RiseGuide CEO adds a board critic to formalize dissent

Why it matters

Fast growth can insulate founders from useful criticism. Matsiuk turned dissent into a formal board function, creating a feedback loop before weak decisions reach lagging metrics.

Oleksandr "Alex" Matsiuk, cofounder and CEO of RiseGuide, deliberately recruited outspoken employees and brought a persistent critic onto his board after deciding that growth was shielding him from useful feedback.

In an as-told-to essay published by Business Insider on September 20th, Matsiuk described a familiar founder problem: CEOs have no manager, formal performance review, or personal development plan. When results look good, boards and employees can start treating those results as proof that the CEO's methods are equally sound.

That distinction carries weight at RiseGuide, a self-improvement app founded in 2024 that Business Insider says has grown to 110 employees across 12 countries. RiseGuide sells structured, bite-sized lessons intended to turn passive phone use into learning. Matsiuk has effectively applied the same behavior-design premise to his own job, building routines that force criticism to reach him before lagging metrics do.

Matsiuk is a Ukrainian entrepreneur based in Warsaw. RiseGuide's biography says he studied international business at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and strategy and international management at the University of St. Gallen. Before RiseGuide, he worked in venture capital and served as head of growth at SKELAR, where he says he analyzed more than 5,000 startups. He also cofounded creator platform Trible, which RiseGuide describes as having been acquired.

A board seat as a management control

Matsiuk said he looks for independent behavior during hiring rather than relying on a standard interview question. One creative producer questioned him for 45 minutes and demanded a live laptop tour when he mentioned RiseGuide's office view. Another candidate challenged RiseGuide's brand strategy instead of praising it.

Those interactions gave Matsiuk evidence that the candidates would keep pushing after joining. He applied the same test to the board member, selecting someone who understood RiseGuide's model, knew him personally, and could spend time with RiseGuide's staff. The candidate challenged the purpose of the role and asked how disagreements would be handled before accepting it.

The useful detail is structural. Matsiuk assigned dissent to someone with board access, relevant operating experience, and enough personal familiarity to keep pressing when other people stopped. He was creating a counterweight to the authority that comes with the CEO title.

Matsiuk said that dynamic changed a planning exercise around a year ago. He proposed tripling RiseGuide's growth and doubling its staff over a six-month period. The board member questioned why Matsiuk considered those goals ambitious, proposed a target roughly twice as high, and pressed him to identify the bottlenecks preventing it.

Matsiuk said RiseGuide adopted the higher targets and achieved them. His account uses relative targets without the underlying baselines, so it offers a management case study rather than an independently testable measure of RiseGuide's traction. The operational lesson is still specific: a fourfold target forces a founder to consider different hiring, distribution, and execution choices than a twofold target.

The app Matsiuk is trying to scale

RiseGuide's homepage says the company has passed 1 million downloads and reached more than 400,000 monthly active users. Those figures are company-reported and do not include a measurement period on the homepage.

RiseGuide monetizes through fixed-term subscriptions that renew automatically. Its support site lists plans lasting four, 12, or 24 weeks, with prices varying by region and promotion. That model makes acquisition, conversion, engagement, and renewal central to growth, putting more pressure on management to distinguish durable customer behavior from a rising download count.

In a March 20th blog post about SEEK, RiseGuide described the product as a closed-loop knowledge engine drawing on publicly available work from more than 300 verified experts. The company says each answer includes video evidence, an executive summary, a sourced explanation with links to original material, and a specific action step. SEEK also declines to answer when its library lacks relevant material.

The positioning reflects Matsiuk's stated reason for founding RiseGuide. He has said that useful knowledge was scattered across biographies, interviews, books, and podcasts, while smartphones encouraged passive scrolling. His proposed remedy was substitution: give users something educational to scroll through instead of relying entirely on restrictions.

Turning criticism into a job

Matsiuk's advice to other CEOs focuses on outputs that can be evaluated immediately. He wants colleagues to flag a poorly written Slack message, an insufficiently ambitious target, or a weak hiring decision instead of waiting for quarterly results to reveal the consequences.

That approach requires more than announcing an open-door policy. Employees still know the CEO controls budgets, promotions, and continued employment. A board member has greater standing to keep an argument alive, particularly when the role was created with disagreement in mind.

Matsiuk's system also places responsibility on the founder receiving the criticism. Hiring outspoken people has little value if disagreement is treated as disloyalty once a decision becomes uncomfortable. In his telling, the higher planning target worked because the board member had comparable operating experience, kept questioning the constraints, and produced an argument strong enough to change his mind.

Fast growth can make a founder's judgment appear self-validating. Matsiuk's answer is to give a trusted critic formal access before agreement becomes the default. RiseGuide's scale claims and relative growth targets still require the usual scrutiny, but the governance choice is concrete: the CEO created a role for someone whose job includes telling him he is wrong.