From CPA to CEO

Mike Pinkus: Over the last 10 years at ConnectCPA, we've had the privilege of witnessing the incredible journeys of over a thousand businesses. We've been there for the thrilling highs and daunting lows of entrepreneurship. We've celebrated wild successes and monumental exits, and we've also stood by businesses as they've navigated the stormy seas facing Roblox, and challenges that every entrepreneur encounters in their day-to-day grind. Join us as we dive deep into the stories of these resilient individuals who dared to dream, who persevered, and who were a testament to the power of entrepreneurship. This is their journey, their lessons, and their triumphs. Welcome to GrowthTales. I'm your host, Mike Pinkus, co-founder of ConnectCPA.

Mike Pinkus: Today we have an incredible guest, Michael Kravshik, the CEO of LumiQ. For those that haven't heard about LumiQ, they're a NewAge mobile podcast app where you can obtain your professional education. I use the term NewAge because, as a CPA myself, I intimately remember the days, right, that make that dreaded commute to a banquet hall just to get my CPD credits. Michael, being a CPA himself, has enhanced the lives of CPAs everywhere by making professional development more accessible and entertaining. They've also enhanced the quality of the content we all consume by interviewing sought-after guests like Michael Kain from Wealthsimple and investor John Ruffo from Maverick's Private Equity. At ConnectCPA, we've been happy customers of LumiQ for years, and our fully remote CPA team could never go back to the old way of doing things.

During the conversation, Michael, we discussed many things, but three that stood out are: one, knowing when to pivot; number two, knowing how to delegate to your leadership team once you grow to a certain size; and finally, if you're looking to raise money, Michael's advice is some of the best I've ever heard. We hope you enjoy the episode. Hey Michael, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate you joining GrowthTales today.

Michael Kravshik: Yeah, pleasure to be here.

Mike Pinkus: So Michael, I wanted to start off, for anybody that doesn't know about LumiQ, can you just give me the quick elevator pitch of what is LumiQ?

Michael Kravshik: Absolutely. LumiQ is a podcasting platform where accountants and other finance professionals can get their mandatory, you know, continuing education credits through engaging podcasts with business leaders and various subject matter experts.

Mike Pinkus: That's incredible. And I bet you've been asked that a lot of times.

Michael Kravshik: Well, just a couple of times. I mean, if you really push me on the content, I'll talk your ear off for too long, so I try to keep it short. You said elevator pitch, so...

Mike Pinkus: So Michael, we've known each other a while and I know the origin story to a pretty great degree of LumiQ, but I think it's an incredible story. Do you mind just giving your view of the pivot, Luminary? How did LumiQ come about? I want to hear it from the founder's mouth themself.

Michael Kravshik: Sure, yeah. I'll try to keep it short. I mean, my co-founder Berko and I were best friends, and for a while I joined a different startup company, and he kind of lived vicariously through that failure of a startup story, which was, you know, ultimately really important. I think it gave me a lot of the knowledge and, um, you know, a lot of the hard lessons that you learn when you go through a failed startup to kind of be able to be much more successful. So I didn’t found that company, but I was kind of the third person in. And when I left that company, Berko and I had all sorts of different ideas about what we could do, but ultimately we weren’t one of those companies that was like, "Here’s the idea and we’re gonna execute on that."

Michael Kravshik: It was, we want to build a business together, and let’s try to do as much as we can to try to understand what product—how we can get product-market fit before we start building a company. And that was kind of the big lesson that I had learned. The company that I was with prior, they were technologists that had this really cool technology and they were trying to find it. I think the cliche line is, it was a solution without a problem, right? And we were trying to find what that problem was, and that ultimately became my job. And so I learned a heck of a lot doing that. And walking into this, I was like, well, you know, we don’t want to do that. We want to find the problem first and then figure out how to solve it. And boy, we went through a number of different ideas, and the first probably 10 ideas we pivoted through very quickly, through conversations with people to try to figure out if it made sense or if it didn’t.

Michael Kravshik: The one that we like, quote unquote, “started with,” ultimately was this idea that I’ll call “Guys.” And we worked on that for about four months full time, doing as much as we could, talking to the prospective customers and seeing if it made any sense. And I mean, ultimately it didn’t, and it took us a long—you know, it took us that four months to really come to it. And that was probably one of the darkest moments in the whole lifecycle of everything—was, you know, feeling like we just spent four months working like 90-hour weeks, and the solution or the end result of that was, "Okay, we’re done. Do we go get jobs now, or do we try again?" And we ultimately decided to take one more kick at the can.

