‘You just have to be willing to walk that path’ with Dr Anton Puzorjov

Anton is the founder of Quas Drinks, a company he set up in 2021 whilst completing a PhD in synthetic biology at the University of Edinburgh. A serial entrepreneur, he established his first venture while still a Masters’ student but closed the business in 2019.

Anton shares what he has learned from his journey including:

• How his entrepreneurial dreams were inspired by an ex-girlfriend’s mum 
• When he realised that his first business One Cherry wasn’t viable
• Taking advantage of all the support, funding, events, and competitions on offer
• Treating everything as a learning opportunity

Find out more about Anton’s work -

• Connect with Anton on LinkedIn
• Find out about Quas Drinks

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This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and Sarah McLusky and is proudly supported by the Scottish Ecosystem Fund 2023-24.

Transcript

Anton Puzorjov
By the time I finished my PhD, the business was already not just in the concept, not just kind of developed, but we were selling.

If you keep on going that route, or even if you try to go that route, you would end up learning so much about life, about business, about people, about yourself, about how things are done in the world.

You just have to be willing to do it and walk that path.

Podcast Intro
Welcome to the Academic Adventures podcast. This podcast is all about people who have embraced the opportunity to combine their academic work with entrepreneurial ventures. You’ll hear about the highs and lows, balancing responsibilities and grabbing opportunities, plus advice for anyone thinking about following a similar path.

Sarah McLusky
Hello there, I’m your host Sarah McLusky and my Academic Adventurer for this episode is Anton Puzorjov. Anton is the founder of Quas Drinks, a non-alcoholic fermented drinks brand that he set up in 2021 whilst completing a PhD in synthetic biology at the University of Edinburgh. 

But, as you’ll hear this wasn’t Anton’s first venture. Inspired by an ex-girlfriend’s mum he had his sights set on following an entrepreneurial path. During his Masters he established the University’s student Entrepreneurs Society and then won funding to develop One Cherry, a retail app for local charity shops. Around this time, he was also offered a PhD and a place on a mini-MBA course. Juggling all of these commitments proved to be a bit too much and, in the end, despite proof of concept the app never quite took off, so Anton decided to close One Cherry down and focus on his PhD and biotechnology instead. 

Despite his current venture being more aligned with his interests he feels like he hasn’t quite found his forever business and is planning to ‘walk that path’ and apply everything he has learned to bigger and better things. 

Sarah McLusky
Welcome along to the podcast, Anton. Thanks so much for joining us. Could you tell us a bit about your journey into entrepreneurship? How it all came about?

Anton Puzorjov
Yeah, I think I have a little bit untraditional approach to entrepreneurship in general. Like my family background, so I grew up in Estonia to Russian parents and neither of my parents actually had background or anything to do with business or entrepreneurship. My mum was a tailor and my dad was working as a manager on an oil terminal.

Um, so I never actually had, you know, encountered anyone doing business or what entrepreneurship was. And in my head, I still remember, I thought people that are doing business were people that wear the smart suits, um, with ties and, uh, looking very serious, you know, and I had no idea what they were actually doing. So I was never attracted to that, but that was until I met a mom of, um, my ex -girlfriend who happened to be an entrepreneur.

And I remember, I still remember this moment when we were driving in a car and I, and I saw her kind of just being herself and herself at the time was managing business, managing life, three kids. And she was driving this really nice, nice car. And she was talking with this client in a different country about business and she was at the same time on the phone with someone else trying to handle something for her kids and I was like and she was like super smart and super sharp and like super-efficient you know like really something that I was like you know if I wish I could be the same person you know I could, I could solve problems fast. I could be like fearless. You know, I could be, you know, in charge. That to me sounded very, very attractive. And that was for me a big, big inspiration.

Sarah McLusky
Sounds like a fantastic role model. Yeah, and so what then, what were the next steps that you took?

Anton Puzorjov
Yeah, the interesting story is that I only met my ex's mom about one month after I applied to university to study biology. So it was a little bit too late to completely change the degree. But what happened is that at the University of Edinburgh, I applied to study immunology at first. And a few months later, after I actually started my degree, I managed to change from 100 % biology to 50 % biology, 50 % business.

