I recently moved to Orange County, California, and I would like to be involved in the best innovative, disruptive, ambitious, and clearly impactful projects here.
What I Do Best
I have experience with all stages of launching projects — strategy, ideation, research, resource development, marketing, planning, execution, operations, partnerships, scaling, and much more.
And when necessary, I can do all tasks myself. I’m certainly happy to delegate and work with the team, but when needed, I can work independently, very promptly, and literally around the clock: creating websites, apps, and media; collecting and analyzing data; writing proposals and pitching projects; launching marketing campaigns and managing social media; hosting stakeholder meetings; planning and executing events; measuring performance; and basically everything else that needs to be done.
And when I say “quickly,” I mean really quickly — I can collect and analyze primary data from a thousand respondents in 24 hours, develop and launch an app, prototype, online course, or experiment in a day, and organize and fill a mid-size event in a couple of weeks when it’s necessary.
My Qualities
I am extremely creative — trained intentionally for many years. I even have a dedicated day every week (Sunday) when I don’t eat for 24 hours but just brainstorm, generate, and develop ideas.
I am extremely prompt — often many times faster than most people, especially now when I can collaborate across three screens with GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Python, and many others.
I am very strategic — always keeping long-term goals in mind.
I am very analytical — constantly building models, patterns, and frameworks everywhere.
I am highly stress-resilient — and I actually feel I thrive under pressure and tight deadlines.
And yes, I am very reliable — I keep promises and never miss deadlines.
My Background
CEO, partner, and founder in large and small businesses
Government leadership as Director of the Business Development Administration
Development and leadership of the largest stage-gate innovation and startup pipelines
President, national president, and board chair in international organizations
Leadership of global research initiatives with 26 countries involved
Organization of 300+ major business events — innovation forums, investment forums, career days, boat shows, millionaire fairs, trade shows, conferences, etc.
And when I say “organized” or “led,” I mean I fully owned these projects from ideation to execution and served as the lead stakeholder for all of them.
Achievements
I have all possible advanced education — from an MBA, economics, strategic management, data analytics, to cognitive neuroscience, and a Ph.D. from a top-ranked program. Though I understand that nowadays this might be less important than real capabilities.
I have multiple awards — national best business event award, national innovation award, National Outstanding People award, best project awards, outstanding paper awards, multidisciplinary research awards, and others.
I have hundreds of publications — top international scientific journals, industry magazines, a dozen books, presentations, over 100,000 reads and views, and over a thousand citations.
However, I place greater value on practical outcomes. I like tangible, visible impact, and I am happy that I had a chance to contribute to a hundred real projects. I am very challenge-oriented and competitive, and it’s easy to motivate me to work when the project is challenging, significant, and impactful.
Outside of Work
Just a few personal notes — simply to show that I am not a robot and that I do enjoy life beyond launching projects :
I love everything related to children’s development — activities, events, contests, and educational programs.
I love the ocean — boats, sailing, having designed and produced my own boats, raced, and even crossed the ocean.
I love mountains and sky — skiing, snowboarding, hiking, painting mountains, and piloting aircraft.
I love all active things — bicycling, swimming, tennis, running, exercising, and many more.
And certainly travel — visited 60 countries, stayed in hundreds of hotels, did many tourism research projects, and more. I especially love national parks, boats, RVs, and everything connected to nature.
Motivaiton
My personal motivation is simple and very strong. Moving to California means starting from zero in terms of local visibility, trust, and relationships, no matter what I achieved elsewhere. What matters now is building real success stories here, integrating deeply into the startup community, and partnering with founders who are building something meaningful.
I need the real success projects here, and I am ready to play my heart out to create them.
10 Reasons Why It’s Inefficient to Stay on the Same Project Too Long
1. Diminishing Marginal Returns
After the initial creative phase, each additional hour produces smaller improvements. Early work generates breakthroughs; later phases offer tiny gains for disproportionately high effort.
2. Habituation Reduces Cognitive Sensitivity
As the brain adapts to a familiar project, attention, emotional engagement, and novelty response decline. Launchers lose their natural advantage—fresh, high-energy insight.
3. Decline in Divergent Thinking
Long exposure to the same problem activates repetitive neural patterns. This suppresses divergent thinking, which launchers rely on to generate multiple ideas, prototypes, and innovative solutions.
4. Opportunity Cost of Stagnation
Time spent polishing an old project prevents the creation of higher-value new ones. Every extra week drains time, attention, and potential impact elsewhere.