Michael Kravshik: And what we ended up coming up with in that moment was a job platform focused on passive candidates, like people that weren’t actively looking for a job. And I’ll spare the details on it, but we ended up building that business because neither of us are developers. Like, I’m an accountant, I’m a CPA, and Berko was a marketing guy. And so we couldn’t afford to go and build a product until we really, really knew that it had something. And we really had to take this kind of lean model approach. And that’s what we did with this platform, Luminary. We slowly built pieces of it, tested them in the market, you know, a lot of legwork to try to get some revenue, to try to hire some people and raise some money. And we went through that process for about two and a half years.

Michael Kravshik: Ultimately, we got to about maybe three-quarters of a million in revenue a year in the Luminary world, but probably only... so that was actually from the real Luminary product. The other part of it was sponsorships and stuff like that that we were doing because we were engaging so heavily with the CPA market. And this was—and it has always been—you know, whatever success that we have had is not due to, like, the genius of waking up one day and having some eureka moment. It’s our customers that have really driven our product development. We just spend a lot of time talking to CPAs and understanding what matters to them. And ultimately what we found out was that continuing professional development was a big pain point.

Michael Kravshik: And we were trying to—like, we weren’t scaling Luminary fast enough. We were putting too much work into it, not getting enough out of it. The juice was not worth the squeeze in that moment.

Michael Kravshik: And so we decided to originally find something that we could add on top of that platform—trunk layer more value in for our users. And that was when we came up with the concept of LumiQ, which was solving this CPD or CPE problem through podcasts. And as soon as we launched the alpha of LumiQ, it was blatantly obvious to us—this was a way better product than anything we had built before.

And then this would've been 2019 when we actually put the first, like, market version of it out—in May, I think, of 2019. So it was about five years ago. And I remember we went to our first pitch, and I have to thank the folks at CBRE because they were our first pitch—our first opportunity to walk into a room and to sell people on this product that we had built.

Michael Kravshik: And we brought in a bunch of pizza and we pitched them the product, and in 20 minutes we made a $20,000 deal. And they're still a client today. And when you compared that to, like, spending—God, I don't even remember how much time it would take us to close, like, an $800 deal that was non-recurring in our old business model—it was just immediately obvious to us that this was really, really wonderful. The product-market fit was there, even though the product was still in a super early stage.

And so by the end of 2019, we had dropped everything else and we were fully focused on LumiQ. And that was what, of course, we named the CPD or CPE product that we had built—'cause originally it was supposed to be part of Luminary. That's the “Lumi” part of it. Mm-hmm. And yeah, and then, you know, the rest was just building LumiQ.

Mike Pinkus: That's incredible that you were at three-quarters of a million in revenue, which to some—like a lot of entrepreneurs' standards—that's almost a seven-figure business that you're effectively killing, I guess you could say. Like, you're cutting it off. You're asking it... yeah, like the job court.

Michael Kravshik: But we were losing money on it.

Mike Pinkus: Okay.

Michael Kravshik: Like, we were—we had the team at that point was, I wanna say, like eight people. Mm-hmm. And, you know, like Berko and I were, I think, paying ourselves $20,000 a year, maybe $40,000 a year. So it was tough. It was tough. And we were working like dogs—and we still work like dogs—but at least now the company actually has the lift and the growth that we need.

But we just couldn’t see the future of that company. So don’t get me wrong, it was a really hard decision. But it—you know, this is the most annoying thing ever, ’cause people said this to us before we had real product-market fit. People would say to us, "Well, you’ll know when you see it." We’re like, "What does that mean? Like, screw off. That’s a really annoying thing to tell someone." And then I’m gonna go and say it anyways—because once you see it, you’re like, "Oh yeah, that’s product-market fit."

And it’s never a hundred percent. You’re always trying to get better and better and better. But we didn’t have it with Luminary. And we do with LumiQ.

