Meet the Team

HUGGING A COMPUTER
 

I was born in Surgut and lived there until I was eleven. I was lucky to grow up in a very cold place, surrounded by a very warm atmosphere. Everything around me was pretty gray—but not for me. My family brought color and warmth to the harsh northern life. Neither of my parents worked in the oil industry or anything like that.
 

My memories are positive: the unique provincial beauty of the Russian north, cozy ugly five-story buildings, low leaden skies, snow-covered streets. Something between Iceland and Norilsk. In 1998, we moved to Moscow in search of a better life. My father was a second-generation IT specialist—he’d spent his career automating processes at various factories. In ’98, he got a job offer in Moscow. We moved—and then the financial crisis hit. He never even started that job. But we weren’t about to go back.
 

I got a computer very early on. It was like magic. No one else had one—but I did. I grew up hugging that computer. It felt like I had no other option: I was clearly destined to become a programmer.
 

I enrolled at Lyceum 1533, a well-known IT-focused school in Moscow. But there I clashed with the programming teachers. Oddly enough, I bonded with my geography teacher instead. So while all my classmates went on to study programming, I applied to the Geography Faculty at Moscow State University.

And after graduating—I became an IT specialist anyway. You can’t escape your fate.

 

FROM WEB DESIGN TO CORPORATIONS
 

Since I wanted to earn at least some money, I started doing web design and web development. I made websites to order. Back then, there was no front-end or back-end division—one person did everything. That person was called a web designer, and that person was me.
 

Later, I got an internship at a German company that specialized in business process management. I had no idea what business processes even were. But it turned out to be fascinating—organizing people’s work in such a way that everyone’s happier, things run more smoothly, efficiency goes up.

That idea—helping people work better—really inspired me. I completed the internship successfully, and since then, I’ve basically been doing just that: building software that helps optimize workflows for all kinds of companies.
 

I’m currently working for a major American IT company that consults and builds tech solutions for large clients. These big companies come to us with questions like: “How can we optimize this, this, and that?” And we provide answers—and solutions, depending on their needs.

They come to us for expertise and teams of professionals. For example, let’s say a national postal service realizes people aren’t going to post offices anymore. They come to us and say: “Can you build us an app that will help us keep our customers?” People would probably use the app more than they’d walk into a branch just to check the status of a package. So we design and develop the app and integrate it into the company’s daily operations.

That’s what we do.

 

FROM CORPORATIONS TO SEEKING MEANING
 

At some point, I burned out. Hard. I realized that my desire to help people wasn’t really being fulfilled. I was building massive systems for giant corporations—like aluminum producers with luxury offices in Moscow-City. And sure, now their aluminum extraction process runs 25% more efficiently. Great. I get paid for that. But it brought me no satisfaction.
 

I started feeling like I wanted to do something else—use my skills to help something more meaningful than huge companies with a million employees extracting aluminum. So I started consulting for friends, helping small projects where people didn’t know how to structure their processes.

Eventually, through this kind of work, I joined the ArtCracker project. It helped fulfill that need—to do something that helps people and also genuinely interests me. I needed to feel in tune with the product.
 

The idea of building an app that identifies art objects and tells stories about them really appealed to me. I saw meaning in it. I saw value—not just price.

 

THE GYM
 

I understand corporations well. I understand how relationships work within large companies. But a startup—that’s a whole different thing.

A startup is a great gym. It’s a fitness center for developing your professional skills. And people in startups are constantly living with uncertainty. It’s like adding extra weights when you’re doing pull-ups. Startups force you to grow.
 

It’s a completely different pace. A different rhythm. Different processes. In a startup, you have to constantly motivate yourself. You have to give a lot more. You have a lot more agency. But the future? Totally unclear. It’s incredibly difficult. But when you see that your product—something that didn’t exist yesterday, but does today—is suddenly useful to tens of thousands of people, you feel real joy. It’s awesome.
 

And it’s in moments like that that you realize: you're not working or living in vain. That’s the motivation to keep hitting the gym, again and again.