When she stopped working for Google, Yulia Farber got a tattoo.
She wanted to remind herself to ‘always be myself at work.’ Because if she didn’t, she would lose what she was actually good at, her powers, and herself.
In episode 176 of Women Disrupting Tech, Yulia shares her journey to becoming the CPO of Onside.io, an alternative to the Apple App Store that started as a result of the EU Digital Markets Act, and how she builds the muscle of being amazing.
Discovering Yourself and Building the Muscle of Being Amazing with Onside.io CPO Yulia Farber – Women Disrupting Tech
You’ll hear us talk about:
- How and why she made the jump from marketing into product, something that looked like a step back in the hierarchy
- Why leaving a job in big tech felt like a divorce at first, even though the workload caused her to burn out.
- What she does to ensure that she can work on things that she is good at, and how she asks for help for things that she’s not.
Plus, you’ll hear how she plans the next thing to work on by working backward from the revenue goals that she’s supposed to hit and what that has to do with a house in Monterey.
It’s an honest and deep conversation about what it takes to find your own identity, thanks in part to my new co-host, Kristina Altukhova, who brought a new point of view to the podcast.
You can listen to the episode by pressing play below. Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
While Yulia spent a large part of her career working for large corporates (she calls them cozy swamps), this episode is not short on experience that can benefit early-stage founders and investors. Here are three takeaways that can benefit both.
Being good at something allows you to ask for help on things that you’re not.
As part of her performance review, Yulia would hear what she was really amazing at. That made it less painful to think that she was not good at everything. It also allowed her to ask for help on the things she was weak at, like “struggling with Excel sheets for two days and not completing my task because I don’t know how that works.” She argued to managers that if they wanted her “to perform at this level of amazingness”, she needed help. For founders, it means that they need to understand what they’re good at and ask their team and investors to help them focus on those things. Otherwise, founders would be wasting investor money by doing things they’re weak at.
Plan backward from the revenue goal to find the next step.
When we discuss a current project, we also talk about how she plans. Yulia looks at the revenue she has to generate and by what date. Then she thinks about the next thing that should be done to lead her team to this result. Then she considers, “Do we have it, no or yes? If we do have it, what should be this next thing? If we don’t, where do we get this part?” During the conversation, she uses the example of her dream house in Monterey: She looked up the price on Zillow, worked out how much money she would need by age 45, 50, 55, and calculated what Onside.io should do to bring her that amount of money by that date. She reminds us that it is not about planning but about finding the closest next step to getting there. For fundraising, the goal could be getting to the next funding round, determining what is needed to get there and determining the next step.
Rehearse the situation until it is no longer new.
Whether it is a job interview or investor conversation, preparing can definitely help. Yulia says it helps her to recreate situations so that it is not new anymore once she’s in it. She suggests answering questions out loud, listening to your answers, playing them to extremes and then slowing down. It helps her stay calm because she’s been in that situation and practiced for it. She even goes as far as to have go-to phrases and she compares it to training before the Olympics. Of course you’ll be nervous before the start, but not as nervous as when it would be your first time. For investors, helping founders prepare for their fundraising or client conversations can help founders feel less nervous and in a better position to secure the deal.
These three takeaways help founders be prepared and stay calm, even when times get turbulent. As Yulia puts it: calm comes from knowing what you’re doing.
😇 Know a founder who could use some calm? Use the share buttons below to share the episode with them.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 03:30 | Yulia Farber journey to becoming CPO of Onside.io |
| 04:38 | Moving from marketing to product |
| 12:05 | Romanticizing your job description |
| 15:26 | Success and the tattoo about being yourself |
| 17:53 | The tattoo about being yourself |
| 22:40 | Using feedback to ask for help |
| 36:21 | Losing yourself to a big tech job |
| 41:45 | Women leaving corporate for a startup |
| 47:01 | Onside.io: an alternative app store for iOS |
| 49:28 | Web-to-app funnels for app marketers |
| 58:35 | Planning an Android store under uncertainty |
| 1:05:08 | Saying out loud that you’re nervous |
| 1:11:04 | Planning backward from a revenue goal |
| 1:17:52 | Coaching founders to know they’re not less |
| 1:22:28 | Practice and the muscle of being amazing |
| 1:24:31 | Where to find Yulia and Onside.io |
The Episode in an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
Yulia calls herself a romantic workaholic and this episode is a journey through the different parts of that personality. We move from the friendly aunt whose advice no one follows, via a woman whose identity at one point consisted for 80% of work, to a CPO who studies competitors like Sherlock Holmes to understand how they solve the problems she’s running into. Alongside these moments, here are three from the episode to remember:
Taking control of what disappoints her
In big tech marketing, Yulia says, “you’re not the main actor on the stage.” Product does not always deliver the way you imagine, and you start asking why they cannot just do what you are saying. Her way out: “You get tired of being disappointed and you just decide to join this side and disappoint yourself directly without anyone else on the line.” Deciding to explore where the friction is gave her the opportunity to see what it feels like to walk in another person’s shoes. With that, she moved from being the person who gives advice to carrying the risk of the result.