So for four years at the University of Edinburgh, I ended up studying everything from strategic management to strategic marketing to economics to finance, principles of finance, a little bit of accountancy as well. And that gave me a very nice broad overview of different aspects of business. And I think I was doing it definitely strategically, knowing that at some point I want to run a business and I really wanted to understand all aspects of business. And of course I wasn't, I don't think still I'm not expert in any of those things, but I really understand how they all sort of work together.

Sarah McLusky
Yeah, but you didn't then start a business straight away though, did you? You went and did a PhD after your degree?

Anton Puzorjov
So yeah, no, I mean, coming from a different country to the UK and studying here in a new place, like it was quite life-changing to put it slightly. Like my English seems to be all right now, but trust me, like the first two years at university, I could barely put a sentence together. And you know, when you don't have a language, like one thing, a big thing I realized is that it doesn't even matter what you know, if you can't communicate it. Nobody will ever know that you know anything. 

It took me time before I could think okay maybe I can now think of starting business so I took it as a challenge to learn all the building blocks and I wasn't really rushing myself and after my bachelor's degree I started a master's in bioinformatics.

So I was trying to marry my interest in computer science as well as biology. And in parallel to that, I also started the University of Edinburgh Entrepreneurs Society. And that for me was, that for me was the first sort of, I would say proper business experience. When I took an idea of let's unite students that are passionate about entrepreneurship and let's give them environment and community so that we could learn from each other and we could help each other out and we could find co -founders and we could attend events together and grow together and create something new and solve problems and, you know, make a, make a world a better place for entrepreneurship. 

And that was my first proper experience of taking this idea. And I, at the time I didn't have any experience in being in a society, let alone being, you know, the, the, in the committee of a society at the university or anything. I was like well, this is something that I believe needs to exist. I have no idea how to get it done. But let's just jump off the plane and try to, you know, build a parachute or a rocket while you're flying down, you know, and learn along.

Sarah McLusky
Yeah. I think that's good practice for entrepreneurship, isn't it? Yeah.

Anton Puzorjov
Oh, a hundred percent, because you will never know everything you want, you might need on this journey. You got to just have to adapt and learn quickly enough.

So getting that society off the ground was a crazy experience and just trying to communicate and align people to follow the same goal, the same direction and picking people, you know, trying to understand what, how do you, how do you work with people? You know, how do you find the right fit? How do you align them? How do you lead them? Like, how do you, you know, separate different responsibilities and grow that whole thing together?

So, and that society was a fantastic learning experience from zero, from nothing to a fast growing, the fastest growing society at the University of Edinburgh in 2016/2017. And yeah, that was, for me, that was a testament when I passed it on to the new committee at the end of my master's degree. And the society still exists and I'm very, very, which I'm very, very proud of and happy about. And when I finished that, I passed over the society reigns to someone else. For me, that was a testament. Well, I took something that I had an idea about and I turned it into something that now exists, leaves and breathes and has people around it and delivered value and like now is in real material world, you know? So I thought, look, if I can do that, I can probably start a business as well.

So a few months later, I was taking part in this, how is it called? I think it was, it was climate launch pad. That was the thing. Climate launch pad program in 2017. And they were sort of looking for business ideas that could help climate impact. And that was the time when with a couple of friends of mine, we came up with this idea of creating an online marketplace for secondhand shops and charity shops so that we could help them to sort of move online and start getting clients from online. And at the same time, the idea was to help people that want to be more sustainable and trying to do something against the fast fashion concept and to help them to make the shopping experience with secondhand clothes much more convenient and comfortable and quicker by browsing local items in your local charity shops online. So that was the idea.

Sarah McLusky
I can see why that would be a very useful thing. So what was the story then? What happened next?

Anton Puzorjov
Yeah, so that was, the concept was brilliant. And I still think, you know, every time I share it, people think, well, that's fantastic. You know, I would totally use it. Yeah. And that was the first, my first experience of actually building something from scratch. And I, yeah, over the next, from that idea over the next 12 months, we, I gathered a whole brand new team from scratch because people that I was working came up with that idea with.

Sarah McLusky
Yeah

Anton Puzorjov
One of them graduated immediately, the other person moved to a different country. So I was on my own. I went to a charity shop. I, I volunteered myself. I thought I'd take the boxes in terms of, I think it could work. I talked to people. I did market research. I found a new team of people that, you know, had shared this vision and passion behind the project and wanted to help and also learn alongside me.

