Askar Aituov:
Hi all. Today we have Nuray Salina, founder at Linkly, co-founder at Venture Scholar Studio. Dear Nuray, thank you for your time. And, please, if you could introduce yourself.
Nuray Salina:
Thank you very much, Askar. It’s a pleasure to be here speaking with you. I watched a lot of DevsKZ videos with other founders, with other wonderful, impressive professionals. And I would like to introduce myself. My name is Nuray. I am an alumna of Cambridge University. I also graduated from KIMEP University two years ago. I am very passionate about entrepreneurship, about startup, tech space. And I’m also on a jury panel of different startup competitions here in Kazakhstan, on city level, on Almaty city level, republican level.
And I’m also a founder of two startups. I co-founded Venture Scholar Studio startup with my wonderful co-founder Dr. Yaniv Prusilkov, which is now based and registered in Cambridge in the United Kingdom. And also, I started a new startup recently. It’s called Linkly, my new initiative. We connect micro-influencers, bloggers in Kazakhstan with small, medium-sized businesses. So, yeah, this is about me. Thanks for having me again.
Askar Aituov:
Thank you. Thank you so much. Guys, your questions, you can write in chat. If you watch recording, you can write questions in comments. So far, there are three questions I prepared in advance. But we also have some… a little bit slide deck, right? Or you want to do it later?
Nuray Salina:
Uh, I think… it depends on the question. If the first question will be about my startup, I’m happy to share some slides to show the customer discovery process, the validation, product-market fit. So, if it’s okay, I would love to share the slides now.
Askar Aituov:
Okay, I will go with questions then on validating ideas regarding Linkly. What was the single fastest, low-cost experiment you run to validate your startup, this Linkly? And what was result? Or any like… signal did you see that convinced you like, “Now it’s time like to commit building it full time”?
Nuray Salina:
Mmhmm. Yes, sure. Thank you so much. That’s a wonderful question. So, the single low-cost experiment that I would like to highlight now is the fact that I started experimenting, testing my idea, testing my hypothesis before building it. So, it really helped me save a lot of time and resources before even creating the minimal viable product.
So, what is Linkly? Linkly is a platform that connects micro-influencers, as I mentioned, and business owners for creative collaborations, campaigns of different formats and kinds. So, first… so the idea started with… sorry, I will just give a brief overview of my idea. The idea started with my own personal observations that a lot of people in my friend group and outside of my friend group are influencers. They are people, great people who have a lot to share professionally and personally, who like creating beautiful visual content. And this really inspired me to dig into numbers, inside the industry.
And I came up with this like very vivid idea of Linkly, of the platform that would connect businesses and creators for collaborations. But it was like so, so vivid. And when I started exploring the statistics, the industry, I realized that… that everything looks great on paper, but now it’s time to go out and speak to the customers, speak to potential users, business owners. So I would spend, I don’t know, like hundreds of hours speaking first to my friends, then to like mutual connections, to people outside my network, business owners, content creators… content creators on like a very starting levels… who are just starting their careers in content creation, UGC creation.
And then I started speaking to business owners. Conducted more than hundreds of interviews. And this really shaped my understanding of what kind of platform would be perfect, what would be the right solution for the existing market in Kazakhstan. And then when I came up with… when I already had this firm idea, I started building… I started building like, I don’t know, two months after I was validating these ideas. So by the time when I… so this was a great experiment. So when, by the time I launched, I already had like eight initial clients who were willing to pay for my services, who were willing to pay for promotion on my platform. So this is how I generated around like 2K USD before even launching. So, yeah, this was my small experiment. Thank you so much.
Askar Aituov:
That’s a great… quick result. And Ecosystem Startup s7v asked: “How do you earn money from your Venture Studio?” I don’t know, is it Vladimir Popov asking? It looked like his logo. Probably it’s Vladimir, yeah. I think you partially answered, right? You have these influencers who came to platform and… Did you charge a subscription fee or is it one-time fee for the…?
Nuray Salina:
Uh, sorry, I… they are asking about Venture Scholar Studio? Venture Scholar Studio is a separate startup. Linkly is like creator market…
Askar Aituov:
Ah, separate! Okay. Yeah, yeah. I got confused. So, is it Venture Studio… is it like commercial? Is it like startup incubator or what is it?
Nuray Salina:
So initially it… so Venture Scholar Studio is another… is another piece of art, I would say, in terms of like pivoting, experimentation. Like, it was great. It was a great experiment. But Venture Scholar Studio is a bit different. It’s an eight-week remote placement for high school students, for university students to help them educate about entrepreneurship. It’s like a small mini-incubator for them to help them gain practical startup experience, also working experience.
So what we do, we connect our students for Venture Scholar Studio—we call them Venture Scholars—with startups from Silicon Cluster… from Silicon Cluster which is basically Cambridge entrepreneurial ecosystem. We connect them with founders. So founders educate them about entrepreneurship, teach them a small mini-incubator course and also assign them work… assign them some work, some homework to better understand startups that they are working on. And also to help our Venture Scholars to gain practical experience while they are doing this eight-week program.
