My Story

I grew up Russian at home and American everywhere else. My parents immigrated from Russia, which meant my childhood came with a strong accent in discipline, structure, and very strong opinions about education. I was raised speaking Russian, thinking Russian, and being reminded regularly that potential is useless if you do not work. That background shaped me early, even when I was actively resisting it.

I went to high school in Seattle, where I split my time between things I was decent at and things I probably should not have kept doing for as long as I did. I played competitive chess, made it to state and nationals, and loved the strategic aspect of it more than the trophies. Chess taught me how to think several moves ahead, how to lose without panicking, and how to sit with uncertainty until a clearer position emerged. That way of thinking stuck.

Academically, my parents sent me to Brainchild and the Russian School of Math, which are essentially boot camps for analytical thinking. Ironically, despite all of that, I disliked math for most of my youth. Not because I was bad at it, but because it felt imposed rather than discovered. I was learning techniques without context, answers without questions. I understood how to solve problems but did not yet care why.

At the same time, I became obsessed with history. I devoured historical books, not for dates, but for patterns. Empires rising and collapsing. Incentives shaping decisions. Small miscalculations compounding into irreversible outcomes. I did not realize it then, but I was already thinking analytically. I just preferred stories over symbols.

In high school, I rowed crew. I was never the star athlete. In fact, I hovered somewhere between below average and occasionally useful. But rowing taught me something important. Progress is often invisible day to day. You show up, you suffer quietly, and over time the output compounds. That mindset later mattered far more than raw talent.

I also found ways to make money on the side. I taught myself how to film, edit, and produce videos, and started working with local music artists in high school and later in college. It was creative work, but it was also client management, deadlines, and figuring things out with limited resources. I learned how to ship, how to adapt when plans fell apart, and how to turn a vague idea into something real.

When I entered university, I initially studied history. It felt natural. But somewhere along the way, something clicked. I realized that history and statistics are not opposites. They are cousins. Both are about looking at existing data, observing patterns, and making claims about what is likely true. History just calls it interpretation, while statistics calls it an alternative hypothesis and pretends it is more serious.

Once I saw that connection, math stopped feeling abstract. Statistics became a way to formalize the instincts I had already developed. Instead of telling stories purely with words, I could support them with evidence. Instead of intuition alone, I could quantify uncertainty. That shift changed everything.

I leaned fully into statistics and data. I discovered that I loved working at the intersection of analysis, strategy, and decision making. Not just building models, but asking the right questions. Not just optimizing metrics, but understanding what they actually represent.

Along the way, I never lost my love for strategy. I grew up playing games like Age of Empires, where resource allocation, timing, and long term planning mattered more than flashy moves. That same thinking shows up in how I approach problems today. I care about systems, incentives, and second order effects.

Eventually, all of these threads came together in Wineman, a wine technology startup I co-founded. Wine might seem unrelated at first, but it is the perfect intersection of data, culture, pricing, and human behavior. Wineman applies statistical modeling and data aggregation to a market that historically relies on intuition and tradition. It is part analysis, part strategy, and part storytelling. In other words, it feels familiar.

If there is a consistent theme in my life, it is this. I rarely take the most obvious path, but I connect ideas well. I bring together structure and creativity, rigor and narrative, numbers and people. I am comfortable being a beginner, comfortable being wrong, and very comfortable learning fast.

I am interesting to hire not because I followed a straight line, but because I did not. I understand how systems behave, how people make decisions within them, and how to turn complexity into clarity. And I am still hungry to build, learn, and compound.