Bigger Than Us. Starting a purpose-driven venture. Meet two co-founders of Marabou.

See and listen two of Marabou’s founders asking themselves the question of the big “WHY”. What motivates us to build a purpose-driven funding venture. 

Read the full transcript:

Hello, Cookie! Hello, wife. Okay. Since we are today interviewing each other, first we will introduce ourselves. Yeah, I’m Maria. He’s Marcel, we are co -founders of Marabu, funding subscription for Impact Innovation. And I would like to know more about you, Marcell. If I ask you to introduce yourself in three sentences. What would you do? Three? Is that already one of the sentences? It’s very good that we didn’t prepare any questions. Yes. So like speak from the bottom of your heart. had quite a lot of experience in a variety of fields and I’ve been to 50 countries, worked in 25 of those.

I have seen that charity is not really a solution for poverty. I worked in humanitarian aid and that was just a bandaid on a gaping wound. But I saw that whenever something worked in a resource poor setting, was because of innovation, because of

people creating, having an idea, creating something, making a business out of it, making it sustainable. And I saw that and I felt we need more of that. You broke the rule of three sentences, but I take it. And now I want to unwrap it. So you said you worked in humanitarian aid. Tell me more about that. Okay. So I worked for one of the

three largest humanitarian aid organizations. And I’ve been on missions in, I think, nine countries from South Sudan over Guatemala to Uzbekistan. And my job was to make patients come to treatment. Because you’d think that if you put doctors in a hospital, patients would come, but most often it’s not.

It’s like builders who try to build a startup, like build and they will come. So sometimes the builders don’t really think of their customers, which in that case is patients. User experience. Yes. And that’s a very tough sentence. would say patient -centered communication. But basically, like I did a traveling cinema, motorbikes, a screen.

and a video and some Coca -Cola traveling in Cameroon through the bush to educate people about a disease that is similar to leprosy, to show them what are the symptoms and where they can seek treatment and how good it will be afterwards. So we made a movie and we made this traveling cinema. Confess, you saved the story specifically for this interview.

Did you invent this idea yourself? There is something like, I forgot what the name was, Brazil, a theater version where you would educate people on the market by having actors play something on the market. And I took that idea and I updated it to the 20th century with the traveling cinema. Super cool. So I guess people loved it. Well, they loved the…

the entertainment value of it because it was like in the bush, is mostly no electricity. having somebody come with a traveling cinema and repaired the educational film with a real movie so that they would have something out of it. Cool. So you were like a flying circus. Yes. So how many times you actually showed the movie? Actually, I can’t tell because… You lost count.

No, it’s in my line, in that line of work, I was creating something, then I would be handing it over to a team on the ground. It’s not of big use if I am going there because I don’t speak the local language. So I actually can’t tell how often it was. So it continued its life after you. I certainly hope so. Maybe still like today some

traveling, cinema, is, I don’t know, maybe in other countries of Africa or whatever. We need to find out now. Now I’m curious. Maybe you don’t know and you already created a movement. Yeah. Well, a movement we want to create here as well. Yes, but I don’t believe in creating a movement. I believe that you can only feel something in the air, something that is already happening.

Yeah, and just embody it somehow, give an opportunity for people to participate in it. Because, I mean, human is unable to create something that is bigger than himself or herself. Well, you’re my wife, so I naturally agree with you. Yeah, of course, I cook and you grow. And vice versa. That’s true. I want to go back to actually your

experience of working with doctors without borders.

Although we’re laughing here, I can…

suspect that it’s a very demanding and emotionally exhausting job because you have to deal with suffering and poverty every day, especially I know that you worked in the field, as they say.

Why did you choose to do all this shit for seven years? Well, I had long discussions with my therapist. Afterwards? Yes. And we came to the conclusion together. My mother had a psychosis and she was in and out of hospitals all the time. And I was affected by that from the age of six. And I was more or less grown up at the age of 13 taking care of my mother.

And there is a theory that you compensate the things in adulthood, what you were missing or having or not being able to fulfill during your childhood. And for me, it was I couldn’t save my mother. So I thought, well, why not save the world? And when you discovered that that was your main motivation, maybe it’s still your main motivation, no? To be

really honest in every act of helping lies also some own benefit. It’s a really good feeling if you see that what you do has a positive impact on other people. Doing that gave me the biggest purpose in my life. I’ve seen people die, but I’ve also seen people stay or

alive or be healed because of these actions. And there’s nothing more powerful than that. When I stopped after seven years, it took so long because every other job that I ever did had to measure up to this experience and nothing ever did. So eventually, this is somehow coming back to that.