So, it was intended to be as a commercial project when we just started. But now we have different thoughts… different thoughts about the future. Maybe it can be something like charity, maybe it can be something like an incubator. So, you know, we are also in a very initial stages now. We just launched our first cohort. It’s going great. And me and my co-founder Dr. Yaniv Prusilkov, we are the mentors. So for now, it’s a commercial project, but we envision so much for the future, so much help and support for the students. So we will see how it will fit into a broader ecosystem of like Cambridge cluster.
Askar Aituov:
Thank you. That’s amazing impact for the community. Thank you for doing this. A question about your actual experience in Cambridge as a learner, as a student. So people say entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but you study in Cambridge some frameworks, like business-related frameworks. And could you maybe spot some… mention one specific lesson you learned in class that changed how you run your business in actual real world?
Nuray Salina:
Mmhmm. Yeah, thank you so much. Also great question. Thank you so much. I was… I would like to start with saying that I was super lucky to be admitted to this program, Masters in Entrepreneurship course. Because I was really… when I was doing my bachelor’s degree back home in Kazakhstan, I envisioned myself… I planned to do a practical master’s degree. Not something very theory-based, but more like a practice-based, something that I could implement future in my projects. So of course my first choice was Cambridge. It’s like the best program in the world for entrepreneurship, at least in Europe. So I am really happy to be accepted there.
But another moment that makes me feel very lucky is that I also had a chance to complete “Accelerate Cambridge” program at Cambridge. So it’s an 11-week business startup accelerator. Will not deep dive into accelerators, what they are, but basically both programs are very complementary. They are very practical.
And if there was something that… like one main insight what I learned is that customer discovery always comes before the solution design. That you always need to understand your customers, to understand their needs, their problems before starting building your own solution.
So, my master’s degree really equipped me with lots of knowledge… it saved me lots of time that I could have spent making mistakes and pivoting. So honestly, I’m very happy that I could do this program earlier in my career, earlier in my life.
I was also very lucky to meet a lot of very established, impressive people in the Judge Business School and in Cambridge general. And this networking opportunity, it helped me work in three different startups throughout two years of my studies. So I worked in three different startups: two Cambridge-based startups and one Canadian startup. So it was really a great experience.
Many people believe that it’s not possible to learn how to become an entrepreneur. But I would argue with that and I would say that if you are equipped with a very good… with a very deep knowledge in fields such as strategy, business models, fundraising, experimentation and pivoting, this makes your journey as a startup founder much easier and just much simpler. So, this was a great experience.
Askar Aituov:
That’s amazing. So I believe the networking, it works a lot as well. Canada, like Britain… not many have this access to top-level networking, I believe. So thank you. And amazing experience.
A question from Kaiyrzhan Seitkarim. Hi Kaiyrzhan. I guess this is coming from the context, this person is being offered… probably Kaiyrzhan I think is a developer, engineer… startup stock option. So he is asking: “If a startup offers stock options, how can you evaluate and trust the investment fund backing this startup?” Probably it’s some investment fund, I don’t know, I guess just in Kazakhstan backing startup.
Nuray Salina:
So, Kaiyrzhan, sorry, do you mean the startup offers stock options as a part of compensation, like salary plus stock options as a part of compensation? Or do you mean… is it like for fundraising? Sorry, maybe I am misunderstanding.
Askar Aituov:
As a salary.
Nuray Salina:
Ah, okay. So, in a Canadian startup, Voisin, where I worked as a product manager intern, I was actually given… my compensation was completely based on stock options. So I believe that you should evaluate and think about how much you trust the company based on your research about the company, based on your role, based on the potential of growth and scaling. Look at the previous investment rounds. Look at the stage of the company right now. What stage is it? Pre-seed, or Seed, or Series A, B, C, whatever. So, it really depends a lot on like a case-by-case.
What you should do is really do a big… I don’t know, like audit… audit of the startup to have a better understanding whether stock option alone is sufficient for you or not. If also it comes with a salary.
Also a good thing to evaluate, for example, in many companies… in many like high-growing companies, part of their compensation is of course a stock option. And like there are so many cases, like it’s not a rare case when the compensation in stocks exceeds the salary, exceeds a good salary. So, yeah, you need to research about this company. If it’s already like… on Series A, Series A extension, of course you see that there is a huge potential. But if you are working in a pre-seed stage startup, I don’t know, like pre-revenue, pre-money, pre-product, of course you need to evaluate the risks. It’s honestly like a case-by-case situation. Hope this answers your question.
Askar Aituov:
Yes, thank you. We have two more questions. First one from me regarding the industry trends. Are there any technology trends, startup trends in UK which are taking off overall in West? And you feel it’s ignored or missing in Kazakhstan? If there are any?