Mike Pinkus: And you—as you said—you saw it. Like, when you know it, you know it. I guess it's hard to hear when you're struggling. Yeah, paying yourself $20,000 a year, it's hard to know if it's going to come. So that’s incredible that it did come.

And—which brings me to something that I have a lot of respect for you over—which is, you guys have scaled really, really quickly. And from the time that you pivoted to LumiQ, you guys have grown tremendously as a company. And Michael, how many people are on the team right now?

Michael Kravshik: So right now we are about 72.

Mike Pinkus: Wow.

Michael Kravshik: And we expect, hopefully, to kind of get closer to that triple digit by the end of the year. So it's, uh—yeah, it's been a quick... you know, it’s funny, those first three years felt like so long and painstakingly horrible. I mean, amazing in different ways, horrible in other ways, ’cause it wasn’t growing the way that we wanted. And the past five years, when it, you know—it’s like, you know, slow and fast at the same time.

It’s weird to look back on it and be like, “Oh yeah, shit. Like this is a real company now.” It didn’t feel like it for a really long time.

Mike Pinkus: So finding product-market fit was—obviously that was a struggle, took a while, and that was a tough part. But now you’ve found product-market fit. What are the struggles or some of the challenges that—you didn’t just find product-market fit, you grew very, very quickly in terms of year-to-year growth.

What are some of the key challenges you faced? Your first challenge was that product-market fit, but now—growth, culture, a bigger team, new customers—what are some of those challenges that you faced when you started to just expand after finding product-market fit?

Michael Kravshik: Well, I mean, maybe one thing that I’ll say just briefly is, like, kind of the pursuit of product-market fit should be an ongoing thing. And I think we’re always trying to figure out, well, how do we get better? How do we get better? I say this to the team a lot, which is: the only real long-term, competitive, sustainable advantage is knowing your customers better than anybody else. Because then you can build something that they care about, that they like enough to—I mean, ultimately—pull out their wallet. That’s what, you know, you’re a business, you gotta make money. But at the end of the day, if you really spend time—and this is for anybody listening that’s starting a business—my best and only real advice is to just spend a lot of time with your customers.

Michael Kravshik: Spend a lot of time with you, Mike, talking to you. I mean, half of our—more than half of our early investors were CPAs. It was just the people that understood the problem that we were solving. And you just spend time with those people and really understand qualitatively where they’re at.

Anyways, that wasn’t what you were asking. Since then—look, yes, scaling—I mean, it’s hard. Somebody said it to me this way, and I think that it encapsulates it: when you’re trying to find product-market fit, it’s like you’re pushing a boulder up a mountain, right? It’s obviously incredibly difficult, and, you know, every inch is really, really hard. And then you get to this point where you kind of crest the top of the mountain, and the boulder starts rolling down, and now you’re running after the boulder.

Michael Kravshik: And that’s hard in different ways. You know, now you’re making sure that you’re not going to break your ankle, you know, stepping on a rock, or trip over yourself and fall down the hill. And I think those are the kinds of things that we’re dealing with now. Like things that you mentioned—culture. Like, how do you hire people that really do encapsulate the things that make your company great? I don’t have an answer to that. That’s an open question for anyone. I’m still learning that.

One of the things that I found particularly challenging is—most of the people that got you there are really great, like scrappy people. And that’s like me too. Like, I’m not really a process person as much as I’m—

Mike Pinkus: Accountant.

Michael Kravshik: Right? That wasn’t—I just spent so long habituating myself to just doing anything however you could get it done. You know, "good enough is good enough" kind of thing. And you get to this point where you actually have to build scalable processes, and get people to follow those processes, and be attentive to how you’re communicating that.

You know, when you have 10 people, communication is easy. Once—I found it was about 50 people—at that point, you realize that nobody knows what’s going on unless you are very actively communicating that to them. And we continue to make this mistake all the time: assuming people know something, when there’s just too much going on for everybody to know what’s happening.

So finding, you know, like helping the people that got you there make that transition into the people that can operate in this kind of new environment that you’re in.

Michael Kravshik: And also—I mean, maybe this is a big one with me—is like, actually turning my own mindset to changing the way that I do things. And that’s hard because you just get so used to doing it a certain way, and, you know, being able to let go is always a difficult thing. And when you have great people—which I’m glad to say that we have a lot of those people—that I can trust and hand things off to, but it’s a constant challenge. I’m not gonna lie.

