Q: Tell us about yourself. What motivates you?

I was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, to a theoretical physicist and a cellular biologist. I moved to the US when I was two. Growing up, it always seemed to me that science and technology were the easiest ways to make people’s lives better – regardless of social class or politics, country of origin, or any belief system. Like my parents, I was initially drawn to physics and biology, then shifted to software programming and economics. I knew early on that I wanted to help accelerate the adoption of new technologies from basic research to something actually making a difference in people’s lives. That’s still what I want to do today.

Q: How did you end up in the tech industry?

I always knew I would end up in the tech industry, but I took a somewhat unusual path. I wanted to best position myself for long-term, large-scale impact, and I believed that by joining a venture capital firm, I’d have the most leverage to accelerate new technologies. So, I came at it first from an investment side, joining DFJ Growth as an associate, but quickly realized I needed firsthand operating experience to be an even better investor. Next, I went into product engineering roles at Mapbox and SpaceX to gain that experience. Now I’m thrilled to be back at DFJ Growth after a decade away. I never left the tech world, and now I’ve seen different angles of the challenges our partner companies face.

Q: Welcome back! Yes, you left the team a decade ago as an investment associate to pursue startup experience. How did that go for you?

Great. Being a venture associate was fun, but I quickly realized that I had a lot to learn. If I were to help companies accelerate their growth, and help technologies get to prime time faster, I would need to learn how to solve these problems firsthand. Mapbox was a great place to cut my teeth: engineering-led, open source in both product and cultural philosophy. I was able to learn every part of the business simply from following tickets on our internal Github repository – everything from the code / code reviews to market analysis to our enterprise deals. We grew in scale and in revenue rapidly for the next three years, and everything felt like it was breaking all at once. My role changed eight times in four years, and I was thrown into whatever we did not have a good solution for at the time. 

Joining the Starlink program at SpaceX was something I had thought about since my first go at DFJ Growth: it was the kind of fundamental technology that I was drawn to since childhood. It could advance communications worldwide, changing the world for the better. In February of 2022, that lesson hit home much closer than expected as Russia invaded the country of my birth. Starlink kept many people in Ukraine connected to the internet. The Starlink team dove in to restore digital connectivity in Ukraine, where I spent my summers growing up, where the people we were helping were just like me. I’ll forever be thankful for what my teammates did during those painful first months, and a long time thereafter.

SpaceX to me represents how to get difficult technology out of the lab and into people’s hands and homes faster than anyone thought possible. The lessons I learned there, I want to bring to every startup that’s building something very difficult, or with a high chance of failure.

Q: What brought you back to the firm? Was this part of your grand plan?

It was time. The Starlink program went from “default dead” – all previous satellite mega constellations had gone bankrupt – to self-sustaining and rapid growth. There were many things left to do (expansion, direct to cell, further cost reductions to make it more affordable), but the teams we had built were highly capable, and a new generation was eager to jump into the breach. 

I could have jumped onto the next problem, but I wanted to step back and think more broadly. I wanted to share the lessons I had learned with others facing similar odds, and help multiple companies execute with the techniques I saw work. My goal now is to empower other people. A world in which there are many teams and companies executing like SpaceX would be a pretty exciting world.

Q: How are you defining your role at the firm? What contributions are you hoping to make? 

My first role coming back to DFJ Growth is to dive deep into the core technologies that the firm invests in. My job is to understand the nuances, gotchas, blockers, and non-linearities to get them to market. Nothing kills a company like trying to scale before the technology or product is ready. Counterintuitively, more money is just as likely to drown a fragile idea as support it, as early iteration is best done by smaller, more focused teams. 

When the technology is ready to scale, I want to help the company execute, primarily in the time to learning and time to market domains. Increasing learning rate and shrinking critical path is the best way to cut burn, get to revenue faster, keep employees motivated, and keep investors engaged and open to further funding. This is not easy, but there are repeatable techniques for getting this right. 

Q: We like to say we imagine the future and back the visionary entrepreneurs who define it. What does this mean to you?

While there are many possible futures, and some are more likely than others, none are ever guaranteed. Nuclear fusion, satellite cell phones, autonomous cars – none of it will happen unless we make it happen. There is a special class of entrepreneur who is prescient and audacious enough to say what the future can look like, and also has the talent, ingenuity, and perseverance to see that vision through. The best thing we can do to make a better future is to equip and assist this caliber of visionary founder.

Q: How do we engage with our companies through their scaling journey?

We engage both by jumping into the trenches with them and providing a “zoomed out” perspective built on collective decades of expertise. This is another reason why we have a team with diverse skill sets. For some companies, we focus on recruiting, executive search, and making introductions and connections with the right resources and collaborators. For others, CEOs have asked us to advise or even personally jump in around transition points or critical initiatives where a company has a gap. That’s often where I’ve had the most fun. The important thing for us is that our founders see us as a real and beneficial part of their team, not just another entity on their cap table. 

Q: What are the most important lessons you’ve learned as an operator and how do they translate to advice for founders?

The biggest lesson I learned as an operator is to shorten the iteration loop. Nothing else matters. If you can iterate quickly, you'll burn less cash, get to revenue faster, keep your employees motivated, and keep investors engaged and interested in what you do. In order to get there, I found three habits to be most important.