A smile on her face as an ideology
One thing you notice is that Yulia laughs a lot. It’s part of her ideology, and she mentions that she’s always making jokes and having fun, even in daily meetings. “It’s just how I roll.” She believes that it is easier to go through life with a smile on your face. In fact, she would rather become a comedian than join a team where she would need to keep a straight face all the time. Laughing and using humor allows her to show her human side, like how Google puts effort into its doodles and Easter eggs.
A romantic workaholic who found her place
Yulia did not expect to end up in a startup. She does not see herself as an entrepreneurial soul: founding gives her “fear but not a thrill.” At the same time, she loves “to tell people what to do… and to see how it results in something”. Working at Onside.io means “it’s just me and the product and the market”. Here she feels she is “forming something new,” which is a little frightening, because mistakes come easily, and a thrill, because “marvelous things” come easily too. Her summary: “It’s again romanticizing it, but I’m a romantic workaholic.”
Each of these moments is a decision about where her work puts her, with her own definition of success as the test: “being myself on a job that’s still interesting to me.”
🗣 What was your magic moment of the episode? Was it when she called herself a romantic workaholic, her use of humor and fun, or how she describes taking control of what disappoints her? Or was it perhaps another moment in the episode? Let me know by sharing your favorite moment in the comments.
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
Near the end of the episode, I ask Yulia what a tool like FundingCoach.ai would need to do to coach female founders well. This is how she starts her answer:
“I think what is sometimes lacking is just understanding that you’re not less than other people in the room.”
— Yulia Farber, Chief Product Officer of Onside.io
You can apply this to the investor interview, the job interview and any other room working women are in.
💡 Know a founder who could use this advice while preparing for an investor meeting? Share the quote with them using the buttons below.
Or learn about 3 trends I noticed across episodes below.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
In every blog about an episode, I use Claude to identify themes from the transcript that come back in previous episodes to identify trends across episodes. The following three trends came back from the analysis.
Adapting to fit in costs women energy
For Yulia, trying to fit in and playing along didn’t work. It required her to do things she knew she was not good at. So she “was just missing the real me”. That meant losing her power, the things she was good at, and herself. After leaving Google, she had a tattoo to remind her to be herself in the future.
Several other guests talk about what it costs to play along. In episode 172, Veroniek Vermeulen mentioned that for women, “it costs so much more energy when you’re not being yourself and you try to fit in, and burnout is often related to not being valued for who you are.” Earlier, in episode 149, Marsha Goei describes how she tried to assimilate to her six male co-founders and spent too long “stretching myself into this shape that didn’t fit me.” And in episode 72, we hear from Manisha Athukorala how she decided early in her career to be herself, even if that meant she would lose out because of it.
The power of rehearsal before entering the room
They say practice makes perfect. But for many founders, it does something else too: make them less nervous about doing hard things. Yulia shares how she preps answers to questions, listening back to them, even to the point of making it a bit theatrical. As a result, the new situation is not as new and stressful as what it could have been like had she done them for the first time.
This preparation theme comes back in many episodes and applies to founders regardless of gender. In episode 155, Beata Wandachowicz-Krason shares how pitching to investors you know can be practice for the really big pitches because by then you’ve already been challenged on your story. In episode 143, Jamie Albaum mentions that “by putting in that preparation, I’m going to feel more confident.” And even investors believe that practicing really well is key to a good performance. In episode 38, Tessa de Flines adds that founders should “not fall into the trap of wanting to add everything.” Her tip to do that: stop after every four sentences to force yourself to keep it short and concise.
The power of planning, especially for the unknown
When we talk about building an Android app store, Yulia mentions that she has to go through a lot of scenarios, including very negative ones, without having a lot of information. She mentions that planning is her anchor when 80% of the situation is unknown. And planning backward from revenue goals helps her find the closest next step to take.