Yeah, this is like a threshold that it’s very hard to hit, to reach this level of… I don’t know, what is that? That you feel that you affect the lives and actually are responsible for lives of many people? I don’t know. What I can say is I grew up very poor, considering that I grew up in a rich country, but there I grew up very poor.

And my very first motivation in life was to get as wealthy as possible so that I would have never again be the ridicule kid and have enough food and new clothes. I still don’t wear secondhand clothes today because of that trauma. No, I know that you have a sweatshirt. bought it together. Yes, and I didn’t wear it. don’t wear it. That’s a revelation. So for a while I…

I consumed everything that was consumable for me. And I just realized once you have done that, then that is gone. And there is no, there’s nothing real about it. Connecting with other human beings. I can tell you a small story. I made a video for patients of multi -drug resistant tuberculosis in Uzbekistan, which is

awful, you have a death threatening disease, you have treatment that takes two years, and many people can’t go through the treatment because it’s so tough. And then they die. And I was there to create a motivational film to keep the people in treatment. And I was to meet a former patient who became a lay counselor for other patients. And my

psychotherapist, not my therapist, but the therapist who was organizing the late patients said, we can meet this woman. You have one minute because we don’t have time to see if you want to work with her. And I saw her, I saw her eyes and it was so amazing. This woman had created a miracle of surviving and while surviving already helping other people.

this created such a, if I was esoteric, would say an aura, it created something that was so incredibly beautiful. This connection is what is the most precious in the world. It’s intimacy. Yeah, you told me that when we met. Yeah, you told me that intimacy is something that you value the most. And actually,

Today I’ve read a very well -made list of questions that you can ask a person and for a There was a question when you understood that you love her or him. Yeah, and think that’s a very good question. mean, if it’s a loving couple, they will immediately tell you very heartwarming story.

interesting that very often it can be boiled down to one specific moment and at least it works for me. When we had our first almost overnight discussion and it was very

vulnerable talk, I would say. was very open and intimate. literally. And I felt this connection.

I understood that I am able to see you as you are, just beyond all the other things and the titles, and I don’t know, gender, age, experience, I just saw you. And I believe that this moment when you can see this authentic self of other person that creates such a strong

connection. Like you saw something, you saw a treasure, you saw something super valuable. So a person showed you the most valuable thing that he or she has in the life himself. And that’s something we experience right now with this project. We meet on the one hand the people with great ideas and we share very intimate moments about

their dreams. We get to know these people and why they arrived at this project. And on the second side, we meet so many people from various ways of life. When we tell that story, they say they feel so inspired and want to participate because it’s obviously a good idea. Yeah, this is super cool. I’ve never seen, I mean, I’ve worked for many projects since I started working when I was 14.

So I haven’t had a single project that evoked such inspiration in people when you explain it to them. What would be your dream about Marabu? What should it be? What should it become? I start with that connecting all that what we talked before with the objective. It won’t be three sentences.

The moment when I knew that I had to leave humanitarian aid was when I was in Juba, the capital city of South Sudan at the time when the country broke free from North Sudan. And it’s a city with half a million, at that time half a million inhabitants. And on one Sunday we took a car from the compound to a hotel with a pool because there wasn’t much to do there. And in that half hour drive, I counted

95 different aid organizations. So at some point there were up to 10 ,000 aid workers there. My organization in the 10 years since has spent about 30 million dollars in aid projects.

And if you look at the news today and research a little bit about the state of the country of South Sudan, you see that nothing has changed. It’s the same as before. This humanitarian aid is great because it saves people right on the spot, but it does nothing to create real change. Coming from that,

What I tell you now might not, hopefully not sound that bad, but what I actually want is power. And money is power. What I want is there are problems in the world. That’s climate problems, the effects of climate that we can’t turn around, in health and for instance, in what’s called FemTech,

Not many people know that, but there is nearly no money going into health innovation for women. Yeah, that’s true. Which is incredibly awful. We have… You usually say that people are getting older and they have to stay younger because they still need to work.

So there are a lot of problems and these problems need to be solved. And for many of those, there is no money. And what I want is, I want that people who usually have no access to money get a chance to implement their ideas for this change. So money is power and I want this power to change the world on that level. I don’t have great ideas.

