Jeni Mayorskaya and the art of starting over

At seventeen, Jeni Mayorskaya was walking into shops in Novosibirsk and offering to arrange newspaper advertising. Her preparation had involved a trip to the library. Her pitch involved considerably more confidence than her experience might have justified. The shops bought. The newspapers gave her discounts. A friend’s request for help placing an advertisement had become a small business.

It is an appealing beginning for someone who wanted to be a journalist. She had discovered another way into the newspaper: through the department that paid for it. Eventually, Kommersant hired her to sell advertising. The ambition survived; the job description changed.

Years later, as founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Stork Club, Mayorskaya would be selling to employers and working with venture investors. The distance between those two sales conversations is enormous. Yet the opening question seems familiar: what does the person across the table need, and can you make the arrangement work?

That question offers a useful way into her career. The company names change. So do the countries. There are books, mobile services, translation tools and employee benefits. A conventional résumé puts each into its own box. Following the work makes the connections more interesting.

The apprenticeship in other people’s businesses

Before Stork Club, Mayorskaya co-founded Bookmate. Her earlier work also included Yota, where she worked on entertainment services. These were businesses in which a product had to travel between companies and audiences: a service needed distribution, a book needed a reader, and an agreement had to hold both ends together.

Bookmate, an e-library and publishing platform, belongs to a particularly revealing part of that education. A digital book looks wonderfully portable once it reaches a screen. Getting it there requires a less photogenic chain of permissions, commercial arrangements and technical decisions. Someone has to make the relationships work before the reader gets to enjoy the convenience.

The same distinction matters when assessing a founder. A product can appear simple because somebody has taken on its complications. The useful question is where those complications went. Mayorskaya’s early career repeatedly put her near the arrangements behind the screen.

Her product work later extended to ABBYY Language Services. By 2015, she was leading development that included SmartCAT translation automation and professional translation services delivered through an application programming interface. Her conference biography described experience spanning mobile operators, device manufacturers and media businesses across several countries.

That is a practical education in interdependence. A translation tool has users, but also professional contributors and business customers. A mobile service has an audience, but also a distribution partner. Decisions that look internal to one company can become someone else’s daily obstacle. Product management, in this setting, requires looking beyond the product.

There is a practical consequence to that range of responsibilities. A founder who has worked on both the promise and its delivery has had to encounter the gap between them. Marketing can invite someone to try a service. Operations must make the next encounter worth having. Product decisions connect the two. Mayorskaya’s working history gives those functions names, places and actual companies, rather than leaving them as a list of skills.

A Singapore chapter, with room for the ocean

In 2013, Mayorskaya moved to Singapore and founded Mnemonic, an on-demand workforce venture built around smartphones. The move placed her in another market and another version of the coordination problem: bringing people’s capabilities into a service that could be requested through a device.

Seen from a distance, the change from digital books to mobile work can look like a sharp turn. Look at the relationships involved and it becomes easier to follow. Both require bringing a distributed supply of something valuable to people who want access to it. The software is part of the arrangement. So is persuading people to participate.

There is also an unusually cheerful trace of this period in the public record. Wooden-accessories brand WOOED introduces Mayorskaya as an entrepreneur connected to Mnemonic and surfing-wear brand Cheeky&Coco, with interests in neuroscience, the ocean and kiteboarding. A life spent among product plans evidently had room for water.

That detail earns its place because business biographies tend to sand people down until only their job titles remain. Here is someone whose working history includes both a crowdsourcing venture and a surfing-wear brand. The combination feels less tidy, and more like an actual person making choices.

It would be easy to recruit kiteboarding as a metaphor for founding companies. Better to leave it as kiteboarding. A founder is allowed an interest that does not have to justify itself in a pitch deck.