Mike Pinkus: That was gonna be my next question for you. Well, you and Adam are doing everything in the early days, and now, yeah—you’re, like you said, at 70 people. Well, you need leaders. Like, I mean, let’s be real—delegation. You can run around and do everything, but you probably wish you had little Michaels running around everywhere where they—it's hard...

Michael Kravshik: Oh, he’s a real pain in the neck, I’ll tell you.

Mike Pinkus: But how have you managed expectations of, like, a leadership team as you’ve stepped back? Has that been difficult?

Michael Kravshik: Totally. Totally. And that’s the thing—it’s not only you. Our leadership team is primarily people that were early employees that were in the scrappy phase with us. And so all of us can only do this learning curve of, like, we have to completely change how we operate. And there’s all these other people now that you have to consider how what we’re doing affects all of them.

And, like, I would not sit here today and tell you I have solved that problem entirely. I think—we’ve moved in a really good direction on it. But I think one thing that we waited too long to do—and maybe this sounds simple and obvious—but was actually come to terms with that. Right? Like, we spent too long thinking that the way that we used to do it was the way that we could continue to do it. And then you start to experience these problems that smack you in the face and make it really obvious to you that, no—this does not work anymore.

And, you know, sometimes it’s some really good people coming to you and saying, "Michael, how do I get you to stay the heck away from this?"

Mike Pinkus: Right?

Michael Kravshik: And, you know, those are often hard things to hear. But when somebody says that to you and you think they’re a talented person—take heed and try to think about that honestly. And I remember, I was just talking to one of my senior leaders the other day, and I remember when she joined—she’s our content leader—she said that to me, about, "Well, how am I gonna get you out of reviewing every episode we produce?"

And I remember I said, "Okay, you’re gonna have to hold me to this, but when I see three episodes in a row where I don’t have a big problem—like, it’s okay if it’s a small problem—but as long as I don’t have a big problem with three episodes in a row, I’m gonna stop looking at every episode."

And she—she’s very talented—and very quickly that became reality, which was great. So I think it’s also just—and again, it sounds simple—but actually coming to terms with it yourself is sometimes the hardest part about it. ’Cause you—I mean, I’m still stuck sometimes. Because everything’s remote and hybrid, the off chance that we get like 60-plus of our people in a room together, you kind of sit there and you’re like, "Holy shit. This thing is like... like a real big thing." And like, there’s all this stuff happening and I don’t know what the heck’s going on.

Like, you’ve gotta trust these people—or there’s no other option, kind of thing.

Mike Pinkus: It’s funny, as I’m learning through these interviews with CEOs and people from our ecosystem and circle—so many CEOs are perfectionists. It’s so hard to let go. And what you were speaking about—the stretch role versus the outside hire. As you go through this evolution, I want to pivot a bit to investment because a lot of this is experimentation.

As you get bigger, how do you think about investment? Because you guys didn’t take the conventional VC path—to figure out, hey, are we gonna develop our own people? And maybe there’s some stretch roles there leading into leadership. But we might have to experiment with some outside hires too. These things all require capital.

So how do you think about investment, and why didn’t you go the traditional VC route?

Michael Kravshik: I mean, if I can say it in one sentence, the best advice that I have around that is: take as little as you can at every moment. For two reasons.

Number one: dilution. The assumption being that the company later will be worth more, and therefore, if you need an X amount of dollars, it’s just gonna cost you less later on. But I think another important component of that was—what is it? Scarcity breeds innovation, kind of thing.

Mike Pinkus: Right.

Michael Kravshik: The less you have, the more likely you are to figure things out in a way. When you could, "Oh, I could just spend money to solve that problem"—when you don’t have that option, it forces you to solve it in different ways, which is great.

And look, there is no right path here. Some companies—depending on what kind of company it is and what kind of founder it is, which I think is a really important element of this as well—the VC path is the right path. A bunch of money, you grow lightning-fast, it's a way to success. And you see that in a lot of great companies.

For others—I mean, again, it comes down to the kind of company. Like, if you’re very capital intensive, of course you probably go that way, right? We were very capital light, at least off the bat.

