Born in the USSR

Immigrated to USA

🎤   Began rapping career

We are the average of the 5 closest people we surround ourselves with. This led me to a fun 3+ year career in rap music. Listen to a sample.

Biggest lesson: introduction to Mastery. 

📚   Fell in deep love — with learning

The internet (and software) is the most disruptive thing to humanity. I dropped out of College and became obsessed with life-long learning using the most powerful tool out there: the Internet.

Biggest lesson: +90% of every single question in our head can be (scientifically) answered within 60 seconds – holy shit.

🚀   Co-founded my first company

We wanted to learn Computer Science, so we created Sharpup. We built websites, mobile apps, and custom software for some of Michigan's largest Hospitals, Insurance Agencies, Law Firms, Consumer Brands, and Non-profits.

Biggest lesson: the perfect time to learn a skill is the exact time we most need to know it.

🔮   Co-founded a brain app

We forget 70% of everything we learn by the next day, so we built Thoughtback. A simple tool that helps people choose the ideas/thoughts they want to remember and then receive them later in the future. Over 5 million thoughts have been returned back to people.

Biggest lesson: our brains are programmable. Thoughts form our ideas, habits, and choices, so we must absolutely control this input.

👻   Built a snapchat clone

Technology just amplifies human behavior. Since we can't pause or rewind real life conversations, we built a website (pre-snapchat) that allowed you to send one-time videos to friends. Our mediocre growth resulted in shutting down the project.

Biggest lesson: choosing the right platform is key. Go where the users are — in this case, mobile.

🍑    Co-founded a healthy food biz

Cooking is slowly becoming a hobby, just as it did with hunting and farming. Since (healthy) food acquisition was our most frequent problem, we built Demand Food, an app that brought us healthy meals on-demand. After raising a Seed Round, achieving ~25% conversion, and growing 6-10% weekly, we ultimately halted the business due to its unsustainable business model.

Biggest lesson: timing is foundational to success. We concluded that once autonomous vehicles become ubiquitous, the margins will allow businesses like these to sustain.

💳  Co-founded a Cryptocurrency

In the same way the Internet has decentralized information, the blockchain is decentralizing money. The implications are yet unknown, but if it's anything like the Internet, enormous power and effeciency will be given back to the people. One of the biggest problems in this nascent industry is usability, so we built Hey Wallet as a way to onboard the next wave of Web3 users.

Biggest lesson: to be determined :)