What's the single most impressive thing you've done in the past two years — the one achievement that, if we verified it, would make us say you're exceptional?
Our customers, first-time and experienced business owners alike, didn't want to pay upfront for financial year services. So I moved that service out of the lowest pricing tier and made it an expensive add-on, which pushed people to upgrade instead, to a tier that had everything a founder would actually want: dividend payouts, director payroll, all of it. Sales pushed back hard, because their commissions were tied to deal value and this made their job harder in the short term.
I worked out the financial model with an analyst, then built and shipped the new funnel with two engineers in six weeks. Nobody asked me to do this. I was already leaving. I just believed it would work, and I wanted to prove it before I left. Once self-serve showed people would actually buy at the higher tier, we moved sales effort to high-end clients who'd pay a premium for hands-on support. ARPU grew 60% in the UK, measured year-over-year from launch through the next fiscal year end, with nothing else material changing in that window.
What was actually blocking you from testing that, and how did you get past it?
We couldn't issue invoices until a company was fully registered, and registration took long enough that it was killing signups before they finished. With a senior engineer, I built a workaround, a dummy company created in the background, and we reworked how data moved between HubSpot, the website, the client app, and our internal tooling to make it hold together.
Everything we see was built by people. There's no reason we can't figure it out too.
What kind of person are you, really? What drives you when things get hard?
I've internalized a belief that we can deal with anything. Everything we see was built by people, so they figured it out before, and there's no reason we can't either. That pulls me toward finding the answer instead of stopping at the wall.
How do you react when you fail?
I saw a mismatch between our stated goals and what we were actually building: there wasn't a real roadmap. I pushed hard for a fast fix, first verbally, then in a written proposal. Leadership didn't act on it. I checked with our CPO, and she agreed with my read, but told me it wasn't mine to carry, that was the Head of Product's call to make. So I backed off and told him I'd support him however he needed. Now I check who actually owns a problem before I spend capital pushing to fix it, not just whether I'm right about it.
We're looking for people who are sincere and genuine, who care deeply and mean what they say. Is that you?
I was responsible for the R&D budget at Osome. I spent nights reconciling invoices because the finances were a mess, and once I finally had a clear number, I proposed two rounds of team cuts and argued for it with the founders. I knew it would be brutal. But one clean cut, done in one go, meant the team could actually recover, rather than living through cuts dragged out over time.
What are you fundamentally most interested in? Are you deeply curious?
Whenever I hear a claim, I check internally whether the opposite could be true. I'm curious about people: what makes someone hesitate, what makes them feel certain about something. Right now I keep coming back to whether any profession could be developed through practice first, rather than the academic route most fields default to.
What's your academic record? Did you study something technical?
I started school at six, finished at fifteen, and finished university at twenty-one, a few years ahead of the standard timeline. I studied Integrated Electronics and Microsystems at MIET, Russia's leading technical university for microelectronics, and I was part of its first experimental cohort, where university professors taught an accelerated group starting from ninth grade. I didn't graduate with honors.
The booking page is the goal. Everything should work backward from it, not forward into it.
Have you actually shipped products to tens of thousands of users? Do you understand that the work often begins after launch?
At Osome we reached 13,500 companies across the UK, Singapore, and Hong Kong. At Pleo, 40,000 customers across the EU. One example that stuck with me: we launched virtual card activation for vendors at Pleo by shipping the smallest possible trigger, just to test if there was real pull, then iterated for four months. Most of the actual work happened after launch, enabling success managers to drive adoption, working through client conversations, and untangling policy management edge cases nobody predicted upfront.
Do you have great taste — the ability to see beyond the obvious and recognize what elevates?
I study how people arrive at decisions, not just their outcomes, so I look for interviews where someone explains why they approached something a certain way. Usually the answer is obvious once you see all the moving parts, and you don't need to force it. For visual judgment, I read culture and history. Modernism, for instance, was a protest against industrialization, and I see the same pattern now in AI-generated design. A lot of current work looks intentionally raw, because that rawness signals human-made in a way clean output doesn't.
A recent example: I was setting up Acuity Scheduling for my wife's practice, and the whole flow makes you configure every setting and build your catalog before you ever see the booking page, the actual thing a client experiences. So you end up redoing everything once you finally see it, because you built it blind. The booking page is the goal. Everything should work backward from it, not forward into it.
Do you practice your craft — put deliberate attention into something excellent, not because someone's checking, but because it matters to you?
Buttons in our design system didn't respond to press: no depth, no motion, they just sat there flat. No one was going to raise that in a review, and the dev team didn't have the bandwidth to prioritize it. So I wrote the PR myself and shipped it, along with dark theme support the team hadn't gotten to yet. Small thing. But it's the difference between an interface that feels alive and one that feels flat.
Do you understand how software is actually built, or is engineering a black box to you?
I work regularly in VS Code with Claude Code, in Swift, React, plain JS, and three.js. At Pleo, I worked with our Principal Engineer on a harder question: how do we build a scalable foundation that works for both SMB and mid-market complexity. We had vendors coming in from DATEV, Xero, and our own system, all needing to match and reconcile for reporting, with no single source of truth, everything matched point-to-point. I proposed a unified internal object layer that each provider mapped into, so vendor identity stayed consistent no matter where it came from, and reporting didn't break as we added more integrations.
What's your rate of improvement? Have you had a step-change in capability — not gradual, a visible jump?
This has happened to me twice. At Yandex Market, I went from principal designer to reporting directly to the CEO during a company transformation, with no prior budget ownership and no experience managing managers, and I built both live, under pressure. At Osome, I moved from design straight into VP of Product over a hundred people in R&D, which meant shifting from owning craft to owning how teams move together toward a roadmap, and being accountable for commercial results I couldn't touch directly, only through other people's work.
Neither time did I have the skill before the role. I got the room first, and built the capability under pressure.
Do you wait to be told what to do, or do you naturally identify problems and move?
When I joined Pleo, I built a map of how the business actually operates: the underlying equation, the moving parts, drilled all the way down to observable behaviors where design could actually have influence. Nobody asked for it. It's just how I work out what needs to be done. I synced with our VP of Growth on it, then taught other designers to use the same map, so they had something concrete to check their ideas against, and a way to argue for influence on the roadmap that wasn't just opinion.