Viktor Kyosev
- Born in Bulgaria.
- Educated in Denmark.
- Spent my twenties living across seven countries.
- Based in Singapore these days, with a lot of time in Tokyo for work.
I lead product at Docquity, where 70% of Southeast Asia’s healthcare professionals find answers, keep learning and follow up with patients. I joined as Chief of Staff running special projects. One of them became Dx, an AI clinical decision support tool that is now the core of the reimagined Docquity. As it grew across nine countries, we brought it to animal health in Japan, where it is now the leading platform of its kind, for vets and for pet owners. On the side, I build Questd, a home for problems worth solving. See the work.
What I think about these days
If you recognise you have real potential, you have a responsibility to aim it at something worthy of it. When everyone with an entrepreneurial instinct builds things that make money but don’t matter, the world doesn’t get worse, just smaller than it could be. So I want to spend my one, finite life on the hardest problems I can find, the kind worth dedicating years to even if they burn you, because the world gets better when the people who could work on hard things actually do. More in Work on something that matters.
Some things I believe
- Velocity is everything. The faster you execute, the more you learn. Speed increases your interactions with reality.
- Small teams win. Fewer people mean faster decisions, fewer meetings, and no need for political fragmentation. No room for mediocrity.
- The only real limits are the laws of physics.
“I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest of caution.”Wernher von Braun
- There are two ways to reduce economic inequality:
- Lift the floor.
- Lower the ceiling.
- Most problems come from not having found your life’s work yet. Once you do, most questions disappear.
- Fight entropy. A product that isn’t improving is degrading. It’s always Day 1.
- Relentlessly add value to great people in my network.
- Take full ownership. No excuses, no passing the buck. End-to-end responsibility in everything I do.
- Default to trust. Approach problems with intellectual maturity. Give credit in public, criticize in private.
- Optimize for impact over status.
- Every introduction costs someone social capital. Treat it with gratitude, and make it worth their while.
- Say yes to the work you feel slightly unqualified for.
- Intelligence isn’t measured by an IQ test. It’s your ability to get what you want out of life.
- Relationships last when both people add value. If you want someone close, make their life better.
- The fastest way to make friends in a new country is to help people and expect nothing back. I’ve tested this in seven.
- Maturity starts when you take responsibility for problems you didn’t cause.
- Your compensation is proportional to the size of the problems you solve.
The longer version is in 50 things I know.
Where I write
My newsletter is The Ascending World. Everyone has seen Black Mirror, and many like it. I started this publication to write about the white mirror: the future where technology makes things better, which most people never stop to imagine. Product, startups and the parts of the ascending world that aren’t obvious yet, seen through that lens. All my essays are on the Writing page.