Zero to one, four times. Two exits. One unicorn. Still an unfulfilled desire to build things that matter.
Zero-to-one, then scale. Day-one startups to heritage brands. Margin, growth and retention are the only scoreboard I care about. Public value is now on the same line.
I can hold the product argument, the go-to-market argument and the technical one at the same time — which is what building in a market with no incumbents forces on you. I go to the warehouse and the call centre before I look at the dashboard, because the dashboard is downstream of things nobody wrote down.
Twenty years of building, and still in the trenches: a mobile messenger in 2005, national payment infrastructure in 2022, and whatever is hard next.
No server. Just us.
Founding team at Uzbekistan’s first unicorn: fintech, lending, marketplace, payments, cards, and the data culture underneath them. Millions of users and 1000+ employees in two years, built from nothing in a market with no digital infrastructure and a regulator in every room.
Founded and sold Worki, Russia’s fastest-growing jobs marketplace (acquired by Mail.Ru Group, 2019). Co-founded Dengi Vpered, earned-wage access backed by Target Global (sold). Fintech products with 100+ banks. A multi-channel mobile messenger in 2005, three years before the category had a name.
London-based. Most interested in problems where the technology is genuinely hard, the deployment is political and the blast radius is national: sovereign infrastructure, public systems, defence and dual-use, AI in the public interest.
Marketplace, fintech and payments, built from zero in a market that had none.
A calendar that lives inside Telegram: two-way Google sync, and plain messages become events.
A calm weather app for Android. Drag your thumb through the hours. No ads, no account.