But I think the biggest reason was just really recognizing our personalities as founders. Maybe it’s the accountant in me, but I always found it really hard to get my head around this concept of, like, I am going to burn significant amounts of money for a significant period of time. It just wasn’t who I was.

And to be honest, for the first—I’ve been doing this now for eight years—for the first six of those years, we were the ugly duckling in the startup world. This was not a, you know, the words that got thrown around—"Oh, you’re just a lifestyle business." And that was meant as a pejorative. It was not a compliment.

And don’t get me wrong—we questioned our resolve around that a bunch of times. But in looking back on it, I think it was just that we had to be true to who we were as founders. And, you know, again, there’s lots of great companies to be built the other path, and there’s lots of great companies to be built with this path.

And really understanding—how do you run the business? You always think that, like, "No, there is a way to run a business, like a right way," so to speak. And there isn’t. There are many right ways. There’s also lots of wrong ways. But you gotta pick a way that speaks to who you are. It’s like—it’s just like culture, frankly. I mean, it’s a part of culture, right?

Part of our culture is scrappiness. You know, my CTO even to this day—he fights me when I’m like, "You have to go hire somebody." He’s like, "No, I don’t." And I love him all the more for it, right? That’s who he is. That’s why we get along so well. His immediate response to things isn’t, "Let’s just throw money at it." It’s, "Let’s figure it out a different way."

And you know, you gotta adjust over time. But anyways, I think looking back on where we are, I am happy with the path that we took.

Mike Pinkus: Do you think you being a CPA and maybe having a deeper understanding of the unit economics—and not to stereotype CPAs as being conservative with cash—but do you think that plays into it a little bit, why you were that way?

Michael Kravshik: Oh, a hundred, a hundred percent. I'm happy to stereotype myself as a CPA because I love— I love being a CPA. And CPAs are—I mean, they’re our customer, and I have to say—they're the most fun people to build products for, for a bunch of reasons.

Number one, they’re all really, really smart, but they don’t take themselves too seriously. And that’s—you know, like, not to give shade to lawyers. I mean, I know your wife’s a lawyer, Mike...

Mike Pinkus: By the way, just to jump in for two seconds, Michael, we’ve been a customer at ConnectCPA of LumiQ for years. And by the way, I remember driving to those banquet halls, sitting at the back on my phone going, “Oh my God, I can’t believe this is how we need to digest information.”

And I apologize for interrupting you, but I wanted to ask you—'cause of the scrappiness you were talking about—you’ve had, like, Michael Kain on, you’ve had John Ruffolo on. These aren’t—these are big names. How did you go about, on the content creation side, right? That scrappiness—how did you get all these people?

Michael Kravshik: Okay, I’m gonna answer your question, but I’m just gonna say one more thing about accountants.

Mike Pinkus: Sure, go for it.

Michael Kravshik: They love accountants. Which is—not only do they not take themselves too seriously—they have been amazingly generous with their time for us. Like, I talk about spending time with CPAs—with your target market. I mean, again, we have not had any eureka moments. These have been CPAs telling us what we need to build for them. And that’s why they’re so awesome—because they’re actually willing and they’re thoughtful. They’ll sit there and give us really great feedback. That’s what drives everything that we’ve done.

So, the "not taking themselves too seriously" thing is fun because then we get to make silly jokes about being CPAs. So anyways, I’m very proud of my CPA heritage.

To answer your question— I mean, with Mike Kain, to be honest, I rigged the deck on that one. We were best friends growing up and lived on the same street. So, that one I didn’t have to try too hard for.

I mean, John Ruffolo, just to use that example you brought up—he’s a wonderful guy. I remember I reached out to him and asked for some advice. This was not even to be a guest on LumiQ at the time. And he said, “I always give people one chance.” As long as they don’t waste my time or do anything untoward, then that’s their chance.

But I mean, he’s an insanely inspirational guy in a lot of different ways. We did a—quite frankly—heart-wrenching podcast with him about...

Mike Pinkus: I listened to it. Incredible.

Michael Kravshik: ...about his accident. And just—I mean—I cannot put into words how much respect and admiration I have for him.

But the answer to your question more broadly is—I have one word: shamelessness. Just ask. Just ask. And you’re gonna get a lot of no’s. It’s like a sales pipeline. In the early days especially—now it’s easier, once you’ve had great people like that. Right? Other people want to be on a podcast that’s featured those great guests.

