Aleksandrina Ikonomova

I've spent the last seven-plus years on every side of the early-stage table, building and selling a company of my own, operating inside startups, angel investing across consumer, health & wellness and early-stage B2B, and working hands-on with more than 320 startups on operations, business models, customer discovery, product, fundraising and growth. That volume taught me to spot the difference between a company that needs more capital and one that needs someone to name what's actually broken and fix it. I also mentor founders through the Founder Institute and Beyond Accelerator, and I spent a year as business and operations advisor to The Liber, helping it build the systems, monetisation and partnerships behind 15M+ views and a 200K+ audience in a single quarter. Today I run Pisana Labs, which I built around a conviction that European venture needs a third path between unicorn and shutdown. We go inside VC-backed companies, rebuild the real economics, find the rate-limiting problem, and decide what comes next; a turnaround while the investor keeps its position, preparation for an M&A process, or a buyout where we carry the turnaround risk ourselves. I'm also a founding partner of Negotiate Like a Woman, an open-access database of real negotiation case studies. If you're a founder wondering whether to raise again, sell, or sell a piece of what you've built, or an investor sitting on a position that isn't moving, I'll give you a blunt read rather than a comfortable one.