The Sum of Vectors: Building Leadership Teams That Actually Move Forward

In this episode of the Leadership Quotient Podcast, Lindsay Guzowski sits down with Andrey Kostyuk, General Partner and CEO at AAlchemy Ventures, to discuss what it really takes to build leadership teams that can adapt, align, and grow in investor-backed companies. Drawing on his experience as a founder, investor, and mentor, Andrey explains why great leadership depends on active listening, matching the right people to the right roles, and understanding that perseverance only works when it is balanced with agility. He and Lindsay explore why so many startups fail because of founding team conflict, how leaders can think about teams as the sum of vectors that must be aligned to move a business forward, and why uncomfortable conversations early are often the key to avoiding major breakdowns later. They also discuss how AI is reshaping the future of leadership, from back-office automation to agent-to-agent workflows, and why the leaders who will succeed are the ones who stay current, stay educable, and keep learning as the environment changes.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Leadership Quotient, a podcast by the Crucible, where we explore how leadership teams in investor-backed companies are built, aligned, and scaled for impact. I'm your host, Lindsay Gazowski, and in each episode we'll talk with the people shaping value behind the scenes, from operating partners to investors to advisors to State Suite executives about what it really takes to drive performance through leadership. On today's episode of the Leadership Quotient Podcast, I chat with Andre Kostiak, general partner and CEO at Alchemy Ventures, about the importance of active listening, considering leadership teams as the sum of vectors, and the failure of companies due to founding team conflicts. Andre, welcome to Leadership Quotient. Walk me through a little of your history.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

Yeah, of course. Today would be described as a new bank or fintech company. Back in the day, it was just a bank. So after two attempts in 15 years, I successfully exited and had quite a lot of time on my hands. Practically speaking, I was thinking I will be just spending all my time on the beach. Like it lasted for like three, four months, and I got bored and started looking forward what to do next. And I was 41 back in the day. It was a program run by ESA Business School and Georgetown University. And during that, I encountered a formal business angel environment in ISAD. Actually, it was ESADA BA, the first business angel network that I joined, where I understood that, like in a Mollier play, I was always always speaking in prose. So I was always doing kind of angel investing stuff, not knowing the name. And uh that's how I started. Uh that's what I'm doing since then.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

And you are doing angel investing and also mentoring of some of these early stage founders. Tell me a little bit about the leadership lessons that you learned from growing the bank that make you an effective mentor.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

You know, it's uh I would say more or less the same as any other significant size business. It's not very forgiving environment. So you need to be able to identify incorrect decisions fast and uh do corrective intervention fast as well. Or better not to be in this situation. So you have to be open-minded, you have to have a good team, you have to be able to react fast, not sticking to what like uh to the good old ways if they don't work. You need to be educable, first of all, you need to need to work with educable people which can look beyond what was okay yesterday because it may not be okay tomorrow. So it's a good combination, you know, about uh perseverance and agility. As a mentor, I'm always saying kind of don't confuse perseverance with stubbornness. There is a fine line, but there is this line.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

And did you have great mentors early in your career that helped shape who you were as a leader?

SPEAKER_01 4:08

I was thinking about that question long and hard, actually, because formally I would say I had not, but informally there were definitely the relationships which I would define as mentor relationships. Now some colleagues in the field, uh my supervisor for my first PhD, who was also not just a teacher, but effectively a mentor. And that was really kind of unpronounced. I didn't understand that was a mentoring relationship, and that word back in the day was not so well known. And that comes to what mentoring is, but I think that's for a very different and much longer interview. But long story short, mentoring is not about teaching, mentoring is about lead by example and transferring soft skills. That's what it is. And uh I've had those people from whom I kind of uh borrowed quite a lot of soft skills in terms of how to lead the venture. That's true.

SPEAKER_00 5:20

What do you think some of those most important soft skills that you were able to glean that others may not think of as nearly as important?