And over the next four or five months, we built the first prototype. Sort of like an app that literally allowed people to, on one side allowed us to upload a picture and some details of an item from mobile phone. And then the other end, we could display those items on the kind of a marketplace type interface. And we had the trial for about four days with one of the charity shops on Nicholson Street in Edinburgh. And that was a great success. I thought at the time.

It all worked and yeah, I remember I was kind of biologist and I ended up creating with a couple of friends of mine this first application from scratch, you know, like 80 % of the code, I still wrote myself. And that was a crazy, crazy experience just to get getting something like this off the ground.

And that, that was a proof of concept. We got the data and then we use that data and sort of initial traction. to apply for probably about dozen or two dozen startup competitions that are available to all students or people living in the UK and some of them are available to Scottish students or Scottish universities. And yeah, this is where we got the initial sort of money. And then we used this resources to build a properly like proper working application that was actually built by computer scientists, not by biologists and it was actually working properly.

And then 12 months, basically 12 months from since I had an idea, 12 months later, we launched a proper application. And then for the next 12 months, we've been running a trial with four shops in Edinburgh, collecting data, trying to understand, you know, what works, what doesn't, or what didn't at the time, and trying to fix it and trying to make it work basically. But yeah, and this is, so I started this working on this idea sort of last three months before finishing my master's degree. And immediately after my master's, I actually, it was a really tricky time because I got a full-time offer to do a PhD with the supervisor, Alistair McCormick at the University of Edinburgh. And I really, really wanted to do that because that aligned with my kind of long -term goals. At the same time, I was accepted to the mini fast track MBA program in London. It was called New Entrepreneurs Foundation. And I also started working on this startup idea. I was like, what should I do?

Sarah McLusky
That’s a lot going on.

Anton Puzorjov
Right? And for the first year, two years of my PhD, I was basically, for the first year, I ended up doing full -time PhD, full -time business, where at the peak of this idea, I ended up...having a team of 11 people and three, three people were actually working full time for me and getting salary from the grants that we got. And other people were sort of students and volunteers that were just passionate. They wanted to help one way or another. And then I was doing full time PhD and guess what? That's the first time full students first doing your first year of PhD. You have no idea what you're doing.

Sarah McLusky
Goodness, yeah.

Anton Puzorjov
And you're also business as you're building a business, you also don't know what you're doing and building a business as a founder is like 24/7 job. You know, you don't switch off and being a PhD student is also 24/7 job. You can just at least in my case, I couldn't just do it nine to five and just go back home and just think about something else. It doesn't work that way. So most of the days during my first year of my PhD, I was, I had three screens on my, in my office, my PhD office and on two of those screens, on one of those screens, I was just, I was creating constructs, DNA constructs that would go into the bacteria in order to do the transformation and express this highly valuable blue pigment from cyanobacteria, which is completely irrelevant to everything else.

On the second screen, I would be sending emails to potential charity shops, trying to set up meetings with the managers, regional managers and trying to pitch them the idea, the vision, how the retail is changing.

And then on the third screen, I would have all the code base of the app because the development team was still very, very small. So the developer was building the stuff, but I was fixing all the bugs and I was trying to do my bit so the things would move faster. And also this is the sort of PhD office, but I also was doing this online fast track MBA in London. So two times every month for 10 months, twice a month, for 10 months I was commuting to London on Fridays for full time workshops, for full day. And the most interesting part is I was doing this on Megabus because I was broke.

Sarah McLusky
Oh no! Not even the train!

Anton Puzorjov
I was broke. So over 10, over 10 months of that mini, mini MBA, fast track MBA program, I counted over 500 hours on, on Megabus back and forth overnight, right overnight.

Sarah McLusky
That's the kind of thing you can only do when you're young, I think.

Anton Puzorjov
I swear, like it's, you know, this is what I enjoy about entrepreneurship and just as kind of pushing myself is that you end up doing things that you look back at and you think, Oh my God, how the hell did I even do that? Like I'm even, I'm just talking about this, all these things. And I'm like, if someone told me that this is what they're doing, I'm like, man, are you crazy or something? What's wrong with you? Why are you doing this to yourself? But that's the reality of building a business. Like, especially, I guess when you were young, you got to be, you gotta be quite crazy to, especially if you're combining it with your job, with the family, you know, other commitments or the university, like all of those things take so much time.

Sarah McLusky
Yeah, but you managed to get through anyway to some degree. So you finished your PhD. Did you finish the MBA as well? Yeah.

