The Getaway Car

This is not a productivity book.

It's not a hustle bible. It won't tell you to wake up at 4 AM and cold plunge your way to a seven-figure exit. This is a raw account of how one immigrant kid — programmed from birth to grind — figured out slowly, painfully, with a lot of bad decisions along the way, that the only metric worth optimizing for is the life you're actually living.

Dmitry Dragilev arrived in America at eleven with three layers of clothes on his back and one belief drilled into him by two countries that agreed on nothing else: work or disappear. He spent the next two decades doing exactly that — scaling startups, walking away from a Google acquisition while everyone around him took the payout, then building three more companies, acquired by Semrush and Adobe — all while working three hours a day and being home when his kids walked through the door at 3 PM.

The milestone kept moving. The time never came. Until he stopped waiting for it.

What it's not

A growth playbook. An exit strategy guide. A meditation on hustle culture. A framework for squeezing more productivity out of every hour.

What it is

A blueprint for building a business that funds your life — and a brutally honest account of what it actually costs to figure out what your life is supposed to look like.

Who it's for

Founders winning by every external metric and losing something they can't name. Anyone who's answered "once we hit the next milestone" to questions about their kids, their health, their marriage.

What you'll leave with

The exact sequence — messy, slow, sometimes humiliating — for finding your real identity and building a business around it. Not a framework. A practice.

Inside the book

Foreword

The Only Metric That Matters

We were sold a definition of success built around revenue, headcount, and exit multiples — none of which have anything to do with your actual life. The dirty truth about why most entrepreneurs aren't building companies. They're building prisons with great branding.

Programmed

From Moscow to Nashua — how two countries with opposite ideologies gave one immigrant kid the exact same operating system: you are what you produce. Stop producing and you disappear. And why that wiring follows you into your calendar, your inbox, and your inability to sit still on a Tuesday afternoon without feeling like you're falling behind.

The First Exit

The question nobody asks at a SaaS conference: when did you last pick up your daughter from school? How building JustReachOut cracked open the only number that actually matters — 90% of the time you'll ever spend with your kids is already gone by the time they turn eighteen.

The Great Refusal

Google acquired the startup Dmitry spent two years building to 40 million pageviews a month. Everyone signed and headed to Mountain View. He walked away. No savings. First kid on the way. No plan. Why that walk in the opposite direction was the first decision he ever made that was actually his.

What Do You Actually Want?

In 2011 Tim Ferriss asked a question Dmitry couldn't answer. A few months later Patrick Byrne handed him a clock — six months to live, ten punches on a ticket. What happened when he finally got honest enough to answer both, and why his first reaction to his own answer was shame.

The Architecture of Enough

Two backpacks. Six months. Thailand, rural China, Tibet, the Baltics, a Stephen King audiobook in Tallinn with nowhere to be. The actual sequence — messy, slow, occasionally humiliating — that gets you from "I should probably think about this" to knowing exactly what your identity is and being able to defend it in any room.

This is Great Dmitry, But I Still Have to Make Money

Your identity won't pay the mortgage. But a soul-crushing job isn't the only other option. Real examples from real people in Dmitry's life — an OB-GYN, a military pilot, a lawyer — who repackaged what they already knew into a life that fits. Also: the exit is the money event. Everything else is just covering your costs while you build.

The Blueprint

Not every business is a getaway car — most are just jobs with worse benefits and no HR department. The exact philosophy behind building one that someone will actually pay to take off your hands: start with the exit, find your distribution partner before you build your product, educate your acquirer while you grow, design yourself out of operations from day one.

The Blueprint in Action

Three businesses at three different stages — one two months old with live customers, one at 170 paying customers in its first month, one still in discovery — running the same playbook in real time as this book is being written. What the repeatable system actually looks like when it's happening.

Finding Your Acquirer Before You Build

Most founders think about the exit at the end. That's exactly backwards. The step-by-step process for researching your acquirer before you write a single line of code — which marketplaces to use, who inside the organization to talk to, why you'll be wrong about the acquirer the first time, and why complete transparency is the most underrated advantage in any acquisition conversation.

About the Author

Dmitry Dragilev

Dmitry Dragilev is a serial SaaS founder who has built and sold four companies — to Google, SEOJet, and Semrush (twice, most recently in 2025 as part of Adobe's acquisition of Semrush) — while working three hours a day and being home when his kids walked through the door at 3 PM.

He's a contributor to Forbes, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur, WIRED, Moz, Mashable, and The Next Web. He founded the ZURBsoapbox speaker series, where he interviewed Tim Ferriss, Neil Patel, Guy Kawasaki, and the founders of LinkedIn, Twitter, WordPress, and Pandora.

He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and kids. He is, as of this writing, home for school pickup every single day.

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From the Foreword

The Only Metric That Matters

Let me ask you something before we go any further.

When was the last time you sat at dinner with your kids — actually sat there, phone face-down, not mentally drafting a reply to the Slack message you just felt buzz in your pocket — and thought: this is exactly where I want to be?

I'm not asking to judge you. I'm asking because I spent years not being able to answer it. I was too busy. Too "on." Too convinced that the next milestone — the next MRR target, the next product launch, the next acquisition conversation — would be the one that finally gave me permission to show up for my own life.

It didn't.

Here's the dirty truth about the world you and I were sold: most entrepreneurs aren't building companies. They're building prisons with great branding. The cell is lined with pitch decks and Notion docs and "quick syncs" that eat your Tuesday alive. The warden is a culture that has decided your exhaustion is a virtue signal.

Clayton Christensen — Harvard Business School professor, author of The Innovator's Dilemma — watched his classmates from the Class of '79 across decades of reunions. Not a single one had planned to end up estranged from their kids or hollowed out behind their success. They just kept allocating time and energy toward whatever gave the fastest, most measurable return.

Work does that. Work gives you feedback. It closes loops. It lets you feel like you're winning.

A three-year-old who needs you to sit on the floor and play doesn't give you feedback. She just needs you there. And if you're not, she doesn't file a complaint. She just learns, slowly, quietly, what to expect from you.

I did not want to be the founder who learned that lesson too late.

I call what I built the Getaway Car — because the whole point was never to get rich in the Jack Welch sense. The point was to get free. Free enough to be at school pickup. Free enough to deal with your health before a doctor makes it urgent. Free enough to actually show up for the people you keep meaning to call back.

Everything else is infrastructure for that. Let's build it.

This is not a productivity book.

What it's not

What it is

Who it's for

What you'll leave with

Inside the book

Dmitry Dragilev

The Only Metric That Matters

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