Liberty Ventures Podcast with Alexander McCobin
The Liberty Ventures podcast explores entrepreneurship, investing, and liberty to empower you to create meaningful impact. Join Alexander McCobin as he interviews accomplished guests to uncover their strategies to overcome challenges, achieve growth, and leave a lasting legacy.
Liberty Ventures Podcast with Alexander McCobin
Polygraf AI Founder Shares How to Build an Empire | Yagub Rahimov
From the bustling markets of Azerbaijan to the pulsing heart of America's entrepreneurship scene - join me as we pick the brain of investing prodigy and trust-building extraordinaire, Yagub Rahimov.
We explore the exhilarating, addictive nature of entrepreneurship and the daunting challenge of finding purpose while riding the entrepreneurial roller-coaster.
Lastly, we examine Yagub's strategic roadmap to success and the instrumental role investors play in growth, including his jaw-dropping story of rejecting a $25 million investment proposal.
🔗 CONNECT WITH YAGUB
🐦 Twitter - https://twitter.com/yrahimov
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/yagub_rahimov/
👤 LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/yrahimov/
💻 Yagub Rahimov's Website: https://polygraf.ai/
🔗 CONNECT WITH ALEXANDER
👥 LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mccobin/
🐦 X - https://x.com/amccobin
📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/mccobin/
🚀 LIBERTY VENTURES
Liberty Ventures is an ecosystem of purpose-driven investors and entrepreneurs aligned on advancing a free and prosperous future.
Join our Angel Investor Network or submit your startup here: https://www.libertyventures.xyz/investing
Try it, put your best on it, hustle forward. If it works, great for you. If it doesn't, you learn something out of it. At least you learn some sort of an experience. Right and learning. If you deduct the L, it's like earning right, it's the earning involves learning.
Speaker 2:I'm going to take that line. Learning has earning in it. That's absolutely on point. Welcome everyone to the Liberty Ventures Podcast. This is Alexander McHobbin, the founder and general partner at Liberty Ventures, and I am just so excited to have this podcast again building up the community of purpose-driven investors and entrepreneurs aligned on advancing a free and prosperous future, and it's really exciting to have one of our advisors, an incredible individual, joining us today. Yaghoub has been a startup executive, he's been an investor, he's got a new startup right now, a polygraph that's doing incredible things. Hopefully he can share a little bit about it with us, although there's a lot in development right now. I know that you're not able to share, but you just have such a fascinating story and background that's led to who you are and what you're doing today. Yaghoub, why don't we just start there? Can you just take a couple of minutes to share your background, what's led to what you're doing today with everyone, as context for the rest of this conversation?
Speaker 1:Thank you, alexander. You're an amazing person. You yourself really appreciate being here with all the Liberty Ventures family here.
Speaker 1:But for me as a person I come from a possibly country called Azerbaijan, born into a Jewish Turkish family, and it just happened to be one of the lucky ones, in a way, that managed to pick the education side rather than something else, and my life kind of turned around in 2005 when the push administration selected me for a program called Flex, a future leaders exchange program to graduate high school in California, and that's where I learned how to trade with my host family, took my learning from there, started trading and in 2008, I made my significant income first time trading gold, I guess, being lucky first amateur, in a way, a time trader and that was actually mostly because of Lobo Tigre if he's around and seeing this and greetings to him, so just a little backward. I met actually I became libertarian personally myself in 2007 at one of the libertarian camps. I got integrated and started learning more and so on. Ken School and Lobo Tigre were just two phenomenal names that actually changed my life in a way.
Speaker 1:2008 came I dropped out of college, made money so why not? And then I noticed that I actually need something more in my life like a purpose, and won a scholarship by the president of Azerbaijan to study in the Netherlands.
