The family lived on GBP28 a week for food. That is the number Abakar Saidov chose to give when he later described arriving in Britain in the mid-1990s. His father, a theoretical physicist, had retrained for a desk job and sometimes walked three hours to get to work. His mother, a doctor and neuropathologist, was not allowed to practise and ran a shop instead.
He had spent his first ten years moving between Moscow and Dagestan, and has said he never felt Russian in Moscow. In England he did not speak the language, and he has said he was bullied for it. That, he says, made him study harder.
At Warwick he studied maths and economics on a Royal Air Force sponsorship, hoping to fly.
He was also, from early on, selling things. With his brother Sultan he ran a paper round and a sweet shop and imported goods such as electronics and perfume. At 18 he went to Beijing to learn Mandarin, taught golf, and tried to export Chinese cement to Europe. It failed.
What almost nobody knows is how close he came to a different life. At Warwick he studied maths and economics on a Royal Air Force sponsorship, hoping to fly. The rules changed to exclude naturalised citizens, and he has said it came just after the 7/7 bombings. The door closed. He went to Goldman Sachs, where his internship fell in the 2008 crash. He has described gaining about 10 kg and sleeping two or three hours a night, and he spent his student loan on Apple shares. Then he moved to the buyout firm Francisco Partners and decided he wanted to build companies rather than fund them.
In 2013 he, Sultan and Mike Paterson founded Beamery, first called Seed.Jobs, working from the family home. Candidates from abroad sometimes slept there. They were accepted into the AngelPad accelerator in New York, and at demo day in San Francisco they held more than 80 meetings and raised nothing. Back in London they stayed in a crowded hostel. Saidov called it a depressing low point, and has said he sold his car just to make payroll.
The turn was a decision to leave money on the table. In 2015 small recruitment firms became their first paying clients; the brothers dropped them to aim at big enterprises. VMware signed in 2016, then Meta. Index Ventures led a $5m Series A in 2017, and by 2022 a $50m Series D valued the company at $1bn, bringing total funding to about $228m.
The price came later: a 12% staff cut in January 2023 and around 25% that November. In April 2025 Abakar became executive chairman and Sultan took over as CEO.
The lesson is in the budget. A family that counted pounds a week raised a founder who could count what he was willing to give up, including the clients who paid first.