But maybe I can help people realize those ideas. I think that you also don’t want this power for yourself. You want this power for founders and you also want this power for people who will participate in these projects with their money. Yes, of course. And I don’t even want to decide which projects to fund. I want, as we are currently working on,

Maria Chernoyarova (17:59.606)
I want to have a scientific board who says this and this and this is a good initiative. And then I want to have all the people that want to participate in that say what they actually want to fund. So I’m absolutely not important in that thing. I just want it to be. To exist. Yeah. You said that you’ve never seen that

This band aid of charity solves the problems, but you said that if something worked, was innovation. Give me an example. Yes, here is an example. It’s a project that is working and it’s seeking funding for distributing the product. It’s a product that comes out of China, which is one of the countries with the worst pollution.

And there are two ways how you can deal with pollution. You can either get an NGO who creates a project that creates a project with a focus group and then some solutions and then something is implemented. At some point, the money runs out and the status quo will return. There is a small startup that has created an air filter that you can just attach

to a radiator and it becomes automatically a filter for all kinds of pollutants and viruses just like COVID and it’s fairly cheap but the company can still turn a profit. So the company has the incentive to continuously produce and distribute those filters to as many people as possible in every

household and in every car. I can give you an example from Africa, what I saw, which was super great. A light bulb without electricity. What’s the point? The point is to get electricity without, to get light without electricity. You can connect it to like a rotor? You have the light bulb and the light bulb has a cord. And if you tear down the cord. Okay.

you load a spool and when you release it, the cord will slowly move upwards and the spool creates the electricity and it holds about for 15 minutes with one draw. And that’s a small business. Why don’t everyone use it? Well, because people usually don’t want to do that every 15 minutes. So these are small solutions that can have a huge impact.

You get light at a place where you have no electricity, which means that people can read in the evening and can learn after work. Yeah, that sounds super cool. I have another example of this kind. I don’t remember what country was it, but I think they wanted to promote sport. That’s why you were able to jump on a bike. Yeah. And by

paddling for 10, think, well, not 10, I think, five minutes, you were able to pay for your ticket. We’ve talked far too much about myself. I’m getting very self -conscious. I would now like to turn to you if that’s okay with you. Okay. So a little bit different.

Tell me how you became a journalist at the age of 14.

I also grew up in a very poor family. My mother, as you know, died when I was eight. She died from cancer. She never was diagnosed. She had stomach pains and she went to doctors but never got a diagnosis till the very last two weeks. So she just like died. There was a person and person disappeared.

And my father was never a guy who knew how to earn money. He’s a very sweet person. But we were living a very, very poor life. And as soon as I was able to start working, I did that because I wanted to escape the life that I was living.

So I started actually to work when I was 12. Yeah, like in this supermarket, well, giving a samples of sausages and 12. Yeah, and pickles. Yeah. And when I was 14, I always loved to read. So when you read a lot, usually you improve your writing as well. So for me, it was very natural to start writing and

I was quite a smart kid, nobody loved me because of that. It’s one of the reasons why I love you. Thank you so much. with age it improves. That’s a good news. So I graduated from school when I was 14 and I immediately started studying at the university and when I was

choosing where I would like to go for whatever reason. Actually, I don’t know why. but I, when I was a kid, I wanted to be an economist like my mother. But for whatever reason, I’ve chosen journalism.

Maria Chernoyarova (24:15.638)
And actually I was already, I think I was already working at that moment, yeah. I even had to burn a hole in my passport, yeah, at my date of birth, to pretend that I was two years older, so they would be able to hire me. And it worked. I do not recommend anyone to repeat this trick, but I expect that our audience is a bit older.

So how did you come to manage some operations of 21 TV stations? That was a coincidence.

Because when I was a journalist, one of the first magazines for which I worked, it was like a city magazine. So we were writing about Moscow. I had a brilliant boss, very nice woman. I’m still in contact with her.

And I cherished very warm memories about, I think, three or four years that we worked together. And at some point, somewhere in the middle of my journey to become a data scientist, I discovered that she was looking for a deputy and that she switched to marketing. So I thought, I know this person.

I liked working with her, so why not to try? So I arrived to her office and she started to explain what she expects a person who will take this position to do. And it was so much. I was flooded because it was really like TV stations with different topics.