SPEAKER_01 5:34

One of them is definitely active listening. When you very summarize, when you validate what was said, so that you really speak about the same thing. You know, there's a famous saying from American Army like if you assume you make an S of you and me. So that's exactly the case. So assuming something can be very dangerous. So you need to try to substitute assumptions with data or at least mutual understanding. So, yes, active listening is very important, and then that you need to find a proper person for a proper role. When I was young, I was of an opposite opinion, kind of that any you can train anyone, do anything, and that's that's a mistake. Maybe you can, but it will take a lot of resources, first of all, time, and still this person, if not in its proper place, would be a substandard operator, so to say. We are all very different cocks and we all fit very different holes, you know, so to say. That was a very important one. And ultimately, and that's how I try to operate, it's much better. Again, I don't know why so many metaphors come from uh military today, but that's another one. It's like a new generation missile, and I'm sorry. It's like shouldn't forget. You don't want to guide a person all the time until it reaches the target. You give it this the mission parameters, and then you need to hit the target. Like how you get there within the time frame and the cost frame and whatever, that's upon you. I need to see the target hit. I don't care about anything else. So it's much better to find leaders who can. And again, if you're not like that, you can be a leader. You still can't be a middle mid manager, nothing else. Maybe glorified middle manager, but it doesn't change the substance.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

I think that's a fair point that not everyone is a leader, and not everyone should be a leader in these organizations, particularly when you're talking about some of the more early stage companies, because it requires a lot of people to grow and build those from idea stage into something that can be more profitable.

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Yeah, it's uh one of the things it's risk tolerance. And I'm not saying about being, you know, what would they call a daredevil? No, you need to understand the risks, but being comfortable with taking those risks if they are justified. A lot of people tend to play safe and very difficult to lead in that environment, even in a very stable corporate environment, it will definitely become less stable quite soon if you try to behave this way. Another thing is to multitask and to be able to see the situation from many parts, actually. That's also a very important uh personal trait for a leader, to be able to see the situation not only through your own eyes, but through the eyes of other people in a team, and effectively like doing the helicopter view, like what everybody thinks about where we are, why we are doing that, who supports us, who's against what we are doing, and why, and how to deal with that. And you always need to be able to come up with different scenarios, act on data which are constantly changing, situation of constantly shifting, and you need to change the approach. If you can't do that, it's not it's not even good or bad. But if you can do it, but you try to lead, you are in the wrong place.

SPEAKER_00 9:31

So tell me a little bit more about this proper person for the proper role concept. That can mean a lot of different things to different people. Um talk to me about how you define that.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

You know, uh for me, professional level is not even secondary, it's uh kind of a prerequisite, right? So if a person psychologically is good for the role but professionally not, okay, so we are not in a training center. Maybe it's like if it's there's some gap in competences, okay, we'll do that. If it's just a great personality with zero professional knowledge, sadly, you know, go. You need to go back to school and come to us if we still have a space, we will definitely consider it employment. But uh importantly, we are all very different by design, by birth, actually. Whatever you take, whatever you do, like Myers Briggs, which is not really popular today, Big Five, this ocean model, which is more popular. Disk assessment. Whatever you go, you definitely see one thing very clearly. We are very different people in how we perceive the world and how we process information. And that makes us good for some activities, not so good for others. Again, if you are introverted and introverted, it's not how we perceive it in like in general life. But it's not people who try to hide in the hole. It's people who get energy from being with themselves rather than with the people. Try to put this person into sales, and you will see what nightmare is. And vice versa. You just don't need to force people doing what they're really not comfortable doing on a psychological level.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Yeah, I think that's part of why we started the crucible, was because when you look at leadership, a lot of the assessments you referenced, they can point out differences, but they don't talk about some of the nuances that make technically competent leaders great versus those who may be a poor fit for an organization. And more than that, when you're thinking about in the context of the rest of the team, making sure that all of the personalities work together in these investor-backed scenarios so that people can work together to push things forward, not just know who they are individually.

SPEAKER_01 12:05

That's uh okay, we step back from military thing out and we go back to Elon Musk. That's one of the things which of his, which I'm very fond of, because he was describing how he led the team, and he told me the one thing that remember now. All the 24-7, like you know, consider every person is a vector. So that's meaningful, and then if you remember some math from school, how you add the vectors. So if, and then the very simple, simple graph. If you have four people, very good professional people, who pull their organization with the same force, with opposite directions, you're exactly going nowhere.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Align them and you're just shooting foot to the moon. And that's what a leaders leader does actually. He tries to take all those vectors and align them to the best of his or her abilities, so that the sum of those vectors is the maximum or close to the possible maximum. And this is why it's good to have people who think differently, but at the end of the day, you have to be aligned, you have to commit, or you have to go, because if you're really uncomfortable doing something for whatever reason, you think it's wrong and you don't want to do it, and you need to go because you will be just obstructing the company. If you can't convince people, if you can't convince it, you will be just an anchor dragging at the bottom. Maybe for the for the best of the company, but you know, people have a freedom of will. They want to do it, they need to be able to do it. And you can be wrong. You don't can't should not be forgetting a very simple thing. You still can be wrong.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Yeah, I think that's that's an excellent point. Um, I used to, when I was doing executive search for these investor-backed companies, thought that if you could just uh move individuals around to better align those who would be excellent teams together and could row in the same direction, that you'd probably increase value across all the companies, even without finding new executives. Just move the deck chairs to better create pods.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Well, there's always a better combination, effectively. Out of one of my portfolio companies, there was, I think, an excellent example in the founding team. One of the guys was in charge of all the sales, and he was not a person to lead the structured sales team. He was an extrovert, very sociable, great guy, but he was extroverted to the point when he couldn't build the structure because that was killing him actually. And we had a conversation, and I told him, guys, you need to have someone to structure the sales team and let this guy run big special projects for the company. Like when there's a lot of human touch, where there's like way less structure and a lot of improvisation. Now they have a structured sales force which sells standard product, and he's in charge of uh special project bringing and like millions, so like soon it will be tens of millions a year, like everybody's happy. And he is the happy actually, because he's just doing what he wants to do and is very successful in that.

