§4. The Lab
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§5. Biographical Notes
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The Foundation
I grew up Russian at home and American everywhere else. My parents immigrated from Russia, which meant a childhood with a strong accent in discipline, structure, and very strong opinions about education. In Seattle I played competitive chess, made it to state and nationals, and loved the strategy more than the trophies. Chess taught me to think several moves ahead, lose without panicking, and sit with uncertainty until a clearer position emerged.
Patterns & History
Despite years of Russian School of Math, I disliked math for most of my youth. It felt imposed rather than discovered. Meanwhile I devoured history books, not for dates but for patterns: empires rising and collapsing, incentives shaping decisions, small miscalculations compounding. I was already thinking analytically. I just preferred stories over symbols.
Grit & Creativity
I rowed crew in high school. Never the star, somewhere between below average and occasionally useful. But rowing taught me that progress is invisible day to day: you show up, suffer quietly, and the output compounds. On the side I taught myself to film and edit, producing videos for local music artists. Creative work, but also client management, deadlines, and shipping with limited resources.
The Click Moment
I entered university studying history, then something clicked: history and statistics are cousins. Both look at existing data, observe patterns, and make claims about what is likely true. History calls it interpretation. Statistics calls it an alternative hypothesis and pretends that is more serious. Once I saw that, math stopped feeling abstract. Statistics let me quantify the instincts I already had.
Today
The threads came together in product work: data, incentives, and human behavior in markets that historically run on intuition. If there is a consistent theme, it is that I rarely take the obvious path but I connect ideas well. Structure and creativity, rigor and narrative, numbers and people. Comfortable being a beginner, comfortable being wrong, very comfortable learning fast.