Working your way back from the end goal is something that we heard Dr. Ashley Blackington talk about in episode 173. In episode 142, Oryna Starkina talks about how she leverages her tendency to overthink by thinking of some worst-case scenarios ahead and writing down the steps she would take. Having a written plan calms her anxiety and prevents her from overthinking. And in episode 167, BASH founder Elise Mol adds that having a simple goal works better than getting many steps ahead, as big goals are “usually quite vague.”
🗣️ Which of the three would make your next high-stakes room feel a little less new? Let me know your answer in the comments, or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram.
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Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
How much of your voice does it take to copy it? According to Julia Jakimenko, founder and CEO of Cyberette, 10 to 30 seconds is enough. Cyberette builds deepfake detection technology for businesses and governments, and in episode 177 Julia explains why it launched its platform without waiting for the right time. The conversation also covers how deepfake detection works and what it takes to build, hire and pitch investors around the world.
In the clip below, Julia walks through how that copy gets made. With an app on a phone, copying someone’s voice or face takes one to five minutes. You record a voice, add the text, and the output is that same voice reading it. She describes Gen AI as “fascinating and it’s scary at the same time.”
When you want to hear how Cyberette detects copies like this, and what Julia says about launching, hiring and pitching investors, leave your email address below and episode 177 lands in your feed on 19 November at 8:00 CEST.
Until then, as always, keep being awesome,
Dirkjan
What I Want to Leave You With
This episode is the first in quite some time that I have a co-host. Adding Kristina Altukhova means more than an extra person asking questions. Because she looks for congruency in founders between what they say and what they do, she asks different questions. And in this episode, that leads to some deeply personal conversations.
One of those moments is when Yulia opens up about how she deals with anxiety. I know that dealing with stress and anxiety is something that I think every founder has to go through at some point. Whether that anxiety is related to a product launch, fundraising or an exit, being able to offload is key.
Unlike many founders I know, Yulia is not a sporty woman. Her physical condition narrows her opportunities to work out. When you have a lot on your plate
What I found unbelievably brave is that she not only is open about it, but also tells her team that she needs help or me-time. Her ability to express verbally how she feels, to me, is a sign of true power.
There’s one thing we did not uncover: Would Yulia make a good founder? She says that she does not have an entrepreneurial soul and that she could not put the weight on her shoulders. Having listened to her story, I see this differently.
Besides being told that she acted like a founder when she worked for big tech, I believe she has everything it takes to be one. I heard a compelling vision about what it takes to run a successful business, a passion to do whatever it takes to achieve her goals, people and technical skills. So what’s missing? Maybe it’s the problem she cares so much about that she has no other option than to build a company around it. I believe it is only a matter of time until she finds it. I hope she does, because it will allow her the fulfillment of doing what she set out to do long ago: be meaningful to others.
I’m curious how you see it, though. Would Yulia be a good founder?
Listen to the full conversation with Yulia Farber on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Yulia Farber
Yulia Farber is the Chief Product Officer at Onside.io. She started her career in advertising and marketing at Google’s European headquarters in Dublin and spent a couple of years in neobanking and classic banks. She then moved into big tech and made the switch from marketing to product. Onside.io first invited her to consult as a freelancer and later asked her to join full time.
She works at the intersection of product and marketing. Her approach, which she calls Product-Market Fusion, holds that product updates must drive marketing outcomes and that market signals must inform the backlog; otherwise teams burn CAC and ship the wrong things.
She cares about creator freedom and Consensual Tech: “if it’s legal and consensual, it deserves serious infrastructure.”
You can connect with Yulia on LinkedIn.
About Onside.io
Onside.io is an alternative app store for iOS, made possible by the EU’s Digital Markets Act. It is available in the 27 EU countries and lists Brazil and Japan as coming soon. Its media kit puts the potential audience at more than 450 million users. Users download Onside.io from a web page instead of Apple’s App Store, which makes web-to-app funnels possible for app marketers.
Developers can publish on both Apple’s App Store and Onside.io. Onside.io moderates apps itself after Apple’s checks for fraud and malicious content. For developers, it offers the Onside Pay SDK and a PWA Wrapper that turns web apps into store apps.
You can follow Onside.io on LinkedIn and X or find more information on the website.
About Kristina Altukhova
Kristina Altukhova is the founder of The Best Match, based in Amsterdam. She helps founders raise capital by closing the gap between what they say and what investors sense, so they show up as themselves under pressure. She hosts The Human Side of Building, a podcast where investors share how they really decide on founders. On Women Disrupting Tech, she brings the congruency lens: what’s happening inside the founder, not just in the business.
You can connect with Kristina on LinkedIn and learn more about how she can help you as a founder on her website.
Listen to Episode 176 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
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