Meet the Team

FOR AN IT SPECIALIST, STAYING POSITIVE IS CRUCIAL
 

Startups are all about uncertainty. You can start heading in one direction only to realize later that you’re doing something completely different from what you originally intended. Clarity doesn’t come right away—but it always does eventually. And when it does, everything becomes easier and more understandable. It gets easier to solve problems. You start to see what really needs to be done and what’s not worth focusing on. That kind of clarity generates a huge amount of energy—both within yourself and within the team.
 

Another key feature of startups is the abundance of ideas combined with very limited resources to test which ones actually work. So you always have to hold yourself back a bit—not to spread yourself too thin, not to try doing everything at once. Because if you spread yourself too thin, you’ll burn out quickly.
 

ArtCracker isn’t just for users on the outside. It’s definitely a therapeutic project for the team building it. At least for me, it is. The idea for this project appeared when the world around us seemed to be falling apart. Along with it, for many, dreams of self-fulfillment started to collapse too. The usual frameworks stopped working. It became really important to find something meaningful—to attach yourself to something good and understandable.
 

That’s when ArtCracker appeared—first on paper, then in development, and finally on smartphones as a real app. It truly inspired us. I’d never had an experience like this before. The things I worked on before had nothing to do with art. They were much more mundane. And for someone in IT, it’s really important not to feel stuck in gloom.

 

RUSSIAN FIRE
 

My main job is with an online event platform—a service that lets you run an event from start to finish. I’m the CTO. We can handle ticketing, surveys—you name it. We’re like a Swiss Army knife, constantly gaining new features.
 

Working in a big company means solving far more complex puzzles—and having a lot more resources to do so. Before this, I spent three years working on a platform that managed intellectual property rights in Russia. Before that, I worked for ten years at Mail.ru, managing their video platform. So, big tech projects. I know what it’s like to run products used by hundreds of thousands of people daily. And there’s definitely a kind of magic in that too.
 

Russian IT companies are a serious training ground for developers. There’s something about that wild Russian energy that breeds brilliant, talented programmers. There are a lot of Russian-born engineers working in top tech jobs around the world—and that’s no coincidence.
 

There was a golden moment in Russia when developers were given the freedom to build whatever they wanted. When I first joined Mail.ru, there were only about 150 people. I saw firsthand how passionate everyone was, how fiercely they worked, how eagerly they experimented. It was incredible. That energy and experimentation built deep expertise.
 

And to this day, I honestly believe that the best developers in the world are those who graduated from MIPT (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology). It’s a world-class school for engineers—we’re still riding that wave.

 

I graduated from Bauman Moscow State Technical University. I’m an IT specialist by education—an engineer in automated information management systems. I’m one of those rare cases: I actually work in the exact field listed on my diploma.

I’ve been programming since school. I’ve always loved it. It’s how I explored the world. And it’s what I’m still doing today.

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