeah I see the mission behind this project and together with massage we launched a future round initiative and had an event in ma in May this year in Paris. So this is one of how we can solve it but we will see how that goes further. We are just on our journey and in this rapidly changing environment we like clarifying…how this initiative will go further but I find it’s really fascinating and see the big mission behind this. Yeah. Yeah.

Adi Soozin: Do you know Skolkavo, the Russian business school?

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. Sure.

Adi Soozin: One of my friends used to be a professor there.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Wow.

Adi Soozin: And now he has a company called Go Global. Yeah. He’s Russian. He was in Florida then Mexico now he’s in I think California. I should connect you two because… yes remind me afterwards…

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Please.

Adi Soozin: Because I think that…

Nadezda Kopievskaya: That sounds really cool.

Adi Soozin: What you’re doing and what he’s doing he’s actually now doing a Shark Tank style pitch event where he connects startups from around the world with investors. Yeah. I think you two have to meet.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. Cool.

Adi Soozin: So just remind me after just Yeah,…

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Thank you. Okay.

Adi Soozin: I think that would be a very interesting one for you. But All what is one major takeaway or piece of advice that you would take from your story in the book? I mean, people have to buy the book in order to read your full story. they could skip right to chapter 10, but what is something that you would kind of hint about what you shared in the book that could help young marketers transform how they approach marketing strategy today? Yeah.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah, I would say I would put it in this way. So be open-minded and you will have a great variety of things. You will have a bunch of hypotheses. Test them. Just be open-minded and with your flexibility the scalability grows. The more flexible you are, the easier that will be for you to scale because you will find with this testing the hints that will help. So in short I would use this phrase. Sorry the calls are coming.

Adi Soozin: Mine too. final one. What is the best way for prospective collaborators to get in touch with you?

Nadezda Kopievskaya: 

Adi Soozin: Some people give out their personal email. I would not recommend it. So, do you have Kora, LinkedIn, Facebook, whichever one I’ll add to the show notes.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah, I would say write to me on LinkedIn or…

Nadezda Kopievskaya: write to me on Telegram. That’s the best way to reach out to me. and…

Adi Soozin: Telegram. Me,…

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Telegram. Yeah,…

Adi Soozin: too. I hate WhatsApp. I didn’t realize Telegram was.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: I find Telegram more comfortable and more convenient.

Adi Soozin: I know. Yeah. Telegram’s so much more logical. The un user interface is better. it’s a thousand times better. I don’t know why they don’t use it as much in the US. I’m trying to get it not working, but So, Telegram or LinkedIn. All right. Thank you so much for sharing some of your stories. We look forward to seeing you either in the Netherlands or Israel. Do you go back and forth to Israel or you’re kind of just laying low because of all the tension.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: I’m living permanently in the Netherlands. Yeah, I hope I will have a chance to go to Israel for a week or so next year, but we’ll see how that goes with everything. 

Adi Soozin: Yeah. Right now it’s kind of crazy. I took my kids for a few weeks this summer because my mother-in-law passed. So we had to go sit Shiva. We had to go for all of that in the middle of the war in the middle of rockets being fired and they kept shutting off the GPS on our phones so we couldn’t go anywhere…

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. my god.

Adi Soozin: if we didn’t already know how to get there. Yeah, it’s an interesting time to be there. But anyways,…

Nadezda Kopievskaya: My god. Crazy. Yes.

Adi Soozin: So I guess we will find you in the Netherlands.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: I hope to see you soon here. So, we’ll be really glad. 

Adi Soozin: The food there is delicious. Not as good as Israel, but the food there is very good.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Yeah. Yeah.

Adi Soozin: But anyways…thank you everyone for tuning in and we will see you on our next episode. Take care. Bye. Okay.

Nadezda Kopievskaya: Thank you. Take care. Bye. Bye.

This transcript was computer generated and might contain errors.

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