Evgeny Skigin has built companies in two industries that could hardly be more different in tempo. The first, Bitclear AG, moves at the speed of software. The other, Dun Agro Hemp Group, moves at the speed of soil. Running both at once, he says, taught him something neither would have on its own: that most of what people call business strategy is really a relationship with time. Get it wrong and even a good idea fails. Get it right and you can outlast almost anyone.
The clearest way Evgeny Skigin explains it is with a single comparison he returns to often.
Evgeny Skigin Founded Two Businesses With Two Clocks
In software, Skigin notes, growth is almost frictionless. “If a client increases revenue from one million to ten million, the software just handles it,” he says. No heroic effort is required to absorb the volume; the infrastructure scales, the marginal cost of the next transaction is close to nothing, and you learn quickly whether something works.
Agriculture offers no such mercy.
“If I wanted to increase from 1,000 hectares to 3,000 hectares, it would be a massive undertaking — more tractors, ordered a year in advance,” he says. And the crop sets a rhythm that can’t be rushed. “We plan in November to grow in April. What we grow in April, we harvest in October. What we harvest in October, we sell over the following year — but we already need to plan in November what we’ll grow next year.”
The result, he says, is that “you’re always in a three-year cycle.”
The instinct, for anyone used to software, is to see the slower business as inferior: capital-heavy and unforgiving of mistakes. But over time Skigin came to see the three-year clock as a teacher rather than a handicap. It enforces a discipline that fast industries let founders skip, and that discipline, he argues, is what actually builds durable companies.
What the Slow Clock Taught Evgeny Skigin About Business
The first lesson, in Skigin’s telling, is to look at the future rather than the present.
“As a young entrepreneur, you have to look at the future — not what’s there now, but what the future is going to be,” he says.
When you plant a crop, you’re betting on conditions a year or more away, so you can’t react your way to success; you have to form a view about where the world is going and commit early. That mindset, he says, is what led him into both his industries in the first place. Neither was established when he entered it; what mattered was the direction he believed each was heading.
“I wanted to invest in the future, and that’s what I got into.”
The second lesson is patience as a competitive weapon. When the goal is to transform an entire production chain rather than sell a single product, a long timeline is part of the design.
“You’ll make mistakes and lose money along the way,” Skigin says. “But ultimately, if you make it, you’ll have a unique proposition that nobody can replicate.”
Speed can be copied; a decade of accumulated, capital-intensive, hard-won capability cannot. In a fast industry an advantage is often temporary, he notes; in a slow one, once you are truly ahead, you tend to stay ahead.
The third lesson is that conviction has to come first, because nothing else carries a founder through the lean years.
“You have to really believe in it,” he says. “You have to have very strong convictions and perseverance.”
He is candid that some of his work operates on a horizon most businesses never contemplate. Industrial hemp, he says, “is a lifetime project.” He expects it to hold decades of work still to come, and he has chosen to accept that timeline rather than fight it.
How Evgeny Skigin Measures Success
None of this is romantic for Skigin.
“I am a very simple capitalist in this sense,” he says. His definition of success is deliberately unglamorous: are the companies profitable? He means it less as a boast about money than as the cleanest available proof that something real has been built.
“If your company is profitable, it means the products and services you’re offering are wanted — and people are willing to pay their earned money for what you’ve built. That’s the ultimate sign.”
That test matters most, he says, at the frontier of an industry, where he has spent much of his career.
“You’re kind of shooting for the stars,” he says of that phase. “The ultimate success is that people adopt what you’ve built around those new ways of doing things. If they start to use it, it means they actually think it’s better than what they had before, and they’re willing to pay for it.” Everything else, in his view, is commentary.
He adds one condition, though he treats it as obvious.
“This success cannot come at any cost. You shouldn’t degrade your morality on the way,” he says.
Profit is proof that value was created, but only, in his framing, if it was created honestly. Strip that away and the number stops meaning anything.
How to Apply Evgeny Skigin’s Experience to Your Business
Compress Skigin’s experience into advice and it comes down to a few ideas: choose an industry by where the world is heading rather than where it’s comfortable today; match your patience to that industry’s clock; build conviction before you need it, because you will need it at the worst possible moment; and measure yourself honestly, with profitability earned cleanly as the scoreboard.
The through-line is a comfort with time that few founders start out with. “With this kind of work, you’re not just creating a business — you’re trying to transform an entire production chain,” Skigin says. “That’s why it’s okay for it to take longer.” The software taught him speed; the soil taught him time. Asked what keeps him going after more than 15 years of building things most people weren’t yet ready for, his answer is the same discipline the field gave him: believe in it, look far enough ahead, and give the work the years it genuinely requires.