Anton Puzorjov
Yeah, so I finished the MBA. That was kind of the easy part. I almost got kicked out during my, from a PhD, actually four times in total, which is a completely separate, separate story. But I managed to pass, squeeze through the first year because this is the first year is the critical year when you have to like prove that you're worthy to continue. So I was like on the edge of being kicked out, but I'm very fortunate people kind of believed in me.

Sarah McLusky
So what happened with the business then?

Anton Puzorjov
So we launched from the beginning to the first 12 months later, we launched the proper product for the next 12 months. We've been trialing with four charity shops in Edinburgh. And that was already my second year of my PhD, right? And during that year, everything like this wasn't working and that wasn't working and that wasn't working. And like, it's, which is a normal thing for a startup. You just kind of figure out how to make it work.

Sarah McLusky
Yeah.

Anton Puzorjov
And I was trying to figure this out. That was. I started reading a bunch of books and I still remember like it was in December. So one and a half years into the business, I picked up Lean Startup book and I started reading it and I was like going through it and I was like, oh my God, I think I've done everything wrong. Just everything. And this is, so I think it was about 25 years old or something. And I was never, I'd never been a big reader of books. I thought, you know, back at school literature is just a kind of traditional literature, I thought it was a waste of time.

But this time I picked up this book that people told me 20 times to read it, but nobody emphasized that if you don't read it, you're going to fail your business 500%. I wish I had that person that would just tell me like, look, like whether you want it or not, you're not the smartest person there. There are thousands and millions of people smarter than you lived before. Many of them just put it on paper, put it into book just read the bloody book. Help yourself. It's very, very simple. Just help yourself. And I started reading the book. I read it and I was like, oh my God, I've done everything wrong. And then I was trying to fix it and I realized that there were lots of misalignments. And if I read the book earlier, I should not have gotten as far as I did with that business because the fundamental blocks were missing, unfortunately.

And 12 months after the trial and after realizing that, okay, this vision that I had, which was to allow people to find anything from local charity shops online and buy it online to then pick up and collect, that vision was not viable.

Okay. And that was, that was absolutely fine because again, I was a startup, otherwise it wouldn't be a startup. It had the risk and we for data and by actually doing this, we found out that that vision was not viable. That's okay.


And. We also learn a whole lot about kind of secondhand retail, about the apps, about the user experience, about the things, how things work in charities, in charity shops, how charities operate in general. Like lots of this kind of secondary knowledge that you wouldn't think would be useful, but it's actually extremely useful because your initial idea often what's, would fail and that's okay because that's part of building a startup. But the things that you learn along the way about the industry, the people that you meet, the connections, general business knowledge, all of this will stay with you.

So when you actually understand that the initial vision wasn't viable and feasible, it is your job as a founder, as a team to then understand, okay, what can we do with everything we know about this market? With everything we have built so far, how we can repurpose or the proper term is to how we can pivot using all of this information and put that into something useful. And two years into the business, we knew lots of things. We learned a lot of stuff and we had multiple options to pivot, to make this a viable business.

But unfortunately, none of those pivoting ideas were close to my passion as an entrepreneur, because I knew that the vision I had in mind was not viable.

And I was sharing this with friends, with other entrepreneurs, and I was trying to find courage and strength to just make a decision. What should I do with it? And a friend of mine said, look, Anton, like I knew you for like four or five years by now. And I don't think you ever mentioned that you wanted to be the charity shop guy. You know, and I was like, I think, I think you might be right. You know, like I ended up doing this because I saw an opportunity. I saw a problem and I wanted to do my two cents in trying to improve the world, you know. But that was the reason why I kind of went into this, you know, and of course I wanted to learn as an entrepreneur and that was a fantastic opportunity for me to, to learn by doing and I learned incredible amount of things. And then I spoke to another entrepreneur, it was actually Vicky Brock that is now living in, she now lives in Estonia and runs her business from Estonia, which is quite interesting. But I remember I had a coffee with her and she said, you know, it's very, very hard, but you've got to make that decision. You've got to do something that is best for you. And this is just the beginning of your journey, you know? And.

Yeah, she gave me this courage and believe in myself and also the ability to understand that, look, I was a business, I did my best, it didn't work out, there are pivoting options, but my long -term vision is to actually run a biotech company. And to do that, I need to have a PhD.