I mean, we’ve had the CEO of Nike, John Donahoe, and the inventor of Amazon Alexa, William Tunstall-Pedoe—who actually is an investor of mine—and all sorts of just truly incredible people. We had the former CEO of Ticketmaster on the podcast. Just sent him a LinkedIn message. I was like, “Hey, would you be open to doing this?”

By the way—he’s absolutely hilarious, and listening to that podcast is worth every minute of your time. He’s just a businessman from a different era than what we’re used to. And he built an astonishing company. It’s wild what he did with Ticketmaster. Even though—as a music fan—sometimes I get mad at all the fees, I appreciate very much what he built.

Yeah shamelessness. Just ask. What’s the worst that can happen?

My favorite example of this is Jim Balsillie. Jim was speaking at an event with John Ruffolo actually, and I was at this event—it was at Deloitte. I came up afterwards and told him very quickly what we did. This was actually before LumiQ—we were doing live sessions in front of a live audience. I asked Jim if he would—he’s a CPA—come and speak at this event.

And he said, “No. I speak at two events a year and this was one of them. I’m sorry.” But then he said, “Tell me about your business.” We had a really nice chat for a couple of minutes and that was it.

I ended up writing a little blog post. I think the title was Jim Balsillie Rejected Me—And I Like Him More For It. Because, you know, in the startup world, you’re used to people giving you the slow no. "I’m never gonna say yes to you, but I’m gonna drag you along." I really appreciated that he was just like, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

A couple of days later, I get a call. This person’s like, “Are you Michael? Are you the one who wrote this article about Jim Balsillie?” I was like, “Yeah...” She said, “I’m so-and-so from Jim’s office.” And I thought, “Oh shit... am I in trouble?”

Mike Pinkus: Lawyer’s coming in!

Michael Kravshik: I thought I was in trouble! And she goes, “Somebody in our office read your blog post. They thought it was hilarious. They shared it around the whole office. Everybody thought it was hilarious. Jim read it. He thought it was hilarious. Do you want to have a coffee with Jim?”

I was like, “Yeah, absolutely I want to have a coffee with Jim!” And eventually, that turned into getting him on the podcast.

So, if you get rejected—write a viral post. Is that the lesson? I mean, look, I don’t know how many times that’ll work. I think that was pure luck.

But shamelessness. Just ask. As long as you do it—look, the caveat here is—as long as you do it in a respectful way. Don’t badger people. Be respectful of their time. Appreciate that not everybody’s going to say yes—and that doesn’t mean they’re jerks. It just means they’ve got lots of things going on in their life, and you don’t know where you fit into that priority.

And if you do it enough, some people will be kind and give you the chance—and the snowball effect goes from there.

Mike Pinkus: Shamelessness. Yeah, that's a great lesson. And the final question—to be respectful of your time—is, that's already a great lesson, by the way, Michael, but I'm gonna ask you: do you have one or two others? Like, to people starting businesses. You've been through—you said—a failed venture, you’ve been through a pivot, you’ve been through a growth company, you’ve been through investment, and you've been in it almost a decade...

Michael Kravshik: More than a decade, if you include the failed startup before.

Mike Pinkus: If you were to narrow it down to one or two le—I know it's impossible to do that—but if you were to try to narrow down one or two lessons that you would share to someone that’s maybe at an earlier stage in their venture than you are, what would those be?

Michael Kravshik: I will exclude the stuff on PMF—product-market fit—because we already spoke about that. One thing I’ll say is, we actually—in our company—we use PMF as a verb because that’s how important it is to the DNA of the company. Like, we’re always talking to CPAs all the time. It’s not something you did; it’s something you continuously do.

But aside from that, one really great piece of advice I got early on is: don’t ask for money, ask for advice. If you ask for money, you’ll get advice. If you ask for advice, you’ll get money.

And frankly, this worked extremely well with my now lead investor for our last two rounds. He’s on my board and is my closest advisor. Shoutout to Joel Lessem—he was the founder and CEO of Firmex. I originally got introduced to him from one of my other investors—shoutout to Wayne Wright.

I got introduced to Joel—I want to say like five years ago—and I was just asking him for advice. We ended up meeting up five or six times over a couple of years. I never asked him for money. I just liked him. He built a great business and had a lot of really insightful things to say.

