Vadim Zolotokrylin
CEO & co-founder of HoldexThere's a more valuable version of your company hiding inside the one you're building. Usually in the part you've been avoiding.
I have spent twelve years watching good teams pour a year into products nobody needed. The hardest part was never writing the code or shipping the chain. It was being honest about the problem, validating a solution as fast as I could, and having the nerve to walk away from it the moment something else started to matter more.
The leverage is rarely where you're pointing the flashlight
A founder came to me certain his product was a lending market. Three conversations in, it was obvious the real product was the risk engine underneath it, the part nobody on the team wanted to build. So we built that first.
Same team. Same eight weeks. A completely different company.
That became Clearpool: four hundred million dollars originated in its first year. I didn't give that team more engineers. I gave them one honest read of where the value actually lived.
I'm the technical co-founder you bring in before you can afford to hire one
Most of the founders I work with are pre-seed to Series A, building in DeFi, RWA, fintech, or AI, with no CTO in the room yet. I sit in that seat: the architecture calls, the sequencing, the ruthless decisions about what not to build. Embedded in the team for the two or three years it actually takes, not reviewing it from the outside.
Over the years that's meant sitting inside a lot of different rooms. In 2021 I helped Clearpool bridge the digital-assets gap between retail and institutions for lending and borrowing, and helped Finoverse knit together a social platform for the global network of fintech and Web3 professionals. A year later I was deep in Ithaca, an advanced crypto options protocol that landed in the top three on DeFiLlama. In 2023 Synnax put AI-powered forecasting behind financial performance; in 2024 Truflation shipped independent inflation and economic data, updated daily. And most recently, in 2025, Ozean deployed the Layer 2 infrastructure securing tokenized RWAs. Different problems, same seat.
My only loyalty is to the most valuable version of your vision
Which means my read has to be uncompromised. If a truth is hard to hear, you'll hear it from me before you spend six figures finding it yourself. I'm not here to manage your team or replace your judgment. I'm here to hand you the one thing you can't see from the inside, and to say it clearly enough that you can act on it.
“We've been building Clearpool together since 2021. Operating like a Co-Founder is what Vadim brought from day one, and it's what we valued most about working together.”