Speaker 1:And when I landed in college in there, I just couldn't see myself studying. Really it was very strange and I wanted to drop out again. But this time I couldn't drop out because I was under the presidential scholarship and it would just mess up my life in a way, I guess. So I started a company called Target Signals and it became one of the first social trading platforms shortly after getting acquired for a tiny bit of money, but it gave me the ability to understand how things are working A little fast forward. I joined a broker and turned them into one of the world's top two brokerage firms, learned how the market works from the back end perspective not the front end that everyone sees and identified a few pitfalls in the market that I hated.
Speaker 1:A lot of the brokers would actually play monkey games against traders and in 2015, I left the brokerage and went to create my own figure empire in a way, and one of the first things was buying a media platform called atz4xcom and we created something called A2Z-approved brokerage and so on, and it was a certification program that we certified brokers and sent the results to regulators and so on, and, as a result, majority of the scams in the forex industry started decreasing significant decrease Because regulators basically became a whistleblower, in a way that if you would start to find something that was not nice, that was stingy, we would just report them, with explicit reporting around it, with no financial gain. We never collected any bill from anyone for being a whistleblower we had. We just wanted to clear the water in a way and you may see behind me the word trust my wife, just a few weeks ago, said that you started your first company because of the trust you wanted to give the people the ability to analyze in a trustworthy environment. The second company was built, again on the trust, because we wanted to eliminate the scam, and that was the seven markets group. And now I'm again working on a trust environment.
Speaker 1:It seems like the trust is the word that I'm kind of like. It's my destiny, I guess, and I enjoy working in that field. But in 2020, I came to speak at an event called South by Southwest here in Austin, texas, and they shut down the borders and I got stuck here. Shortly after the word broke out that Yagub Raimur is stuck and he's not going back to Europe, unexpected thing happened and our company got acquired, and then I had an incident with one of the review platforms. I wrote a review and that review got deleted by the review platform and they even banned my account afterwards and I wondered, like I wasn't doing anything like different it was.
Speaker 2:I wasn't the faulty one.
Speaker 1:The company that I was writing the bad review about was the faulty one, and they didn't do anything for it. They just deleted me. I wondered is it me or it's an industry-wide issue? So I went on a development research spree of putting my own money where my mindset was at and trying to understand what's reliable in digital environment. That led us to Polygraph and on Polygraph, right now we are a digital integrity solution with multiple AI protocols developed, like on e-commerce.
Speaker 1:As an example, you can use Polygraph Trust Engine to verify products and reviews and sellers on Amazon, walmart or Best Buy or a few other e-commerce platforms as well. Our goal is to make it to every other platform and it's completely free for the user. On the other side, we are seeing right now IBM, as an example, banning chat GPT because of data privacy issues and so on, and it's because LLM models are one-way world. Whatever goes in it's a black box, but that data is somewhat approachable for everyone else as well if you are able to write the right prompt in it, and we have a vision that that environment should not happen to everyone. So we are now working on that to protect everyone else so that they don't need to trust anyone, including us, with their data, and that thing is coming in October.
Speaker 2:I want to dig into this concept of trust that you've emphasized and you said is almost a calling for you in your life, because in the business world, most people have the sense that business is not about trust, it is about monkey business, it's about taking advantage of people. And yet you've been building businesses your whole career around increasing trust in markets and in the way people engage with each other. Why is that? Why are you so focused on trust and why is that your approach to the way business should be done?
Speaker 1:Maybe it's the circumstances. I would just put it on that, Because when you grew up into an environment that was after the Soviet Union literally getting destroyed and the only trust was in the money, that if you had the money you could buy your way to everywhere and I wasn't born into a family that had the money to buy their way to everywhere and growing up in a way, I felt like I was growing up in an unjust environment. So that might be the reason no one really asked this question to me, but that would be my immediate reflective answer to it. But besides that, once you make certain amount of money in life, your mission starts changing. At the beginning, you start chasing money, of course, but once you have certain amount, it's no longer just making money. Especially for me, that thing changed specifically after I became a dad. His picture is somewhere there, and when you have a kid, you start treating the world in a very different way. You want him to grow up in an environment like in a digital environment that we are operating in right now. Even this conversation is digital, being recorded right now. How does Alexander know that the Yagub that he's talking is not a piece of code, it's a real person. How do we know that the email that Yagub sent to Alexander about some sort of contract or whatsoever is really coming from him, or the contract itself wasn't modified in the middle? And everything is happening digitally right now and we see.
