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Fortune

Emma Burleigh

The CEO of $1.2 billion learning platform Preply says it all started with his online search for an English tutor

Kirill Bigai, the cofounder and CEO of learning platform Preply, (Credit: Courtesy of Preply)

Behind the glitz of multimillion-dollar funding rounds that define today’s unicorns are often years of founder sacrifices and barely-there paychecks. Kirill Bigai, the cofounder and CEO of online education marketplace Preply, paid himself virtually nothing for an entire year while getting his now $1.2 billion business off the ground.

“We agreed to not pay each other salaries, because we didn’t have a lot of capital,” Bigai tells Fortune. “We wanted to really make it successful. We had jobs on the side…But the majority of our time was still spent with Preply.”

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