5. Misalignment With Launcher Cognitive Strengths
Launchers excel at ideation, structuring, and early prototyping. Maintenance, optimization, and long-term operations require different cognitive strengths and drain energy and efficiency.
6. Reduced Neuroplasticity From Monotony
Neuroscience shows that varied tasks and challenges enhance neuroplasticity. Staying on one repetitive project limits cognitive flexibility and weakens future creativity.
7. Strategic Rigidity and Reduced Agility
Prolonged focus narrows perspective. Launchers become less responsive to new opportunities, trends, and signals—weakening the agility that makes them effective.
8. Lower Creative Energy and Motivation
Motivation systems thrive on novelty and challenge. When a project becomes routine, dopamine-driven engagement drops, reducing both motivation and execution quality.
9. Decreased Problem-Sensitivity
Fresh eyes spot issues quickly. Familiarity blinds launchers to inefficiencies and weak points, making improvements slower and less effective.
10. Slower Ecosystem Growth
Launchers create value by building a pipeline of initiatives. Staying on one project limits the ecosystem effect—where each new launch builds visibility, partnerships, and momentum for the next.
Launching is a universal capability that applies across industries, sectors, and domains. Here are ten clear examples of what “launching” looks like in practice—each demonstrating how ideas become real through structured execution, creativity, and momentum.
1. Launching an Event
Creating, promoting, and delivering a public experience—such as a conference, expo, festival, or workshop—to attract participants, partners, and media attention. Includes venue planning, experience design, stakeholder coordination, and high-visibility promotion.
2. Launching a Book
Developing and releasing a manuscript through writing, editing, design, and distribution. The launch includes coordinated marketing: author events, media outreach, social engagement, and targeted reader campaigns.
3. Launching a Research Project
Defining research questions, designing the methodology, securing partners or funding, collecting data, and sharing early findings with academic, industry, or community audiences.
4. Launching an App
Designing, developing, testing, and publishing a digital application on the App Store or Google Play. Supported by beta testing, user acquisition strategies, and continuous product updates.
5. Launching a Government Program
Creating and implementing a public initiative aimed at community, economic, or social impact. Involves policy design, stakeholder engagement, pilot testing, communications strategy, and inter-agency coordination.
6. Launching a Manufacturing Business
Developing a product concept, designing prototypes, establishing production lines, sourcing materials, ensuring compliance, and building distribution, branding, and sales channels.
7. Launching an Online Business
Building a digital platform or storefront, defining offerings, setting up payment and logistics systems, and attracting customers through SEO, content strategy, social media, and advertising.
8. Launching an Educational Course
Designing curriculum, creating learning materials, preparing assessments, building digital or in-person delivery, and promoting the course to students, parents, or institutions.
9. Launching a Hotel
Developing the concept, designing interiors, securing permits and licensing, training staff, building operational standards, and executing a pre-opening marketing strategy that drives anticipation and bookings.
10. Launching a Service
Creating a service model, defining processes, training staff, shaping customer experience, establishing pricing, and activating promotional campaigns to attract early clients.
Launching is not only a process — it’s a philosophy and a way of thinking. Effective launchers rely on a distinct set of principles that guide how they create momentum, reduce uncertainty, and turn ideas into visible impact. These ten principles shape the mindset behind every successful launch.
1. Promptness — Move Early, Move Fast
Speed creates advantage. Launchers reduce delays, act decisively, and turn ideas into action while momentum is high.
2. Creativity — Start with Original, High-Value Ideas
Every launch begins with creativity. Generate concepts that capture attention, solve real problems, and open new possibilities.
3. Disruptiveness — Break Patterns and Create New Space
Strong launches challenge assumptions, rethink norms, and introduce alternatives that shift the status quo.
4. Benchmark Search — Look Outside Your Field and Transfer Insights
Explore best practices across industries and disciplines. Adapt what works elsewhere and translate insights into your project.
5. Guerrilla Marketing — Achieve High Impact with Low Resources
Use bold, unexpected, and cost-effective tactics that spark attention and spread organically.
6. Mass Involvement — Engage Many People Early
Involve users, partners, communities, and supporters from the beginning. Broad participation builds momentum, visibility, and trust.
7. Wide Research — Understand Needs, Context, and Trends Deeply
Perform comprehensive research on markets, users, competitors, and emerging trends. Strong research reduces uncertainty and improves decisions.
