Scaling Without Illusions with Nikolay Popandopulo

Our host, Igor Tomych, chats with Nikolay Popandopulo, CPO, Kaspi.kz — eGrocery division, Kazakhstan’s biggest fintech, with a user base of over 60% of the country’s population. Igor, being a fintech founder himself, found his rhythm when exploring the success of Kaspi as well as Nikolay’s mentality when it comes to scaling and team management. 

Key Insights #

• Execution beats strategy narratives: Nikolay explains how Kaspi grew, not thanks to long-term vision, but rather a robust ideology of short decision-making cycles, fast feedback and reliance on concrete outcomes.
• Physical operations force better product thinking: The truth of the situation when it comes to the vulnerability of Kaspi’s operations only truly showed when facing logistics and e-grocery markets. That’s when Kaspi had to deal with hurdles such as delayed orders, angry customers, and wasted inventory.
• Leadership proximity to on-ground work is not optional: Kaspi’s leadership showed up, just like everyone else, to the warehouses, to the offices and logistics centers. Being up close and personal with daily operations provided a clear perspective on the Kaspi’s business all around.
• Speed is protected by structure, not chaos: The company runs on clear principles; no product development cycle longer than three months, long strategies must be broken into testable steps, failure is acceptable if it is fast and cheap.
• Metrics are designed to drive behavior, not look good: Kaspi uses a pragmatic approach to KPIs, avoiding vanity and focusing on improvement upon feedback. Scalability is treated as a first-class metric.
• Hype cycles do not build companies: While it’s important to keep up with trends, AI, crypto, and other trends matter, but they do not replace fundamentals.

Why Listen #

Nikolay and Igor offer a raw and unfiltered perspective on how to build a tech company. The idea is not to just seek sales and develop technologies. On the contrary, tech companies are often most vulnerable to failures concerning human communication and task prioritization. Founders, managers and employees can get a true insight into how scaling happens exponentially, rather than linearly.