A passion for protecting the environment and creating opportunity in the outdoors with Victoria Livschitz

Victoria is an accomplished technologist, serial entrepreneur, corporate executive, and philanthropist passionate about the protection and restoration of the environment. She began her career as a leading specialist in distributed computing, was named System Engineer of the Year and Chief Architect of Automotive at Sun Microsystems, then went on to work at Sun Labs where she became a member of a small technical team that built the world’s first public cloud.

She has started a number of companies, including Grid Dynamics, an early leader in the cloud engineering space which is now a publicly-traded tech company worth $2.5 Billion. Today, Victoria is the founder and CEO of another tech startup, RightOnTrek, in the outdoor recreation space and a philanthropist that loves to share her passion for the environment.

Can you tell our readers about your background?

I grew up in Lithuania, studying mathematics and playing chess. I married early to a fellow chess player and had a child in my teenage years. In 1991, at the age of 20, as the Soviet Union started to fall apart, we immigrated to Cleveland, Ohio as political refugees, in a pursuit of a better life for our family. It was a classic story of immigration: with $500 to our name, we worked multiple odd jobs at the dry cleaning or pizza delivery to put food on the table. And then we started our first business together, a professional chess academy. It was a success and quickly helped us to get on our feet, finish college and get a headstart in America.

After I got a degree in Computer Science, I worked for Ford Motor Company Labs in Detroit on the emerging distributed computing architectures, and later joined Sun Microsystems in the early days of Java and the Internet computing as one of the first Java architects in the field. Over the next few years I had the opportunity to design and build some of the largest Internet systems of it’s time for companies like General Motors, eBay, Wall Street and other large corporations, winning several industry awards such as Sun Systems Engineer of the Year. I also worked at Sun Labs on the future computing architectures, where we designed and launched the industry’s first commercial cloud service in 2004.

After that, I left Sun and started a string of technology startups in the cloud space. The most well known is Grid Dynamics, which became a publicly traded company in 2019 (Nasdaq: GDYN). I left Grid Dynamics in the summer of 2021 to focus on my new startup, RightOnTrek, in the outdoors recreation space.

What inspired you to start your business?

To me, being an entrepreneur is the ultimate one true way to bring your own ideas to market, to find what’s broken or missing in the way the world works, and then build a better way. Early in my career, I tried many times to convince my corporate bosses to invest in the new products I believed would change the industry, and always failed to make “the business case”. But the big ideas can’t really be quantified upfront with an air-tight ROI. With the Livschitz Chess Academy, it was about giving kids and their parents the ability to join a chess club after school to develop their logical thinking and competitive skills.

With Grid Dynamics, the big opportunity was to make the early promise of a cloud economy practical for corporations and working reliably and at scale when the underlying technology was still immature. With RightOnTrek, the big idea is to remove multiple barriers that prevent the general population from spending more time in outdoors recreation and integrate active adventures into their busy lives. At the same time, it’s also about getting serious about sustainability and finding a better way to equip people to venture into the wilderness, safely, and without leaving a trace.

Where is your business based?

         The headquarters of RightOnTrek and the manufacturing facilities are in Columbia Falls, Montana. At the same time, we are a global and largely virtual company that has employees all over the world.

How did you start your business? What were the first steps you took?

         RightOnTrek was born when my friends and I were backpacking the iconic John Muir Trail, a 230-mile trail in High Sierra. I was new to backpacking and this trip literally changed my life. I was both grateful to have discovered the mountains this late in life, and puzzled as to why I waited so long.

And why do so few people do it?  So, I went to study the market and found out that a vast majority of Americans do use the outdoors in small ways, the numbers are growing, and they universally want to do much, much more. Nearly everyone wants to make camping, fishing, biking, visiting National Parks, skiing or just hiking the beautiful trails a regular part of their lives. Yet, they don’t, and the reasons soon became very clear. There are very formidable barriers to entry, ranging from lack of information to expensive gear to lack of skills to plain old simple intimidation of the task at hand and not knowing where to start. In short, outdoor recreation is a product for deep hobbyists, not the general population.

So, I thought I could fix that. And started working on RightOnTrek, now in its 4th year, with an array of products and technologies coming together to make it much, much easier for folks of all walks of life, skills, income and experience levels to enjoy the great outdoors.

What has been the most effective way of raising awareness for your business?

         RightOnTrek is barely out of stealth, with our first season of marketing ourselves being 2022. So far, we are enjoying early traction by an old-fashioned regional door-to-door sales approach. Montana businesses, and those from the neighboring Western states, like Idaho, Wyoming, Washington Oregon and Utah serving the booming outdoors recreation industry - such as guides, outfitters, outdoors retailers and such - are very supportive of local businesses and eager to partner and carry our products. Word-of-mouth still works great when influencers - guides, big name hunters or rangers in National Parks - try your products, love them and recommend them to others.