8. Simplicity — Focus on the Clear, Essential Core
A powerful launch communicates one simple, compelling idea. Simplicity accelerates understanding, execution, and adoption.
9. Experimentation — Test Small, Learn Fast
Run quick experiments, prototypes, and MVPs. Use evidence — not assumptions — to refine the project and reduce risk.
10. Bold Communication — Tell a Strong Story with Confidence
Share the idea loudly and clearly. Successful launches rely on memorable storytelling, consistent messaging, and visible presence.
Generate and explore multiple ideas, identify the core opportunity or problem, and clarify the value you’ll deliver. A strong idea is the seed of everything else.
2. Research — Evidence & Validation
Study the market, audience, competitors, and feasibility. Use research to validate relevance and viability. The initiation phase of the project lifecycle emphasizes defining value and obtaining stakeholder buy-in.
3. Strategy — Strategic Management Steps
Define the strategic direction: mission, vision, positioning, value proposition, differentiation, and risks. Apply strategic frameworks such as SWOT or OGSM to build clarity and coherence.
4. Concept — Project Definition
Translate strategy into a clear concept: scope, SMART objectives, deliverables, success criteria, and stakeholder roles. Also finalize your launch-event concept — audience, messaging, and experience.
5. Plan — Timeline, Resources, Structure
Build a roadmap: tasks, milestones, timeline, budget, team, resources, and a risk/assumption log. Strong planning frameworks create structure before execution begins.
6. Test — Minimum Viable Project / Prototype
Run a minimal version or prototype to gather feedback, test assumptions, and uncover issues. This step aligns with preparation for the execution/monitoring phase of project management.
7. Event — Public Presentation
Execute the public launch. The event is the focal moment where you attract partners, customers, collaborators, and visibility. Define clear goals, design the experience, promote effectively, and follow up afterward.
8. Marketing — Awareness & Engagement
Run communications to amplify your launch: storytelling, channels, content, partnerships, and community engagement. Marketing sustains momentum beyond the event.
9. Evaluation — Feedback & Measurement
Collect and analyze KPIs such as attendance, leads, satisfaction, conversion, and impact. Reflect on what worked and what didn’t, aligning findings with your original objectives.
10. Iteration — Improvement & Scaling
Use evaluation insights to refine the offering, fix issues, expand reach, and strengthen the next launch cycle. Iteration turns a one-time launch into a scalable system.
I always build new initiatives by launching activation events first, because events are the fastest way to convert ideas into partnerships, pipelines, and repeatable programs. Across my career, I have planned and executed more than 300 business events, from innovation forums and investment forums to trade shows, conventions, workshops, and career days. This “event-first” approach consistently helps me validate demand, unite stakeholders, create a media narrative, and accelerate growth faster than traditional marketing.
In my recent book Empowering Innovation, I emphasize that innovation ecosystems scale when they turn scattered stakeholders into coordinated programs, and events are often the most efficient coordination tool. In practice, a well-designed event becomes a startup’s fastest real-world lab: it forces clarity, attracts the right people, and produces evidence.
The startup reality: failure is usually a market and execution problem
Startup failure rarely happens because founders “didn’t work hard enough.” It happens because teams scale the wrong thing, at the wrong time, with the wrong assumptions. Large-scale analyses of failed startups consistently highlight familiar patterns such as lack of product–market fit, running out of cash, weak go-to-market execution, competitive pressure, pricing issues, and team problems (CB Insights, 2014; Eisenmann, 2021).
This is exactly where events outperform many other tactics. A startup can spend months building in isolation, but one focused activation event can reveal whether the problem is real, whether the message is clear, and whether buyers actually care. Events compress uncertainty into observable behavior: who shows up, what questions they ask, what they request next, and what they are willing to commit to.
Events compress the feedback loop and make customer discovery unavoidable
The lean startup logic is simple: early-stage companies are searching for a business model, not executing a proven one (Blank, 2013). That search requires direct contact with customers, and it must happen outside the building (Blank, 2009). Yet leaders often underestimate how much time should be spent with customers; Harvard Business School research argues that CEOs should devote meaningful time to customers because customer understanding drives strategic accuracy and growth (Quelch, 2008).
An event forces customer discovery at scale. Instead of ten separate meetings, you can create a structured environment where dozens or hundreds of relevant people interact with your product, narrative, and team in a single day. Even more importantly, you can design the event so feedback is not accidental but engineered through demos, facilitated Q&A, structured interviews, and measurable next-step offers.