SPEAKER_00 15:51

And I appreciate that you've helped them find another place for that leader. I think too often companies say, Well, this isn't working, let's get rid of that person altogether, where they lose all that institutional knowledge and they bring in someone who maybe can do it, but they've thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

That's all always a fine line as well, because there could be situations on many of those when the company outgrows a person, actually.

unknown 16:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

It happens quite often. There are situations when just a person is in, like you know, a square peg in a round hole, or vice versa, if you wish. And there's plenty of square holes in the company where this person would be a perfect fit. And it's much easier to kind of move this person to a different position without retraining, with all the knowledge about the company, about the business, then bringing a new person in, spend time training and understanding finally that it's a still around peg for a square hold, but slightly different shape. Yeah, it's a difficult choice to make. There are some obvious situations, less obvious, but yeah, you definitely need to try to keep your talent in place.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

So, how do you help these companies think through some of these challenges? Are you using assessments? Is it your deep knowledge of business and the soft skills that you've been imparted over time? How do you function both as an investor and as a mentor?

SPEAKER_01 17:32

Actually, coaching and mentoring tools for this situation are surprisingly well positioned. And the simplest of those, actually, because what you need those people to think about is not kind of lock themselves inside their own eyes. So, like all those problems normally come from they having only first-person view and analyzing situation through their own lens only. A simple question, like, okay, John, what do you think Paul thinks about the situation? Like, tell me, like, how Paul sees that situation. Like, nine out of ten people start, okay. No, it is still in good terms, it is still cooperative, but again, annoyed and this and that. So, okay, so maybe Paul thinks that this is like this. And you just need to kind of help them start moving in a proper, proper way. So, again, second person view, helicopter view, and then definitions of like what you want to achieve, the same alignment. Like, why are you doing that? You know, very simple questions. It could should not be or could not be even like what they call powerful questions. Simple questions, which they don't ask because it's routine for them and they don't see it from outside. And if they don't have this capacity to step away and take a look at a big picture, that's when they need a mentor or a coach. Just to put them back on track effectively in those situations. It they find the way themselves, and that's our job actually. We're not advisors, there's a different completely different breed. Right.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

So, what are the biggest leadership challenges that you see with the companies with which you work?

SPEAKER_01 19:22

You know, even Y Combinator says that even in the company they accepted and who graduated, if I remember statistics correctly, so those highly selected companies, I think 40% die because of the founding team conflicts. So the challenge is in a way it's technical because what they normally tend to do, they tend to not all, but in many cases, it goes like that. Okay, we friends, we do it together, we create three of us, we share it one, split it like a third each, if four of us are quarter each, and that goes like that. And that's a cardinal mistake that you can make, that's a kind of a land mining, like anti-tank land mining if you should below your business again, going back to military. Meaning that if you do not contribute, do not pull your weight, that's a huge source of discontent in the future. Because people will understand that they are underappreciated, undercompensated. You will know that you are overcompensated, but it's difficult to recognize and give your shares back in a sense. So, like, and that becomes a big, big source of problems, while there is a cooperative game model with the Shapley value, which you can effectively use to understand how much how big a share should each of you get from day one, and that's what we try to explain. Then, like, it's much better to have an uncomfortable conversation about that today than in like two years' time, when the price tag on that decision would be a little bit higher. So that's a challenge for sure. The challenge, what else? It's out, yes, one company outgrows you. It's a very big problem and a painful one. That somebody can't cope with uh how the business that his person co-founded had grown, and he can't actually be useful any longer. And company is still not in the situation where it can tolerate, you know, people just waiting uh there with a healthy chunk of shares and waiting for the dividends to come. So that's also a very big deal. And I think another challenge is coming fast, which is uh what we are doing with all those agency models and the solo founders, and how to. Mix and match kind of the old version and the new version of leadership models. And I think, as usual, people overestimate the impact of AI in the short term and underestimate massively in the long term. But even today, it's a conversation to have. Okay, like whom I lead? How do I lead? Like, what's the right combination between natural intelligence and artificial one? How to leverage that properly? That's a very, very big conversation today.