So unfortunately I had to put my One Cherry business idea to kind of to the freezer. I put it, I put in the freezer at the time. I kind of unwind the operations and told the team everything. And everyone was very understanding and kind of, I think, yeah, I was very, very fortunate to work with people in the same Charity shop managers that saw the passion and saw the effort, understood that, you know, yes, it didn't work out at the time, but many of them said, look, if you decide to want to give it another go later on, please come back. We will figure something out and we'll find a way to make it work. But that was the point when I finished that business and for the next 12 months I focused only on PhD.

Sarah McLusky
Yeah, yeah. Oh, it's good that you were able to make that decision and move on, but keeping those relationships intact and not losing sight of your longer term vision. So in terms of that, so you're taking all that learning that you've got from that first experience of running a business and have you got another business idea on the go now?

Anton Puzorjov
So yeah, after I finished that business, I closed it down. Uh, that was amazing. Like I had so much time in my head. It was just incredible. Like it's like a, it's like a Titanic on your shoulders that you carry. And then you just put it, put it on the ground and you feel amazing. So I enjoyed this for about 12 months and the PhD at the time felt like a walk in the park.

But even that was not satisfying. 12 months later, I was like You know, I kind of wish back in the game, you know, I just want something burning. I want to be working on something. And that was just after the pandemic sort of hit, there was 2020 summer. And I was looking for the next business idea, sort of, again, being very careful understanding that most things will not go, you know, you need to be strategic and you don't need to jump on the things, but I clearly knew that I wanted to start a business in biotech because it's like that's that's my long -term vision this is where I see myself and this is where I see the industry growing extremely rapidly and and 12 months after that closing the first business I was in Estonia and I was looking at this drink called kvass that is very popular in Eastern Europe. And the important part to mention is that also I had not been drinking alcohol for about eight, nine years by that point. And I always struggled to find, you know, decent non -alcoholic drinks.

And I was in Estonia between the pandemics looking at this kvass drink and thinking, you know, that drink is fermented, it's non -alcoholic, I really like the taste, let me look into this, you know, let me look into the non -alcoholic drinks market. Maybe, maybe there is something, probably nobody really cares, but maybe there is something. And I didn't, I wasn't expecting to find anything but, you know, the evidence that it's a bad idea and it's not going to work.

But instead what I found was that the non -alcoholic market was growing 50 % year on year in the UK. And I was like, hold on a minute. So it's not just me who is a bit crazy about not drinking alcohol. The whole movement was just getting started. And that was the first, first evidence for me that, you know, there might be something in this idea. So I started developing, thinking about, okay, what's the drink, how I could produce it, how the drinks are being made, et cetera.

And the final kind of goal for me was to, while I'm still a student, a PhD student, while I still have access to all the support networks, some grant funding, you know, brilliant, fantastic advisors in the support network at the University of Edinburgh specifically, I could still have a little bit of time. So if I start working on something right now, maybe by the time I finish my PhD and graduate, it's like in a year, year and a half maybe I could have a fully fledged sort of business up and running so I could switch to running it full time. And that is essentially what happened over the next one and a half years. By the time I finished my PhD, the business was already not just in the concept, not just kind of developed, but we were selling. And for this particular second business, my goal was to go from idea to revenue-generating business, because in the first business, there was no revenue.  There was everything, all the projects, all the tech, all the concepts and all the theories, how we would make money one day. All of that was fantastic. But I was like, no, I need to see cash because if it's not making cash, it's not the business, it's just a project. So with the second business, I went from idea to product that people would pay for within 13 months. And by the time I graduated, I already had some sales going and that's what I've been doing since.

Sarah McLusky
Excellent, oh brilliant. And I wonder if this process of going through it. It sounds a little bit like it's changed your idea of what success means or what it means to run a business,

Anton Puzorjov
I think it definitely did. For me, I always thought of the business ideas as an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to take myself and my skills a few steps further and prepare myself, make that work that people rarely see. And then you work for years and years and years and then bam, you find something. And it seems like an overnight success. It's never all the, it's never an overnight success. It's years and years of tears and struggle and trying different things. And before I started that One Cherry marketplace idea, right. I should have mentioned it since my first year of an undergrad student, I was attending every single startup workshop, ideas workshop, how to build a business workshop, every single hackathon in the computer sciences department, every single ideas, there was Scottish Institute for Enterprise that was organizing business competitions that you could apply every month with a chance to win like £100 for your idea or something. And by the time I started that One Cherry marketplace business, I have failed probably 20 different ideas, maybe more.