Eventually, when I was raising one of my rounds, he said, “Hey, I’d like to get involved.” And he ended up investing in that round. And it wasn’t because I was going out tempering asks for money—it was that he honestly gave me great advice along the way.

What’s awesome now is, because we had those couple of years before he was an investor, where I got to know him, we realized how aligned we were in the way we think about things and approach the business. It made the investor relationship the best I could’ve ever imagined.

To be fair to my lead investor before that, who’s also on my board—John Gnet—it was the same thing. I had gotten to know them really as people and cared deeply about their opinion. Not because I wanted to stroke their ego or get money out of them, but because I actually just thought they were really bright, awesome people. That turned into the best investors I could ask for.

That’s one.

Maybe the other one I’ll say is—I can pinpoint for you, after a decade of decisions—the best decision I ever made. And that was my co-founder.

I went through a business where the co-founders did not get along. The business I was a part of before I started this—the co-founders were at odds with each other. I ended up being the guy in the middle a lot of the time. Not good—especially because I really agreed with one of them and clashed with the other one most of the time.

When co-founders don’t get along, the business is screwed no matter what. There’s just no world where you can have a dysfunctional co-founder relationship and an effective company.

The person who is most responsible for whatever success we’ve had is my co-founder, Berko. We’ve been through a lot of crap doing this, for sure, but there’s nobody in the world I trust more.

Even early on—because I had the startup experience—he said to me, “You should have more equity than me in the business.” And the second-best decision I ever made was saying, “No. We’re 50/50 all the way.” Every dollar for dollar, every dollar we’ve ever made in this business—50/50, every time.

There’s nothing like having a real partner. A real equal partner. And even though I have the CEO title and he’s the Chief Revenue Officer—at the end of the day, we’re 50/50. Because that relationship has been so strong, all sorts of things can go wrong, and you can still get through it.

Mike Pinkus: That is—great advice. And also, a shoutout to my partner, Lyor. I feel the exact same way. I don’t think businesses get to that eight, nine, ten-year mark in dysfunctional co-founder setups.

And knowing Adam personally too—I couldn’t agree with you more. You’ve got a great co-founder, Michael. And I want to thank you for taking the time. I think you’ve enhanced the lives of CPAs everywhere—being a CPA myself, and our team being a team of remote, distributed CPAs—you’ve made our lives easier. And we’re excited to see what LumiQ does next as you guys continue to grow.

Michael Kravshik: Yeah, appreciate that. If anybody’s interested in checking it out, it’s lumiqlearn.com—lumiqlearn.com—and hope you like what we’ve done. We’re really trying to make continuing education not suck and, hopefully, do even better than that—make it really fun and enjoyable.

That’s our mission. If you asked anybody at our company, “What’s the mission of LumiQ?” They’d say: Make professional education enjoyable. Those four words. That’s everything we do.

It’s a lot of fun doing it, because it’s a really cool way to impact people.

Mike Pinkus: Yeah, you guys have built the ultimate content machine. Honestly, all the podcasts are engaging—I listen in my car every single time I go anywhere. And I think every CPA should be using LumiQ. Just the cost to a company of driving to these banquet halls and stuff... there’s a new way, a better way. And you guys have really, really perfected that.

Congrats on all the success up until now, Michael.

Michael Kravshik: I appreciate it. And I appreciate all the support over the many years.

Mike Pinkus: Awesome. Thanks so much.

Michael Kravshik: Yeah. Have a great one.

Closing Thoughts

Mike Pinkus: That was Michael Kravshik, the CEO of LumiQ. Michael shared so many valuable lessons, but I believe a few stood out.

The first—and I've now heard this many times—is: pick your co-founder wisely. Michael and Adam have been best friends for years, and it’s their strong relationship that allowed them to pivot their entire business from a challenging model to a winning company.

The second is that businesses are always evolving, and therefore you have to embrace change. For Michael, change came from every direction—from having to learn to delegate key decisions to a leadership team, to going through a unique fundraising process to raise capital, to shifting the entire product and revenue model in order to find product-market fit. The point is, while change could be scary and lead you into an unknown outcome, it is the only way to progressively take the company to new heights.

That's it for today. As always, keep scaling up and breaking barriers.