SPEAKER_00 22:35

I was gonna ask about that the agentic intelligence in the context of leadership. Where do you see the critical skills shifting for leaders in this next wave of value creation?

SPEAKER_01 22:55

You know, anything that can be algorithmized easily, or more or less easily, is in danger of being substituted by AI quite fast. And while speaking, for example, about the whole bunch of financial and legal, I see that as the lowest hanging fruit for AI to be very competitive, not only on the kind of junior level, where it is now like killing the entry-level jobs left and right, but even at the higher level, because you can't compete with AI in terms of like volume and speed of processing information. What we can compete now with is kind of asymmetrical processing, so say, like creative part of that, even in law and finance. But that's not something it can't compete with us in quite a short run. So I guess you will be using more and more of those tools for the back office purposes. Then I think front office purposes come here as well in terms of sales, and we'll see quite soon. I think agents selling to agent. My personal take uh the travel industry is the first one to fall to that because of really highly algorithmic and highly automated one. So it just needs a little push. So when you will be able definitely to task your agent with buying yourself an airline ticket with this and this parameters, and it he buys it from, I don't know, Air China agent or whoever it whoever offers the best and best terms and conditions for you. That's not even difficult to imagine for us mere mortals. But even in like B2B sales, again, B2C sales, I don't think comes later, but B2B sales, it's also quite can happen quite soon. And then you are left with the core of what you affected the building, and then there are the technology being substituted, so chief technical officers, which will definitely disagree with me, and I'm not thinking that will happen anytime really soon. But CTOs can also become a kind of thing of the past, and finally you end up in a way when you kind of a solo founder with plenty of tools. Okay, don't ask me if solo founders are substituted by another AI. Indeed. But yes, that we are already on this track when we need less people initially uh junior roles, then it will be like mid-office roles, and finally we will be speaking about some roles in C-suite which can be substituted, and if they can, they will be.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

I think we all have to prepare for that future and understand how we we fit into that. Um, in wrapping up here, what advice would you give to business leaders who are hoping to grow their companies, hoping to be a part of this investor-backed ecosystem? What's your best advice from a leadership perspective?

SPEAKER_01 26:25

I think it's still the same. One can learn. Even in the age of AI, what I see as a mentor, as a teacher, that you know, a lot of people approach this AI revolution as ancient Greeks approached an oracle. You come to the temple, you ask a question, you get the response, you don't understand the response, but you religiously follow them. A lot of people work with the AI the same way. And it leads to very ridiculous results. And to be proficient and successful in using this revolution for your own good, you need to have enough knowledge to understand if it hallucinates or not, if it's a good advice or not, if it looks like true or not. So you need to be still be human in the loop. But it's and but you can't ignore it because, as I say, it's not about competitive advantage, it's about competitive disadvantage. If you don't use AI, you are at disadvantage today. If you use it, you don't have advantage. You are on par, actually. That's how it how it works now. And you need to know and to embrace it because you cannot be a ludic of the 21st century. Like you can't destroy AI like those guys tried to destroy those textile machines and stuff. They didn't succeed, and you will not succeed either. You just need to know how to live in this new world. And you need to know how it works and you need to train and educate yourself continuously. Again, I'm preaching what I'm doing because I continuously learn. And I'm sure that it will only accelerate because otherwise you become irrelevant very, very, very, very fast. So, your leadership skills, which are 10 years old, are not as good as non-existent, because on a basic level, what you do, how you communicate with people is still the same stuff. But in terms of business environment, how business models operate today, like five years ago and today, it's like completely different stuff already, and it will be changing even faster. So learn and stay current.

SPEAKER_00 29:00

And that wraps up another inspiring episode of Leadership Quotient. Grateful to Andre for a substantive and candid discussion. To our listeners, if you found this conversation valuable, be sure to subscribe to Leadership Quotient wherever you get your podcasts. You can also learn more about The Crucible and how we're helping investor-backed companies align leadership teams for scale at thecrucible.com. We'll see you next time for more real conversations on leadership, talent, and value creation.