A farewell letter to Vitya
A year and a half ago I heard the phrase "a company becomes its leader" and dismissed it as motivational-poster nonsense.
I was prepping for an interview at T-Bank's AI Center, standard research. Watched and read everything Vitya had put out online. For context: Director of the AI Center at T-Bank, 10 years at Yandex before that (search, then Lavka). Someone who'd lived through 3 radically different company cultures from the inside.
In one of his talks he breaks companies into archetypes. Technology companies (Yandex Search): best tech, user is a distant abstraction. Product companies (Tinkoff): obsessed with users, surrounded by creative chaos. Operational companies (Ozon, Lavka): the flywheel spins, hard KPIs, people get shuffled between tasks constantly.
Solid framework. I filed it away as a useful mental model for evaluating companies.
But he had another idea: culture flows top-down. The leader is the team's DNA. The company literally becomes its leader.
I thought: nice line. Conference metaphor. Classic corporate bullshit that sounds good from a stage.
Got the offer. Started the job.
A year and a half later.
Nobody at the AI Center hangs "our values" on the wall. (Except me — I did it ironically, which is a whole other story.) No slogans. No mandatory process templates. Nobody makes you chant the mission.
But somewhere along the way you notice something strange.
You look at a problem and ask different questions than you used to. You filter information differently, knowing instinctively what matters and what's noise. You react to hype more calmly, because you've watched someone nearby stay completely unbothered by every new benchmark and model release.
At some point you realize: you didn't figure this out yourself. It came from somewhere. Pretty obvious where.
You watch how Vitya makes decisions. What questions he asks. What he pays attention to and what he ignores. How he holds focus when everything's on fire. How he says "this is nonsense" and then calmly explains why. How he dresses. How he jokes.
It seeps in. Not through slogans, through meetings and hours spent together and observation. Through the team.
Last week I caught myself explaining something to my team and heard someone else's cadence in my words. Not mine. His. And I thought: there it is.
Some people don't change what you do. They change how you think. I got lucky to work next to one of them.
Stay tuned
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