I want to tell you about myself. I write my own texts. I shoot my own videos. Nobody writes me scripts. So it seems only honest to let you see what kind of person this is — the one you read, the one whose meetups you come to, whose videos you sometimes watch.
My name is Max. I'm from Siberia (though these days I live in Spain).
1999
Back in school I decided I'd become an entrepreneur. So right after school, I started trying to make my first money. Which wasn't exactly legal — sole proprietor certificates were only issued at eighteen, and I was seventeen. I had to bring a note from my parents to city hall so they'd register me and I could run a business without breaking the law.
Since about age ten, my interests revolved around computers. Video games, mostly. Naturally, gravity pulled me that way, and soon enough I was in the business of building websites to order. I even put together a team. I got a partner. Then another one.
Then we realized we didn't want to live from one client gig to the next, and decided to build something of our own. We didn't know the word "startup". The concept of "SaaS" didn't exist yet. The internet cost a few rubles per megabyte. And still, in that world, we were trying to build some kind of online business.
In time, it started working. By the time I finished university, we had a living project that brought in some profit. It also became clear that I'd graduated as a software engineer: solid on development, clueless about business, marketing, and everything else.
2006
An idea visited me. What if I learned business — not at a university, but, say, inside a real company? So I bought a one-way ticket and landed in Moscow with a couple of bags, a laptop, and eyes on fire. It was 2006. A month later I was working at Mail.ru. Today it's VK. Six months later we launched Otvety Mail.ru — a Q&A project my teammate Max (yes, another Max) and I built from scratch. And jumping ahead: it became one of Mail.ru's most successful projects, one that nobody in the Russian internet ever managed to replicate.
Then again, there was something we couldn't replicate either.
For several years I built Moi Mir, Mail.ru's social network, which stayed third behind VK and Odnoklassniki. And when Mail.ru bought 100% of Odnoklassniki and a serious stake in VKontakte, I resigned and decided it was time to remember I was an entrepreneur. Time to get back to my own business.
2012
I applied everything six years at Mail.ru had taught me. My partners and I quickly grew one of our projects severalfold. A few years later, we sold it for what was good money back then. In fairness, we were running a few other projects in parallel, and almost all of them went bankrupt. Startup survival statistics are a merciless beast.
2017
Having sold the main business and said goodbye to my partners, I set out to find myself again. By external standards, I was a successful founder with an exit under his belt. Local boy makes good. By my own standards, I was a failure who no longer had a source of income.
And no clear idea of what he wanted to do.
Trying to find myself, I kept saying yes to different adventures.
Some of them cost me dearly — not just in money, in mental health too. Yes, every priceless experience has its price. I paid my bill. No haggling.
Once I understood I couldn't build a new business single-handed, I decided: that's a sign. Time to go back to employment.
2021
That's how I ended up at Nexters, where I put all my accumulated experience and knowledge to work. For the first time in years, I believed in myself again. Working alongside living, competent people — a great happiness.
The happiness didn't last. The year '22 arrived. And what I was doing at Nexters lost its meaning. For the record: I was investing in gaming startups out of Russia and the CIS.
I found another job. An American medtech startup this time. The one that finally dotted every i for me. I understood that I can work in a corporation, and that I can work for myself. But working in someone else's startup... No. That's not what my little rose bloomed for.
Luckily, most of the Russian-speaking team got laid off within a few months. Including me.
2024
I found a partner, and we started a small business together. Well — "we" is generous... she had a real, successful business of her own, and I started a little project next to it.
That project was the PRO community. Russian-speaking tech people looking for work in a brutal market, trying to stick together, support each other, and — if at all possible — not go insane. And trade ideas while they're at it. It was a good project. It's still one of my favorite projects.
But a year and a half ago, in early 2025, the AI revolution caught up with me anyway.
The first breakthrough came when I let an agent loose in my Obsidian. Life changed completely within days.
The word vibe-coding was only entering the vocabulary then, and nobody thought of applying vibe-coding approaches to their own context. I write about this as if it were long ago — but by today's timeline, it was several eternities back.
So: back then — many eternities ago — artificial intelligence talk was mostly about generating content or writing code.
I applied agents to my work with plain, everyday context instead. My texts, my analyses, my strategy. Within a few months I realized I could no longer — and no longer wanted to — talk about anything except the real application of artificial intelligence in real life. I don't mean content farms or yet another vibe-startup. There was something bigger: running a business.
I was never any good at hiring people. And for the first time, I was in a situation where I didn't need to hire people — I could just hire a couple more agents. The PRO community saw these shifts too. Being inside that community is what helped me catch new ideas and grow my own.
By the end of 2025, I was spending all my free and non-free time on vibe-coding. I remembered that I am, in fact, an engineer — I wrote the first code of my startups myself, together with my partners. I remembered that I am an entrepreneur — I made my first money not from a paycheck, but from my own business.
2026
In January '26, OpenClaw appeared. My life split into before and after. I saw what an agent could be if you gave it tools, rights, and room.
With OpenClaw and Claude Code, I went off the rails. I started launching several projects a month. Simply because I could. There's no time to think about consequences when curiosity is dragging you past the horizon.
And if this sounds like a questionable strategy to you — that's because it is. Launching a project is easy. Promoting, maintaining, and growing a project is hard.
I burned down to embers. Then the embers burned down to fine ash.
But if I could go back to the first quarter of 2026, I would do it all again. Never in my life have I learned so much, so fast.
I was sure everyone was living like this. But whenever I stepped out to actual humans, it almost always turned out I was talking about something incomprehensible — and generally driving everyone nuts with my AI.
But some people listened. They became the first students of my course.
Then they brought me students for the next cohort. And the next. My students started recommending me inside their companies, so I'd come run an AI training there.
I was still burning out. But at least I could see: I was no longer just launching projects to learn something — I was nudging other people's lives, a little, every time I shared what I knew.
So here I am.
Trying to run a little ahead of the timeline, to catch a glimpse of the future with one eye. And to tell you about that future.
Would I still do this if nobody listened? If there were no one to tell? Yes. I would.
But luckily, you are listening. Which means I can do more than follow my curiosity — I can make something for other people. For my people.
If you've read this far... (and this is, mind you, a rather long text by today's standards, about someone you barely know)... then you're one of my people for sure. I'm glad. Thank you.
The short version — about me.