Everyone said I was insane. For 8 years straight.
2018 Got through the selection into a top consulting firm. I knew what I was signing up for: less than 4 hours of sleep, no life outside work. My friends were partying, I was grinding :) Funny thing: everyone who lectured me about work-life balance back then never built anything themselves. And the ones who did build something worked exactly like I did, simply because they enjoyed it. "You've fucking lost it," they told me for the first time.
2020 Sold the business, left consulting. Sharply downshifted from a six-figure income for the sake of studying and a 20k rubles/month stipend. 12k of it went to the therapist. In the classroom I was the weakest one: everyone around me was a future Harvard PhD, and there I was, relearning calculus from scratch. And mind you, I left consulting as a star: fast promotions, the youngest SBA. But at some point I caught myself getting dumber. Climbing the grades, not growing.
I wanted to become someone who sets the narratives, not someone who does things faster and better than others. "Now you've completely fucking lost it," they said the second time.
2021 I'm a grad student. My classmates are writing papers, prepping for PhDs. And I, alongside my studies, take a job at SberMarket: a 100-person startup nobody had heard of. No real equity, no clear strategy. "Why trade academia for this dice roll?" they asked me the third time.
2022 That startup became the #1 company in Russian e-grocery. My master's was done, my team had grown to 60 people. But I could see the ceiling: only ML products, one market, one culture. I'd always built algorithms and never thought much about UX. I walked away from the options, the big team and the prospects. "What the fuck for?" they asked the fourth time.
2023 Relocation. Alibaba, Barcelona. For a whole year I did what I'd never done before: built user interfaces. Sat with designers for days, ran endless custdev sessions with users. I had to take a downgrade to get the experience I was missing. "You're going to piss away everything," people wrote when they heard about the move. That was the fifth time.
2026 I manage 250+ people and I'm building one of the biggest AI pipelines in the region. People still tell me it's all bullshit and I'm doing everything wrong :)
Eight years. Every decision. The same reaction. Earlier, after every "you've fucking lost it", I'd catch a second of doubt. What if they're right? What if I'm missing something obvious?
Then I noticed the pattern: the people saying it never bet on growth themselves. They optimized for safety. And look, safety is fine. Until it becomes the only thing you maximize!
P.S. The photo is from 2018. That's me at 5 AM dragging pizza home from a team dinner :))))