Speaker 1:I personally see a big issue in that field. I'm like, and I was also scammed some three years ago I lost a big chunk of money really, really big and I couldn't. It should have been completely avoided if it was like there was some sort of like a modification of understanding what's reliable or not. But that's the reason I believe that, why trust is very important. Can we make money out of it? By the way, that doesn't make. I'm still a capitalist person. I still like money.
Speaker 1:What we are doing is not just it's not a charitable activity. We call it like ethical investment, ethical foundry. We do it with a mission that adds value to people, whether it's a consumer buying a product on Amazon. How many times do we buy stuff on Amazon or wherever, that you hate it and you want to return it right after it's because of the fake reviews? Can we make money out of it? Yes, we can become an affiliate and so on, and once you're an affiliate.
Speaker 1:When Alexander buys a new laptop utilizing our solution, Amazon will pay us a small fee, but he will also get the product that he loves. So what did we do here? In one example? Here we made Alexander buy the product, save his time and resources, we made a sale for Amazon, and we got also a commission in the middle as well. So three good things happening at the same time. It's as good of a win-win-win happening as it could be. So we are also like capitalists it's not just charitable, let's just do good and that's it kind of thing. Unfortunately, by the way, operating with GPUs involves lots of costs, so we cannot be really charitable operation, even if you want it.
Speaker 2:But what you just started to get at there, I think, is where I would start. You said earlier on in the answer that when you're young, of course you're starting to try to get as much money as you can, and then you start to think about your purpose and a higher calling or that having a kid changed that. But what you just started to touch on highlights that under the capitalist system, people, the best way to actually make money to in order to do well for yourself is to do good for others. It's to have a sense of that higher purpose and to lean into that, recognizing that other people are benefiting from what you're creating and the value you offer them, that trust actually is incredibly valuable to people and that you can build companies around that and make money from it, and so create a scalable, sustainable mechanism for people to build trust that they'll pay for. That is a revenue generating opportunity.
Speaker 1:That's most definitely Like. There's a famous word that I quite often use and it's called what you chase will generally run faster than you can. Right, and in life we generally tend to chase money at the beginning, when we are young and dumb, and that money is never enough. And then it changes. When you build your family you kind of settle in and then it changes when you become a parent completely and during that environment there is one thing If you chase money or just customer with whatever you have, you're just gonna try to build a product, market fit, Like you build a product and then try to fit it into a market. But if you identify something that you are really obsessed about and you understand what needs to be done in that field, then you are not gonna be chasing something. You may be lacking a little or lacking a little in time because you may want to perfect stuff, but then experience kicks in and tells you like fail fast, fail forward, kind of thing. So it's a little bit of all of these things that you've mentioned altogether.
Speaker 2:And so this starts to get into really valuable advice for people who want to start their own company or have started and are thinking about how to build it. Which is the best thing to do from my perspective and it sounds and tell me if you agree with us or not isn't to think okay, what's gonna maximize revenue, what's gonna make me the most money? It's to figure out the problem that other people are facing, that you might be facing yourself, like you, going through the experience of Let me ask you one question before you finish your question.
