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.
Any AI can hire a person nearby for a real-world task, paid in USDC once the proof is accepted. Read the pitch.
Understand Russia through its local press: dozens of regional outlets read every day, every claim checked word for word. Invite-only.
An open P&L of the UK state: where public money comes from, where it goes, and what every promise would cost.
Where your council tax goes in Hammersmith & Fulham: the budget, every pledge, every payment over £500.
A calendar that lives inside Telegram: two-way Google sync, and plain messages become events.
A calm weather app for iPhone, Mac, Android and Windows. Drag your thumb through the hours. No ads, no account.
A calm to-do list for Mac and the Linux terminal, out now. The Android and Googlebook app is in review at Google Play and out in a few days; iPhone, iPad and Windows are coming soon. Works offline, syncs when you want it.
A party game for one phone and up to four friends: build the trap course together, then race through it. On the App Store and Google Play; five levels free, no ads.
On Wednesday the Chancellor sets out the Budget. Here are eight free tools to read it with: what your taxes pay for, what each tax would raise and how much room the government really has.
Politics increasingly speaks in slogans and promises nobody can check.
Russia keeps part of its budget secret and no longer publishes some of its statistics, so its leaders’ promises are easy to forget.