Yes, so starting flow from animals, nature, don’t know, mothers, anime, don’t know, medicine, like, you name it. So, and we managed 71 groups on social media and in total more than 5 million followers. And of course, every TV station also had their own team.

So we were also responsible for aligning our efforts with them. So she gave me a chance and when I was leaving she asked me not to. So I guess I was not a worst deputy. And it was a lot of fun. We had a lot of freedom to experiment with things.

Partially because my department was responsible for online and when you are working at online department at the offline TV you are not taken seriously. That’s why we were able to do all kinds of crazy stuff so at some point we made a game about Chernobyl.

Yeah, because it was, I think it was like an anniversary or whatever. And we created a full game with real footages of stalkers who sneak into the zone. And I’ve read all the books about Chernobyl, including Svetlana Alexeyenko.

we’ve recorded the real memories of people. So was running around all the building, looking for people with good voices and asked them to record for me the audios. So it was very nice. I loved it. So it was a lot of fun. A third thing from your professional history I would like to know. You then founded

a company, a branding agency and you have built up more than 20 brands. So I can spoiler now it was a successful business. What I would like to know is when you were about to start with it, tell me about your doubts and fears that you had at the time. that was hard. That was really hard.

First, why I decided to start my own thing. I had a boss who was brilliant and awful in the same time. Hello, Oleg. Oleg Beriev.

He is a person, he is like a marketing whale, a creator of one of the first branding agencies in Russia.

He was always very creative, but very hard to work with. But he taught me a lot. And in the end, I felt that I couldn’t stand this anymore. I will create my own circus with my own rules. But I had so many doubts. had, like, I thought that I will die somewhere, like under the bridge, with no money, from hunger.

from starving to death. And this leap of faith that every soon -to -be -a -founder has to make is incredible. Because even if you have enough money to sustain yourself for, I don’t know, a year, three years, five years, there are so many doubts. And what helped me a lot…

was that I had several people who supported me. Who supported me and they even later they had their own businesses. They even became my first clients. Yeah, I was lucky but they said you must take the money. Yeah, because we don’t want that to be a charity. You are spending time, your team is working. So of course, yeah, you should be…

how to say, rewarded, yeah, but…

we should be paid for it. And the quality of our work was very high, especially compared to what other agencies provided in the market at that time. So I have no idea about now. So very quickly we started to see that we got more requests than we were able to fulfill to take. So…

I was able to choose and this ability to choose your battles is something that I feel is the most valuable in being a founder. So all your failures are yours and if you succeed, this is also your achievement. When you moved from Moscow to Germany,

you were head of marketing in a blockchain company. I think we can spare the world to experience in a software company. there were no four jumps in your professional life. None of these stories indicate that you would end up in a

purpose -driven organization that tries to achieve something that is bigger than ourselves. So what has changed in you? How did it come to be that you eventually come to get interested in this idea that we are following here in Marabou? Nothing’s changed in me. Seriously, yeah, so now I understand that nothing…

nothing has changed, I always was like that. I always felt that I have an inner call to be a part of something that is bigger than myself. And the problem is that the older you grow, the harder it is to find this something. Because you become critical and skeptical and you already have a lot of

experience good, bad and ugly in life. And it’s very hard to be seduced by some idea. So I really tried to be a part of different communities. And I think that only now with Marabou, I really feel that we touch something that is really

still very fragile but so powerful that I I just feel it. I cannot explain that. just because I see that in people when I I tell people about what we are trying to do what we are building.

I see that there is something in them that replies to it.

And when I came to this understanding, I was like, wow, this is the thing that I was looking everywhere all my life, something that is bigger than myself. So if I would be able to…

transmit that I cannot say catch it I would consider it a success so every person and I will talk to Every person and I will pitch Marabu to every person whom I whom I meet Yeah, and if one by one people will support this idea and if they later will spread the word and tell other people about this because

In the world where we live today, people very often feel that they do not matter, that they cannot change anything. And I believe that people are naturally good. Yeah, we are all, of course, a bit egocentric and this is normal. Yeah, we want us to be safe. Yeah, we care about our well -being and the well -being of people, I mean, our family members, our relatives.

And this is okay, but in the situation when a person can do something good and at the same time it’s not in conflict with his own interests. So if he or she is able to combine that, why not?

That’s somehow a very nice closing point for part one of our talks because we have a second part and we invite everybody back in for the second part.