The Kyrgyzstan-born founder, who co-founded Boxo to help companies develop their super apps in 2019, opens up about learning fast, launching fast and failing fast
Tech entrepreneur Kaniyet Rayev can’t sit still. He doesn’t want to anyway.
As a child born in Kyrgyzstan and raised in Kazakhstan, he took part in numerous extracurricular activities in and outside of school. He competed in Latin dance, played the clarinet for six years, learned to play the drums, was in a rock band, wrote music and would organise parties at school—all before he turned 16 years old. At age nine, he also enrolled in a coding class meant for older students and did that for three years.
But before you think his parents had anything to do with his busy childhood, they didn’t. “I like learning and I like to learn fast,” says Rayev, who is now the founder of Boxo, a platform helping businesses in Southeast Asia, South Africa and the Middle East develop their super app. “As soon as I stop learning, I get bored.”
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When we spoke for this story, he was learning about home lighting. He and his wife Naya had just moved to a new house and Rayev was trying to find a way to optimise their lighting to make it more atmospheric and cost-effective.
Becoming business-minded
His parents were entrepreneurs themselves: his father started a food manufacturing business while his mother ran a beauty salon. “My parents never asked me to do any of those extracurricular activities. They were like, whatever you want to do, you can.”
A view of Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan, where Rayev was born (Photo: Getty Images)
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Rayev’s first experience with entrepreneurship was when he and his friends would organise “rave parties” at their school—with the blessing of their teachers. They would rent equipment, plan performances, invite DJs to spin and charge their fellow students a cover fee to attend.
He later joined his older sister in London, where he studied at Cass Business School, now known as Bayes Business School. It was there that he saw the opportunity to launch a co-working business. He didn’t start the company immediately; after graduating from business school, he returned to Kazakhstan for a short stint with Uber, before heading back to London to start Haus in 2016.
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“Back then, [the decision] was either to do my Master’s degree or start a business,” recalls Rayev. “I thought it would be better to start something because you can learn faster by actually doing things.”
After thinking of a business that “wouldn’t require a lot of money or time to start”, he landed on a revenue-sharing model, where he would partner with hotels and restaurants with spare capacity to open up their unused spaces to remote workers. “For my partners, it would be additional revenue. For me, there was no rent to pay.”
