Start-up life is not for the faint-hearted — and Alea founder Alexandre Tomic is the first to admit that the road to success is often paved with pain, pressure, and personal flaws.
“I know I have a toxic personality,” he told a packed audience at NEXT Summit Valletta 2025 during the panel discussion The Trials and Triumphs of a Start-up Founder.
“I wouldn’t be where I am if I didn’t have it. I call it the Batman passage — he protects me, pushes me, feeds off me… and sometimes my people.”
Tomic’s brutally honest reflections set the tone for a no-holds-barred conversation on what it really takes to build a start-up, from finding the right co-founder to staying sane under stress.
Now in a non-executive role at Alea, the company he founded in 2012, Tomic spoke about the emotional toll of entrepreneurship and the high-stakes relationships that define it.
A marriage of co-founders
When asked how to choose a co-founder, Tomic didn’t mince words. “It’s like a love-hate relationship. My first co-founder once told me I was more important to him than his wife. It got toxic — extremely toxic — and I was part of that toxicity.”
He emphasised that start-ups don’t fall apart because of tech or funding — but because of people.
“You need someone who has the skills you don’t have. But more importantly, someone you can trust when things get ugly.”
Today, when interviewing potential co-founders, Tomic focuses entirely on soft skills.
“We don’t talk tech,” he said. Instead, he asks deeply personal questions — about marriage, their private life, even whether they’ve ever cheated — because, as he puts it, he needs to understand how they behave when things get tough.
His advice to budding founders? “Screen, screen, screen,” he said, adding that it’s also important to get the contracts in order.
“If the ship sinks, make sure the other guy can’t walk away with the shares.”
“Start lean, start testing”
Also on the panel, Dmitry Belianin, CEO of Belianin, agreed with Tomic that soft skills outweigh technical chops in co-founders.
“You need to do like a proper background check… talk to his employees to understand how he treats people. It is a truth that this is the kind of person with whom you will probably spend most of your time.”
Belianin advised start-ups to begin with low-commitment collaboration. “Start lean, start working together… and then go straight into the action if you think that everything’s aligned.”
Eberhard Dürrschmid, CEO of Golden Whale Productions, added that being a founder means learning how to influence others — not by command, but by motivation.
“You have to be manipulative in a positive way… What is the motivation I have to produce inside this very smart person to produce a result that I want to see?”
Belianin offered his own take: “I always like this good cop, bad cop kind of scenario… So I’ve always been the good one. So if you need to cry at night, you can call me.”
‘Everything good came from failure’
Perhaps most striking was Tomic’s philosophy on failure. “Everything good I have today came from something bad. Someone tried to steal from me, mislead me, hurt me — and from that, something valuable always came.”
He described this process as “dancing with the devil.”
“When I see the red flags, I don’t run. I’ll let them do what they want to do to me. I know it’s a very strange way to talk and express things. And then the magic happens. It takes, normally, one year, two years, and something incredibly good and valuable comes out of it,” he said.
Culture over strategy
Despite the chaos, or perhaps because of it, Tomic believes deeply in culture as a stabilising force.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” he said. When your team knows who they are, they don’t need to be told what or why — they just act.”
This cultural clarity, he says, is what keeps Alea’s employees engaged and mentally well, even while the leadership team absorbs the brunt of the pressure.
“The C-levels are the adults. They can feel the heat. The rest of the team should feel supported and safe,” he said.