Events build social capital faster than almost any other channel
Startups do not grow only through product features; they grow through networks, credibility, and access. A meta-analysis in Journal of Business Venturing shows a positive relationship between entrepreneurs’ social capital and small firm performance, with network diversity being especially valuable (Stam et al., 2014). In other words, who you can reach and mobilize matters, and the structure of your relationships matters.
Events are a practical social-capital engine. They create concentrated “bridging” opportunities between founders, customers, partners, investors, and experts who would otherwise never meet. A startup event is not only about attendance; it is about the quality and diversity of connections formed in a short period, and the follow-up pathways created.
Events reduce perceived risk and accelerate trust
In many industries, buyers hesitate not because they dislike innovation, but because they fear risk, switching costs, and reputational consequences. Live events reduce this friction because trust increases when people can see, touch, question, and evaluate in real time. Industry research shows strong trust effects from in-person events, including increased brand trust and post-event action such as visiting brand websites and continued engagement (Freeman, 2025a; Freeman, 2025b).
Experiential marketing research also reports that consumers often become more positive and more loyal after participating in brand-run events, and that event participation can increase purchase inclination when the audience is already interested in the category (Access Intelligence, 2022). For startups, this matters because trust is the hidden tax on every sales cycle, and events can lower that tax.
Events prevent premature scaling by creating stage-gates and proof
One of the most expensive startup mistakes is scaling before the fundamentals are validated. The Startup Genome research on premature scaling argues that scaling too early is a major reason high-growth startups fail, and it emphasizes benchmarking and disciplined progress through stages (Marmer et al., 2012). Events can be designed as stage-gates: you do not “advance” until you can produce evidence from the market.
A well-structured event is not a celebration. It is a proof mechanism: proof of interest, proof of use cases, proof of willingness to pay, proof of partner pull, proof of community growth, and proof that your message works without founder translation. This keeps the startup honest, and it creates a healthier rhythm of learning, iteration, and scaling.
Events turn marketing into assets, not just impressions
Most marketing disappears the moment you stop paying for it. Events, by contrast, can produce reusable assets that keep working: customer stories, recorded demos, panel insights, expert quotes, case studies, partner announcements, and content series. The event itself becomes the “content factory,” but more importantly, it becomes the evidence factory. When a startup can say, “Here are 12 customer conversations, 5 partner leads, 3 pilot requests, and a repeatable event format,” the story becomes stronger than generic branding.
This is why I treat event outputs as measurable deliverables: leads, meetings scheduled, pilot commitments, partnership pathways, community growth, and content assets tied to distribution. In Event Evaluation book, I frame this as moving beyond vanity metrics toward event measurement that supports real business decisions (Godovykh, 2025a).
What “an event” means for a startup
For a startup, an event does not have to be a large conference. The right format depends on your stage, market, and goal. The discipline is the same: a clear promise, the right audience, a designed interaction, and a measurable next step.
A startup can start with formats like a customer roundtable, a micro-demo day, a workflow workshop, an industry meetup, a partner breakfast, a pilot showcase, or a founder-led learning session. The point is not size; the point is engineered learning and conversion.
Advantages for startups of launching events
Validate demand faster through real audience behavior, not assumptions
Clarify positioning by forcing a simple, compelling promise people will show up for
Accelerate customer discovery by concentrating high-quality conversations into days, not months
Identify the most compelling use cases by observing questions, objections, and “next-step” requests
Reduce sales friction by creating trust through live demonstration and transparent Q&A
Strengthen credibility by borrowing authority from speakers, experts, and partners
Build social capital by connecting diverse stakeholders in a single, high-density environment
Generate partnerships by creating a reason for ecosystem players to collaborate publicly
Improve fundraising readiness by demonstrating traction signals investors recognize
Prevent premature scaling by using events as stage-gates tied to evidence and benchmarks
Create reusable marketing assets, including demos, case stories, expert quotes, and recordings
Launch community loops that support retention, referrals, and category leadership
Recruit talent by attracting people aligned with the mission and showing the product in action
Increase media and narrative reach by giving journalists and creators a “first,” a hook, and proof
Build repeatable programs by turning one event into a recurring format and pipeline
Stam, W., Arzlanian, S., & Elfring, T. (2014). Social capital of entrepreneurs and small firm performance: A meta-analysis of contextual and methodological moderators. Journal of Business Venturing, 29(1), 152–173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2013.01.002.