Nuray Salina:
Yeah, sure. So I will take one like very basic, I don’t know, I feel like a very predictable trend you might think of. I would like to speak about AI. So what I noticed in the UK… in the UK’s tech ecosystem trends is that nowadays startups, tech companies, they are implementing AI not solely as a product, but they are implementing AI in all the processes, in all the operations from recruitment to compliance to many regulatory processes.
I’m not speaking only about like vibecoding, like AI staff and etc. But honestly, AI is being implemented in every aspect of operations, especially in big tech giants. And they are investing so much money into these solutions that I think this is really great.
However, in comparison with Kazakhstan, I don’t think that we are behind. But I think that we are entering a bit of a different game or industry. We have amazing pool of young startup founders who are very passionate about technology, about startups. We have a lot of investors who are interested to invest in early-stage startups such as Big Sky Capital, Sturgeon Capital and many many other British and VCs from the UK, from the US, from Netherlands.
So honestly, I feel like the tech trends in Kazakhstan are also very positive in my own opinion. Lots of interest from investments. However, I also believe that Kazakhstan in the future… in the next few upcoming years, Kazakhstani startups would be building more of a Government Tech solutions. In the intersection of AI and Government Tech. AI and Regulatory Tech. Jurisdiction, legislation technologies also. So for example, one of the services I really like is Salyk.AI. Also like a service that helps you a lot with your taxes. So there are also great solutions.
And I would say that Kazakhstani tech ecosystem is… has a very broad focus on different industries. But in my opinion, from my experiences, I noticed that now UK’s tech ecosystem… the regulation is very high right now, especially like in the year of 2026. And also they are more focused into Deep Tech, Health Tech solutions. Which is… yeah, like there are some differences. But it’s not that someone is behind or someone is in front. It just means that we are moving in a bit of a different direction.
And another important moment that I would like to highlight is that now in the UK, these AI products that have been like really popular over the past few years, when a lot of investors would invest into AI startups… However, now investors are really expecting the returns on investments from the startups that they invested in. They are not looking at AI, how great is AI and its implementation, but they want the measurable results, money from their investments. So it’s becoming much stricter in the UK right now. So yes, these are my thoughts.
Askar Aituov:
Thank you so much. I’m sure audience are having great value from your experience sharing. Thank you for this. And last question from Soul_nl2ig: “What skill or mindset did Cambridge help you develop the most that you feel you couldn’t have gained elsewhere?”
Nuray Salina:
Oh, thank you. That’s a great question. In terms of skills, a lot of entrepreneurial skills. A lot of practical entrepreneurial skills. I mean like the hard skills. I managed to gain through my Masters in Entrepreneurship program. As I told you, like I learned a lot different methodologies, frameworks, product-market fit frameworks, lean startup methodology. I learned a lot about fundraising. I learned a lot about pivoting. About how to communicate with investors, how to approach investors, how to evaluate your startups, how much money to bring…
I had a lot of… before Cambridge, I had these knowledge gaps in startups because I was 21 when I got to the program. I didn’t know much about tech, about startups. So this was the knowledge I hoped to gain from Cambridge and I wasn’t mistaken. This degree really paid off a lot.
So, apart from really great hard skills, one soft skill, the mindset that I gained from Cambridge is that teamwork is everything. Finding the right people, surrounding yourself with right people is very, very important. So this was really a mindset switch for me. It really helped me assess people that I would like to see in my team. From finding the right co-founder to building your own team, bringing people into your companies as employees.
So it really helped me get out of my shell, speak to people, network, explore and just not be afraid to go into the room and think “Oh, I don’t belong there.” No, like Cambridge really switched this, I don’t know, this immature mindset of mine back then. So really made me feel much braver and a better networker, if I may say so. So, these were my biggest mindset switches from Cambridge.
Askar Aituov:
Thank you. It’s amazing. Because this stream has limited lifespan and length. Dear Nuray, if people want to contact you with more questions, if you could leave maybe share your website or any contacts… maybe in the slides they will see it. Because we gonna finish, we don’t have much other questions.
Nuray Salina:
Sure, sure. Maybe I can leave my email or contact details in the chat? Is it possible?
Askar Aituov:
Yeah, sure. You could type.
Nuray Salina:
Or I can also show the presentation slide if it works better.
Askar Aituov:
I think presentation is better so we could put it… they will see on the screen.
Nuray Salina:
[Screen share starts] I’m sharing my screen then. So this is like… you can contact Linkly here. You may screenshot this. This is for contact information for my startup. But if you want to contact me directly, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Here are my contact details, like personal contact details.
Askar Aituov:
Thank you so much, dear Nuray. It’s amazing. I wish you good luck with both your startup and the Venture Scholar Studio. And we have kind of less… I think we have less in a way bridges to the West. Maybe I’m wrong, but what you do, this Studio as well, is getting more and more important. So please proceed. And thank you. And thank you all for your questions. Still you can type if you are watching recording in the comments and I’ll try to ask Nuray and then reply in comments in YouTube. And please put like, it will help. Each like in YouTube is 10 more viewers. So 10 more people will see it. And take care. Bye bye.
Nuray Salina:
Thank you so much. Bye bye.
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