I am an agile productivity coach, an experienced senior executive and tech startup veteran, helping people and organisations succeed in the digital age. I occasionally appear in various media to comment on European politics. I also write a lot.
I was born in the part of the Soviet Union that later became known as Belarus to a family of the communist elite, from whom I learned that Lenin was the greatest of all time because he loved children. I spent my early childhood close to an air force base in Nigeria, where I mostly spent my days drawing doodles of Soviet tanks and preaching atheism to baffled local army officers. While I was at it, the union imploded and I returned to independent Belarus in times of system collapse and emerging jungle capitalism fuelled democracy, which was soon replaced by a new post-Soviet dictatorship. During this time I re-targeted my doodling from Soviet tanks to post-Soviet drunks and hobos, which much more accurately reflected the zeitgeist in that area of Europe.
In 1997 I moved to Sweden, where I replaced my doodling fascination with music production. In 2001 me, my childhood friend Dmitry Palagin and a small fictional dog called Ibrahim created the Belarusian satirical music act UltraВожык which, for a time, became one of the icons of the Belarusian underground rock scene. In 2006 we formed the Gothic pop band Dreamgale together with the model and actress Sofia Mattsson, the first and only album of which was a complete fiasco.
By that time I had graduated from Stockholm School of Economics and had no further faith in my music career, so I focused on television. In 2010 I was involved in the launch a new TV production company in Russia and secured my place in hell by making the Russian version of Paradise Hotel, among other braindead entertainment TV monsters, happen. Sadly for the mental health of the Russian youth, PH delivered the highest viewer ratings in MTV Russia’s history, which is why it really needed to stop.
Reluctant to further contribute to the perversion of a generation, I moved back to Belarus where I got involved in the launch of their now largest online marketplace, Kufar. While running Kufar as a CEO, I founded the Russian-language political blog Antimif, in which I tried to explain the world to brainwashed Russian-speaking audiences by offering them an outside perspective on taken-for-granted political and historical myths. Surprisingly, many of my articles became extraordinarily popular and were re-printed in several prominent news media and blogs in Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine. My article debunking the myth about the morbid conspiracy of the Norwegian childcare authorities systematically taking away children from Russian parents and forcing them into incestal pedophile rings was shared over 40,000 times. (Admit, you had no clue this nonsense even existed.)
In 2017 I combined some of my earlier satirical fables in my first self-published book in Russian called The Tale of The Bear Who Rose To Its Feet (Сказка о том, как медведь с колен вставал). In 2018 I moved back to Sweden to head a new tech startup, while the lunacy I’ve been trying to fight kept taking an increasingly firm grip over the mind of the Kremlin elite. I wrote several pieces for Swedish papers on the subject and sat in countless TV and radio broadcasts when the street protests began in Belarus in 2020, but it became the more clear to me that the lunacy wasn’t strictly regional or national. The reluctance to accept reality and the inclination to lead one’s self-propelled beliefs to extremes is pan-human. To blow off some steam in my frustration over humanity’s incapability to handle itself even at the pinnacle of its development I created the satirical Twitter account Aliens About Humans, which appears to have resonated very well with many thousands intellectuals around the world. So much, in fact, that I have resolved to turn the concept into a book I released in 2024.
Most recently I have been using my extensive executive and startup experience as an enterprise consultant and agile coach, helping companies and teams become more agile and competitive. My focus areas are scaled agility and personal productivity, connecting big enterprise frameworks like SAFe with individual productivity methods like Kandike.