Speaker 1:Do you regret something that you have started, or do you regret something that you haven't started or you haven't done? Do you regret not having met someone in the past that doesn't exist today? Have they gone to the other side? Or do you regret that you've met them? What would you rather? I would rather to regret to have met someone and not like them and regret not to have met them and not to have known. Whatever the result would be and as a founder right, what would you regret? I would rather to fail, knowing that I've at least tried. I've at least tried. I've at least. But not just try for the sake of trying it. I've done my best, trying it Right. Try it, put your best on it, hustle forward. If it works, great for you. If it doesn't, you learn something out of it. They, at least you, you learn some, some sort of an experience. Right and learning. If you deduct the L, it's like earning right. It's the earning involves.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna take that line. Learning has earning in it. That's absolutely on point. And the most successful Founders, or the ones who are doing it because they love the problem, they love the process of starting the company, knowing that there's no guarantees. Even people who have succeeded in starting Two or three companies before may not get the next one right. But it's just the process that's valuable in of itself. And loving that that process, loving tackling that problem to help other people out, that drives people forward and increases the likelihood of succeeding.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like a drug in a way, isn't it like? If you have been there once and you've enjoyed benefits of it, by means of not not only the finance, but the benefits of it, like the adrenaline that it gives you, it becomes addictive in a way. You you just want to. Once you stop it, you're, you're feeling like something is missing out of your life. It really happened to me, by the way, and I read a post I don't remember who it was by one of the famous venture capitalist, and he used a key term for that feeling cocaine driven champagne rush or champagne driven cocaine rush. Whatever it was like and it has nothing to do with it, by the way, it has nothing to do with neither of the drugs or the name or whatever mentioned.
Speaker 1:Like, once you even exit a company, you start feeling like, oh, I'm the God and so on. Right, you are invincible. And then, as the time goes on and you've tried everything on your bucket list you start questioning yourself like what am I? What's my purpose? What am I doing here? What? Why am I here? Even and it starts like hitting the depression zone actually, it does hit that Faster than most people would imagine and then you start researching again and understanding what can you do, reinventing yourself, and then go upward, upward, upward, until again you find that missing piece inside you. But it's addictive. That's what missing pieces adrenaline, the addiction to to fight, addiction to To to just do your best, like not just, not just everyone can breathe in and out, everyone can eat, but how, how much can I eat, watch TV and just travel, like, sooner or later. The world isn't even that big to continue doing it non-stop. So that's the addiction part. Like I actually find that that post when it was a.
Speaker 1:It happened to me personally in 2020 when we sold the company. It was also like, mostly because of the like being stuck in one place, your clothes and So-called pandemic and so on, being, you know, mind-trigger, tricking you in a way. But, yeah, once the best thing afterwards that happened to me was actually the polygraph. Like I, I, I can't Emphasize the need of it and even if it wasn't it, by the way, we we come from a similar background. You and me we have so-called cross part part in the past, but if it wasn't us starting the polygraph, I would not have a common metric in person, right?
Speaker 1:So it also creating stuff enables you to find similar minded people as well and enhances your. You know, outreach as well makes you a better person and If so long that you have a mind that it's not like me but it's a v-thing and just trying to like you yourself, you reached out afterwards, you know, we saw that we added we are, we are adding value to each other, right? We spoke, I came to you and then I guess whatever I said was clicking to your mind. You reached out afterwards saying hey, by the way, let's continue this conversation. And now we, we are privileged to call each other friends, right. And that's the thing when you do stuff that you find good friends in the process that share the same ideas, same ideology rather than ideas. You end up Building, and all it takes it anyways, is just a village right to to to make your change happen, and you end up building that village shortly.
Speaker 2:That's what I love about the world of business is that it's never about just doing something on your own. It's always with other people, and it Facilitates us finding ways to work together and not just look at things as a transactional relationship, but building friendships and building deep, meaningful relationships that have a business component, because we're creating something new. We're finding ways to create new value together. Now, this isn't your first rodeo with polygraph. You've talked about other companies that you've both been a part of and started before, so what are you doing differently this time? What have you learned from your past experiences that you're incorporating into how you're building polygraph? Now, that's an awesome question.