Writing remained part of her professional life. In 2015, she published How Many Languages Your Startup Needs To Know in TechCrunch. The title makes a compact companion to her résumé: a product manager asking how a business reaches people outside its original setting. Publishing an argument also asks something different of an operator. Inside a company, colleagues may already understand the vocabulary and the reasons for a decision. A reader arriving without that context needs a clear explanation. The former newspaper advertising seller had found another way back to the page, this time with a technology byline.

Learning to arrive

Mayorskaya eventually settled in San Francisco. She has spoken about valuing the city’s exchange of ideas and the opportunity to find people willing to build things together. Having lived in different countries, she also describes diversity of experience as a way to understand how differently the same situation can be approached.

The distinction between visiting a place and becoming useful there runs through this part of her story. An introduction can get someone into a conversation. Continuing to belong depends on what happens afterward. For a founder crossing markets, the social work travels alongside the commercial work.

There is a temptation to describe international careers as effortless movement: one city, then another, with an arrow between them. Arrows are generous editors. They remove the work of understanding unfamiliar expectations, explaining past experience and finding people who will give a new arrival a hearing.

Mayorskaya’s career is more interesting with that work left visible. She had already built products before Stork Club. She still had to build the particular relationships the new business needed. Experience travels with a person; a market’s trust must be earned in place.

“San Francisco is the place where I want to be.”

Jeni Mayorskaya, 2022

For an employer-facing founder, this work has another layer. The person choosing a service may be buying it for colleagues whose needs differ from their own. The sale has to survive that distance. A compelling presentation begins the process; the service then has to make sense to the people expected to use it. This is why the relationships around a product deserve as much attention as the screen through which it is delivered.

The operator investors could recognize

Bowery Capital’s account of backing Stork Club gives a concrete view of how an investor read that accumulated experience. The firm emphasized Mayorskaya’s range: chief operating officer, product leader and marketing leader. It also described meeting her through a friend of the firm who was an active angel investor in San Francisco.

Those details are useful together. The introduction opened a route into the firm. The working history gave the investors something to examine once she arrived. Bookmate and Mnemonic were evidence of previous attempts to build businesses, each requiring decisions across more than one function.

For Stork Club, the audience was employers. The commercial argument involved their ability to attract and keep people. This put Mayorskaya back in the business of translating between different priorities: what employees valued, what a company would purchase, and what a service could reliably deliver.

In May 2020, Stork Club announced a $2.7 million seed round led by Bowery Capital and Slow Ventures. In June 2021 came a $30 million Series A led by General Catalyst, with existing investors participating. Hemant Taneja joined the board in connection with that round.

The intended use of the new capital included hiring and product development. These are ordinary words with substantial consequences. Hiring means deciding which responsibilities can be handed over. Product development means choosing which requests deserve the team’s time. More money expands the list of possible decisions; it also makes the cost of choosing poorly larger.

Mayorskaya’s stated ambition was to let people pursue a career and build a family. That aim gave the enterprise sale a personal dimension without removing the need for an enterprise business case. The buyer still needed a reason to commit. Her task was to make the two interests fit.

A fellow, taking notes

A later scene in Aotearoa New Zealand adds another angle. At the Edmund Hillary Fellowship’s final Welcome Experience, Mayorskaya joined a gathering of fellows learning about the country and its Māori communities. The event brought international experience into contact with local knowledge.

Her response was cautious in a way that deserves attention. She spoke about the need to meet local people before deciding where she could contribute. The person with experience in several countries was explicitly allowing for the limits of that experience in a new one.

“It’s imperative to connect with locals to identify the opportunities and figure out how we can work together.”

Jeni Mayorskaya, Edmund Hillary Fellowship

That is a useful place to end a story that begins with a teenager announcing her marketing expertise to shopkeepers. There is room in one career for the nerve to begin and the judgment to ask. The early sale gets the door open. Listening helps determine what should happen inside.

For Mayorskaya, starting over has meant carrying skills into unfamiliar settings while making new arrangements with the people already there. Books in one chapter, a workforce platform in another, employers in the next. The work keeps changing. So does the room. There is always somebody new to understand.