Sarah McLusky
Mmm. Yeah.

Anton Puzorjov
I was applying with everything, everything that I had in my mind. I like, oh, let's just throw it into that system. And I learned how to write those applications in the process. And I kind of grew skin of not succeeding and that's fine. You just got to do the thing and hope for the best. And as, how did my definition of success change? Yeah, of course, like from just applying and trying to win 100 pounds to then oh let's get the team together. Cause my goal, my goals were changing over my own learning experience with the society. For example, I really needed the proof of concept that I create something out of nothing. And that I really wanted to build that teamwork experience. And I succeeded with that.

Next time it was okay. But how do I register a company? You know, okay. I'm not figured out how to register a company and all the accountancy and all the paperwork and all the IP involved around it. So this is also like, who else would teach me this? I mean, the university is fantastic giving you kind of the background, but the day to day, how to run a business, how to manage all those hundreds of different little things. Like you got to figure this out yourself unless you, you know, you have a fantastic team from the start and a couple of millions in your pocket to pay people to do that for you. I didn't have that. So I had to learn it. So every time I would along my, Christ, I think 12 years of entrepreneurial learning, I was moving that point of what success meant for me. You know, and with the last business success meant actually making money, you know? And now I'm looking at this and I'm like, okay, I can take an idea from nothing into something. I can take an idea from nothing into a business revenue generating business.

But now I'm looking at the current business I have and I'm realizing, well, if I want to build one billion pound business valuation, that's not enough. You got to start with the right rights, you know, in the right industry at the right time and the right market or the right team, you know, and what I've done with the current company, with this drinks company, I learned a ton again, but I don't, yeah, I don't think it's the right vehicle to get me to that one billion dollar pounds.

Sarah McLusky
Yeah. So you've still not found your forever business yet?

Anton Puzorjov
I don't think so. No, no, I think it's, you know, I think from my experience, you know, and the PhD and this university experience and my, my previous life as a kind of, as a semi -professional athlete, cause I was doing track and field in Estonia when I was still a kid for 11 years. And what that taught me was the process of continuing improvement, always, step by step.

This is how it works. And I think in business for me, it's also, it's a marathon. It's a continuous improvement. It's just a stepping stone and I'm constantly looking for the next thing, the next opportunity and the next skills. I'm always thinking, reflecting what I'm missing to get first of all, myself and my thinking and my experience and my connections to the level where I could be positioned to take advantage of that opportunity when it comes, you know, when I find that or it finds me to start that big, big, big business.

Sarah McLusky
Yeah, well, I look forward to seeing where you end up. So one last question for you, which is what advice would you give to anybody who's considering following a similar path?

Anton Puzorjov
Do it. If this is what you want to do, do it. I think entrepreneurship in general is by far the most risk-less skill you could obtain to improve yourself. Just think about it, right? As an entrepreneur, you end up doing and trying and learning so many different things.

And a lot of those things are very, very transferable to any other, anything else you would end up doing. Even if, you know, a year, maybe a few months into this journey, you would realize you didn't actually want to do it, you know, and that's okay. Entrepreneurship probably is far for, not for everyone for sure.

And if you learn that along the way, that's absolutely fine. But what if you keep on going that route and even if you try to go that route, you would end up learning so much about life, about business, about people, about yourself, about how things are done in the world. How, because just look around everything we see right now from the laptop to the screen, to the microphones, to the applications, everything was created by people. That's it.

And you have a chance to be one of those people creating something that in the past didn't exist. And I think this is extremely fulfilling to bring something to life that was just an idea. And if it succeeds, fantastic.

Like you just have to be willing to do it and walk that path.

Sarah McLusky
I think that's a fantastic place to close our conversation. So thank you so much, Anton, for coming along and sharing your story.

Anton Puzorjov
Thank you so much for having me. I hope I've inspired a few, or at least someone had a laugh or I thought that what a crazy guy living a crazy life. Thank you so much for having me, Sarah.

Podcast Outro
If you’ve been inspired by this podcast head over to our LinkedIn page and tell us about your biggest takeaways. You’ll find a link in the show notes or search for Academic Adventures podcast.

This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and me, Sarah McLusky. The Academic Adventures Podcast is proudly supported by the Scottish Ecosystem Fund 2023-24.