Speaker 1:I've actually Learned at home. Having to exist in the past. It sounds great, but it's also very stupid. I've done lots of stupid stuff in the past Because at the beginning I Thought that I should do things alone. I had co-founders but we never raised any fundraising. As an example for our previous companies Like the first one was, I guess, lucky shot we got acquired in six months, the second company took me 10 years Before it got acquired and it was very successful company both of them. But now I'm looking back for saying like, okay, if I could have collected just tiny bit of Outside capital not for the capital itself, by the way by the support that I would have gotten from those people, I could have achieved what I achieved in 10 years in probably three years I achieved in 10 years in probably three years. So that's one of the first things that we are doing.
Speaker 1:When we started Polygraph, I started everything with my own capital, built a product to a certain level that I could demonstrate it, instead of saying that, hey, I have an idea. And then we hit the market with fundraising. We wanted to raise $300,000 to $500,000. That was the initial goal and I ended up having $75 million commitment altogether and that gave me the ability to literally handpick who I want the money from. So, instead of $300,000,000, we ended up raising for our first fund raising $1,650,000. And it came from extremely impactful people whom we want to be engaging with Because we have a vision for restaurant industry.
Speaker 1:As an example, I went ahead and collected a tiny bit of capital from two restaurant-experienced people, minn Park and John Leitz. As an example, we have something on government organization side Coming up. We collected some funds from Danny Vigie, max Brown, as an example. We have data masking, et cetera, related happening. So we went ahead and collected funds from Punja Global Ventures. They were actually our lead investor. So we handpicked everybody that we felt like we have a learning curve on. One got the capital, but now, whenever I need help with the stuff that we are doing, it's just one phone call away. They have the skin in the game, in a way, and they support you, they believe in your values as well and they will never say no to you anymore. So that's the biggest learning curve that I've had.
Speaker 2:And this is really important for founders to think about that it's not just about getting money from investors. It's about getting their time, their experience, their network and their insights to grow and to leverage that, perhaps even more than just leveraging the money that they're giving when they invest. So what tips would you have for others for how to leverage their investors? You said that you're able to just give a call to someone and ask for their advice. Is that just the way that you work with them, or is there anything else that you found to be really effective to get their help as you're building Polygraph?
Speaker 1:I'll actually share my story, like how I did it, my roadmap. We created an event series here in Austin called initially called Tech and Tacos, so we would host events here at our office and get people get to talk, not pitch. I did not pitch in the previous round and that way, understand what this person's value is and what my values are. Like Punjaglobal, as an example, they were our lead investor. I did not pitch to them. He reached out to me. I invited them. Of course, I was interested in them I'm not being arrogant about their value or whatsoever so I invited Manmit Singh to our office for the event. He saw the person I am and the values, et cetera, that I was talking about and he said that I want to be part of your journey. And we had a lengthy conversation the next day, 8 AM in the morning, with him that what he's going to be, or what they could be able to help us with, and I fell in love with them. Two hours later the money was in our bank account. It literally took less than 24 hours entirety of the team to settle down and then afterwards we have gone out with Manmit in person. We know each other as friends.
Speaker 1:It's not just the money element, but, as an example, let me give you the other side of the scenario as well. Just, I don't. This is not by means of solicitation to any investor or whatsoever. So we received a $25 million investment offer from a venture one of the top VC funds in the world just a few weeks ago and after reading the depth of the offer and so on, we ended up rejecting it completely Because we saw that we could get money out of it but we couldn't get really the necessary support from them, and also they wanted to get majority board control and this, and that that would mean that we lose completely everything in our company. We just become so-called employees in there. So money is not always the case. You need to find out, especially early stage, that we were in and we are still in. You need to find people that you share the values and they share the values with you. I have on the other side a person like one of our angels. As an example, jimmy Kuhn shot out to him.
