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Deckrobot
2017 — Present · CEO & Founder
(as well as a Product Manager, QA, office manager, barista)
We were the first team to use AI for presentation generation (some 8–9 years before Anthropic). It started as a simple classifier hacked together over a weekend for our first demo — which was objectively horrible, but still impressed the prospect.
It eventually turned into an ensemble of SOTA models (GNNs, deep learning, and all the jazz), powering 20,000+ paid users, $5M+ ARR, and 35+ enterprise customers. We added agentic LLM bells and whistles in 2025 to bring even more amazing functionality to our users. Oh, and we built the whole thing in such a way that it is impossible to steal any client data by design. That level of safety is probably the reason all the large audit firms on earth use our SaaS.
I was fortunate to meet and convince 100+ amazing teammates from all over the world to work with me (17 countries the last time we counted). What really made me proud was not even the fact that we had a bunch of hardcore PhDs (some of whom later ended up working for frontier labs), but the culture we built. Needless to say, everyone got along nicely, including people coming from Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Arab countries, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Pakistan/India, etc.
We didn’t make it to IPO (yet?), but we got featured in Forbes US, ranked #1 on Product Hunt, accepted into Microsoft for Startups Accelerator, and received a handful of unsolicited offers to sell the shop — and our souls — for an ungodly amount of cash.
Our website — made by humans, not AI👔
McKinsey & Company
2012 — 2016 · Jr. Engagement Mgr
I was following an ambition of becoming a "finance bro." I had only seen Wall Street in movies, and once "I made it" to the NYC office, I was very discouraged by the reality of the PE firms we served. While I helped a lot of businesses and met fantastic, values-driven individuals, I was starting to feel ultimately reduced to a "PowerPoint salesman," limiting the positive impact I could make on the world (the joke's on me, PowerPoint stuck with me for the next decade).
On the fun side, I've visited a lot of 'real-world' worksites in the least (or is it the most?) exotic places, such as an oil refinery or a nickel mine in the Arctic. Industrial machines have been my secret passion ever since.
So, I took a leap of faith and started a bunch of different businesses (apps, SaaS, physical stores). Honestly, I don't remember how many there were, but two have definitely survived to this day: Deckrobot (B2B AI SaaS, of course) and Bridal Breeze (the best wedding gowns in SF!).
I still have some very nice suits and PowerPoint design skills that I haven't used much since that chapter of my life.
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GoCarrot
2016 — 2017 · CEO & Founder
We tried to motivate young people to work out and maintain a generally healthy lifestyle through some friendly social pressure. While the whole concept surprisingly worked out, we didn't realize that it takes 1-2 years to sell this kind of idea to health insurance companies. It was my first full-time experience managing devs, and I made all the mistakes imaginable (like having junior freelancers I'd never met in real life as my core team). I was really blessed to meet an outstanding designer, Mason Grishin, who took our UX/UI ahead of its time.
While I blew through all my life savings, it was still cheaper than the MBA program Harvard wanted me to pursue :) I could have figured out for free, though, that any successful product must have a sound monetization model from day one.
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MobiVi West
2014 · Co-founder & GM
I took a sabbatical from McKinsey to launch my first full-time venture. We ended up not touching a dime of our oversized pre-seed investment round, as macroeconomic shifts killed our fintech business before we could even secure a quasi-banking license. Luckily, I hadn't hit "send" on my resignation letter to McKinsey just yet. I had been planning to wait until Christmas, but the Central Bank of Russia hiked its reserve rate from 7% to 17% overnight on December 8th.
Even though we didn't move forward with the idea, I had caught a terminal case of the startup bug and couldn't focus on anything other than building.
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A.T. Kearney · UniCredit · Business Solutions
2010 — 2012 · Analyst
At 18, I landed my first "serious" office job at a bank. It was a prestigious "back-office" role in the credit risk department, where I was mostly in charge of the copier machine. I actually liked the soul-crushing world of cubicles and adults "calculating EBITDA in Excel spreadsheets," so I did everything in my power to get into the prestigious American firm, Kearney. (They gave us free lunches at actual restaurants, which I had only been to a handful of times in my entire life.)
I took the bus every day to a shiny office, only to spend 80% of my salary on a shared room. There, I studied until 3 AM and all throughout the weekend, since I was still a full-time student and had to maintain my tuition scholarship.
I may have missed out on 99% of the college parties—including graduation—but I've never regretted it for a second.
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Off the clock
1M+ km · 200+ places · 7 yrs boxing
I discovered that long-distance running was the best way to unwind after a 100-hour work week. I've completed one full marathon and a handful of half marathons, which is my favorite distance—challenging, but it doesn't totally destroy your body like the full 42km race. As a kid, I was also incredibly passionate about boxing, though I ultimately decided fighting wasn't the most sustainable career choice.
On the language front, I am fluent in English 🇬🇧 and Russian 🇷🇺, and I used to be quite proficient in French 🇫🇷 and Ukrainian 🇺🇦. I even tried learning German while living in Switzerland 🇨🇭, only to discover that the language spoken in the Swiss Alps is completely different from what you hear in Berlin 🇩🇪!