What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?

Innovation is generally difficult, in many ways. You have to believe in your idea and your ability to execute, but you never really know if the customers are going to love it, until you do it. You can’t copy something that was already successful before. And when the customers are finally interacting with your products, you learn you didn’t do it 100% right, so you take customer feedback and go back to the drawing board, improve it and put it back on the market. This is a long and expensive feedback loop! So, you can’t afford to be wrong many times. There is never enough capital to do everything you want either, so harsh prioritization of the mission-critical things in new product development is difficult, but necessary.  

   How do you stay focused?

         You have limited resources and an enormous task ahead of you. You can never fund everything you want to do, so you must prioritize getting mission-critical things done above all. This means saying no to 90%+ of things you or your staff wants to do. It’s about picking the right 10% and making it work.

How do you differentiate your business from the competition?

         Every business has a specific thesis about how the world works and what purpose it serves in it. The competition usually lives in the world as-it-is, and optimizes to that. Innovative businesses, like ours, see the world as it can be - and will be - and build towards that. You really need to nail what world you want to build towards, and stick to it.

         Examples: today, people in the backcountry eat dehydrated food out of foil-and-plastic pouches. So, our competition makes dehydrated backpacking meals with a 30-year shelf life packaged in indestructible plastic that will accumulate in the landfills for millennia. We see the world where consumers eat delicious and nutritious meals made from scratch on the trail in less time that it takes to rehydrate the pre-made meals. We envision serving every type of diet, from regular to vegetarian, vegan, keto, gluten-free and so on. We envision super-light bio-based and fully compostable paper, tough enough to take the beating of the outdoors adventures. That’s where we are building towards, and we are getting there faster than anyone.

What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?

         We go after the communities of influencers and trend setters in our industry. If they want to adopt your products, everyone else will, too. We also focus on winning the local ecosystem first, before going too far and too wide.

What's your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?

         Entrepreneurship is an all-in move. You become fully vested in your venture - professionally, emotionally, financially. Make sure you are up to that, and have the support of your family if you have a family, or whatever makes your intimate circle. Because it will affect them, too. It’s not glamorous. It’s more work and stress than you’ve ever experienced before. And it will likely leave you financially and emotionally broken. The deck is stacked against you and infant mortality of a young business is 90%+. Are you sure you are up for that? If the answer is “yes”, welcome to the game. Once you step into that ring, never ever give up. And be very proud of every day and every step to take to make the world a better place.

What's your favorite app, blog, and book? Why?

         Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration by Warren Bennis and Particia Ward Bieferman, 1998: https://www.amazon.com/Organizing-Genius-Secrets-Creative-Collaboration/dp/0201339897/ref=asc_df_0201339897/?

It’s a fascinating study of the common traits of the groups that came together and changed the world. It provides a blueprint for how to build such groups. I always strive to do that for my companies. 

What's your favorite business tool or resource? Why?

         Slack. When used correctly, it makes your organization move fast, go global, share everything and avoid 99% of meetings, emails, eco-chambers, stuff that slow us down and lock the information away from all to see.

Who is your business role model? Why?

         Elon Musk. He never stops taking aim at ever-bigger challenges faced by our planet, and finds ways to solve them.

How do you balance work and life?

         It took me a long time, including loss of marriage and complete psychological meltdown that took years to recover from, to take work-life balance seriously. Now I make sure to prioritize my personal needs and take time for myself as a matter of routine, not stick them to the bottom of the bottomless queue. I sleep at least 6 hours a day, avoid working past 6:00pm and take most of the weekends off. I also have serious hobbies I take time for on a regular basis.

         What’s your favorite way to decompress?

         I have two major hobbies, backpacking and playing high stakes poker. I travel all over the world to backpack in the mountains of Peru, Patagonia, Alaska and Kilimanjaro, as well as everywhere in the United States. I also train, play online and travel to big live poker tournaments.    

What do you have planned for the next six months?

         At RightOnTrek, we are planning a massive set of new product introductions in the Spring of 2022, in time for the summer adventure season. Please, check us out, create an account on our platform - it’s 100% free! - find something amazing you want to do with our help, and follow us on social media.

         Personally, I am excited about a week-long backpacking trip in Utah in April and for the World Series of Poker in Jun /July.

How can our readers connect with you?

         Visit us at www.rightontrek.com
Follow RightOnTrek on FB https://www.facebook.com/RightOnTrek/

         or Insta https://www.instagram.com/rightontrek/

         or email me at victoria@rightontrek.com