Speaker 1:Jimmy ended up literally spreading our words to everybody and bringing us to investors and advisors that I dreamed of. I just gave him the list and he said that leave it with me, I'll connect you, but you still need to make the sale with them. You need to connect with them. So how we ended up engaging with Jimmy? We went out together even our founders retreat that we had in New York a few weeks ago. So we asked Jimmy hey, jimmy, you've invested, you've been helping us, you're pretty much like a co-founder with us, just without the title. We are going there, why don't you come and over with us? So he came and we rented an Airbnb and stayed with all our co-founders in their families in there. He was part of it and now, like Jimmy is even closer to friend to us, like one phone call away. I know you're going to Necker Island as an example, just earlier we spoke, so they are arranging Necker Island thing and right after the New York thing, the investor that Jimmy introduced me and he's also part of our roadmap, sahir Ali. He's like yeah, we are going to Necker Island, I want you to come with us. Unfortunately I couldn't join them because of personal issues, but yeah, that's kind of like the connection level.
Speaker 1:Engage with an investor, but don't see investor as a piggyback. The investor isn't just there for money. They are an investor mostly, at least many of the good ones I'm talking about, not because of their privilege. They are an investor because they have done that, been there in the past. They have made it with other similar founders as you are and they know some of the obstacles. That will look like a mountain to you and they'll help you to make it into a hill, and that's the thing that you need to kind of treat it like. That's my kind of feedback around like and also like.
Speaker 1:Another thing is be strategic. Whom you want to target and how do you want to attract? If you are a founder and you just need money, we have to be also realist. There are lots of people who don't have financial means to start companies and scale it up. It puts them in some sort of like desperate position. They need capital. They're human beings. They need to live.
Speaker 1:So if you are in that shoe, you may feel desperate, but don't feel like you are desperate. There are other means as well for you to raise capital. There are lots of like for us. When we started it, we won grants and we won bunch of subsidies. So look a bit outside like. The investors are not the only way. In fact, actually go to investor when you have to go to an investor. You just go to investor when you don't need them yet, and that way you can also like eliminate your desperation in a way and win value for yourself. They would see that, okay, this is a person who can find his means around without being desperate. This is a person who can be innovative and creative as well. So there are always ways on capital attraction part as well.
Speaker 2:I think that is a fantastic lesson to end on, but I always have one more question at the end of this, yagoo, and it starts from my premise that the best way to connect with people, the best way to learn something new, is just to volunteer to help them out. It's very much in line with everything that you were saying To reach out and say I want to help you in some way, because that's the start of a trusting relationship. So I'm curious if anyone listening is excited about you, or polygraph or anything that you're doing, and wanted to reach out to you and say, hey, I want to offer to do this for you for free, just to get to know you, get to learn from you, to get involved. What's something that you would be excited to see come across your inbox and that you would respond to.
Speaker 1:I would love to see someone use our product and spread the word. That's the main thing that I would say. If you are trying to help, use it and give feedback to us, please and also spread the word, because without us building that village, our ideas are just ideas. Our product is just yet another solution. So we need people to come and share their opinions and we value everyone's opinion, Just like you, Alexander. You have added tremendous value for our journey. When we were even training our AI engine at the beginning, you and your team, you all gave feedback and those are the valuable points. You spread the word. You are giving me the additional help even right now me being able to address to your audience as part of the spreading world, and nothing can be as valuable as that.
Speaker 1:So I also appreciate you as well making it happen. You're an amazing person and what you're working on is self-worth recognition. You're not just yet another person who is. You can also be like many other people right, go, relax and so on but your mission is to connect capitalism with libertarian mindset and make it worthwhile both for investors and founders. You're basically a link maker. You're a chain maker, in a way that connecting the parties together. So I also appreciate you, thank you.
Speaker 2:I can't say how much I appreciate you, yucu. You're just such an impressive, incredible individual. I am inspired every time that we talk. Every time I learn a little bit more about your story and learn something from you in each one of our conversations. I can't thank you enough for everything that you're doing in being the kind of leader and representative of capitalism that we need out there. So really thank you for everything you're doing and for joining the podcast today.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. I'll see you in the next podcast.