Alexander
Grom
Running an accelerator for startup founders, a community for first-time founders, not a venture studio. Helping investors with their startups. I believe in venture studios and that they will change. More about me and my thinking on the channel.
Previously: Head of Pipeline at SKL.vc, product at orbita.vc
What I'm doing now
Limbo is the accelerator I'm building. Community-first, not a venture studio101 / not a venture studioStudios take big equity stakes and run operations. We don't go there — we give structure. — the idea is that first-time founders learn fastest from each other when there's real structure underneath. The first batch put 190 projects through the funnel and brought five to due diligence202 / due diligenceDeep check of a startup before an investment. Reaching DD = an investor sat down to read seriously. by spring. I raised the money for it twice.
On the other side of the table, I help investors I trust with their portfolio startups — mostly positioning, fundraising prep, and the operational work founders avoid until something breaks.
Before this
Seven years across venture and startups. Head of Pipeline at SKL.vc303 / SKL.vcVenture studio. 2024–2025. Built dealflow infrastructure from scratch, pulled portfolio projects out of trouble. — built the dealflow infrastructure from scratch, ran 500+ projects through it, saved the studio around $300K through process and budget work. Before that, Product Owner at Orbita.vc — two MVPs from zero, one of them at 5,000 users in three months. Before that, three years running my own redesign agency: Gazprom, Megafon404 / clientsAlso Gemotest, Norilsk Nickel, banks. 100+ projects over three years., the usual suspects.
The throughline: I show up where things are unclear, and I leave with something organised.
What I'm thinking about
I think venture studios are going to change. The current model is too capital-heavy and too slow to learn. The future is closer to what good accelerators already do — communities of founders, distributed bets, lean operations505 / lean operationsSmall team + right processes + AI. What used to need 20 people in a classic studio now gets done by four., structured help instead of equity-heavy hand-holding.
First-time founders are the most underserved group in venture. Everyone wants to back the second-time founder with the warm intro. The first-timers — with energy and no map — get sent to generic programs and pitched the same templates. They deserve real infrastructure.
I write more about all of this on the blog.
What I can help with
A few things I'm good at and happy to do for others. I consult startups. I help young accelerators and venture studios get off the ground — designing the program, tightening the selection, or building the playbook you don't have time to write yourself.
If you're a fund or a studio doing something ambitious, I'd love to work together and try to build something genuinely new and a little unusual.
Off the clock
I play Go and I run the Tsyupa Cup606 / Tsyupa CupAnnual Go tournament. For several years now — a main event in the Russian Go community. — a small annual tournament that has somehow become a thing in the Russian Go community. Chess, squash, boxing. I'm an expert at Alexander Gorny's AI Academy and I've taught a "Practical Marketing" elective at KGU. I'm married. I expect to live in Spain by the end of next year.
Talk to me
telegram · linkedin · iamtsyupa@gmail.com