The first habit is a culture of urgency. This is a major advantage startups have over larger companies. Fear of death forces you to prioritize ruthlessly and make sure your best people are focused on the most important problems. It makes you cut everything except what’s essential. It’s the “what would you do if there’s a gun to your head” thought exercise–except for the company, the stakes are real. On the reverse side, too much money too early can dull this edge, as distractions set in, and you lose sight of what is most important.

The second habit is ownership. So many of the poor outcomes we saw at SpaceX were due to a lack of ownership or the ownership being at too high a level. SpaceX's best asset was its Responsible Engineer culture. As a responsible engineer, if anything goes wrong with your part or part of your system, it is your fault. If you're responsible for a valve and someone else causes debris to come into your valve, it is your fault that you didn't put a filter on it. If someone used your part wrong downstream, it was also your fault for not thinking through their use cases. Responsible ownership hugely accelerates the business. You always know exactly who has the ball, and no one can point the finger at someone else. You have to get it done, do it right, and do it yourself.

The third habit is to simplify, simplify, simplify. Be ruthless in reducing complexity, because complexity is the devil. If you are tempted to think removing a complex requirement is impossible, remember, you’re likely wrong. Elon Musk’s “algorithm” really works, and 70% of the value comes from the first habit: “question every requirement.” It’s humbling the number of times I’ve spent weeks of my team’s time working around a problem, when the task itself was unnecessary, or we had tried to optimize prematurely.

If you get these three things right, you’ll be set up to out-execute 95% of teams out there, and you will be able to attract and retain the best people, as they’ll feel like they have more control and more impact.

Q: What are the guiding principles that define your approach to investing?

Number one is to understand who you are building for and why. Technology is exciting, but one of the most common traps is being a hammer in search of a nail, or (close corollary) doing something because of its difficulty or novelty, rather than for its positive impact or because it meets a need in the world. I want to invest in technologies where the need is so big, potential users are already trying to chain together two or three brittle and ineffective workarounds; that’s where a company can come in and become a game-changer. That’s the kind of problem I want to help solve.

Second, you have to have the right team. A company is the long shadow of its founders. The ideal founder is mission driven, relentless about self-improvement, and honest with themselves and others about the challenges they face. A culture of trust begins at the top, and often, the best way to describe a leader is someone that others want to follow, especially through difficult times. The right people, in my view, are even more important when making an investment decision than a particular technology. 

Q: Share an experience from your career that epitomizes your approach to life and how you confront challenges. 

Getting the Starlink network up and running was a foundational experience for me. Scrappy doesn’t even begin to describe it. When we had our first satellite hardware ready to launch, in typical SpaceX fashion, it was the bare minimum that we could safely get to space, which meant none of the network code was written yet, phased array beamforming algorithms were hacky and hardcoded – and we weren't sure which issues were fixable in software. Our second and third launch of more satellites loomed on the horizon, so if we had a showstopper problem, we had to find out before we launched more dead hardware into space. This combination of bare-minimum tech and the intense pressure of it has to work produced some of the guiding principles I still use today.

I have a devotion to “critical path” – identifying it, assigning the right people to it, and unblocking everything that stands in their way. In the early days of Starlink, despite having world-class engineering teams, progress was constantly getting slowed down or blocked by trivial things like testbed stability or lack of coordination on dependencies. For bug tracking, we often didn’t even know which system the issue originated in. To sort all this out, I was assigned to “own” critical path. I had to figure out and resolve whatever was blocking our top priorities from moving forward. Each day I sent an email to everyone in the program, naming the top three blockers. I would assign a single individual to be responsible for each issue, along with the help they would need. When people knew what was blocking progress, volunteers jumped in after hours and over the weekend to help. Things that used to take weeks were done in hours. The people responsible for the critical path felt like they had the entire company behind them. And they did.

Getting Starlink working required hundreds of problems to be solved, and hundreds of actions to be iteratively rethought or unblocked. As a result of the way we supported each other, and rallied around the people on critical path, the team who worked through that massive push view the experience as an incredibly fun time in our lives. Even my wife agrees! 

Aligning an organization behind a central mission is hard, but it’s crucial. It takes both technical depth and an empathic touch. But once you have that feeling of rapid progress – that what you’re working on really matters – it’s addictive, and it builds on itself. This is something I’ll keep with me forever.

Q: What book or work of art has had the most influence on you?

Two of the most influential books for me are Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” and Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” 

The first is a modem parable about pursuing one’s dream, or personal legend. It’s a simple allegory, readable in a matter of hours, but I find myself coming back to it every few years because of its depth and how applicable it has been to my own journey. In a nutshell, the protagonist learns that everything you go through in life – everything you learn, all your challenges and setbacks – will all be valuable in accomplishing your personal legend. That one thing that defines your life. I’ve found myself returning to “The Alchemist” during my hardest days for the inspiration it brings.

Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” was recommended to me by every Eastern European over the age of 60 in my life growing up. Apparently, it was one of the only non-fiction books the Soviet censors allowed through, even though it was written by an American businessman. My life changed dramatically for the better after it helped me break out of my introverted, technology-first mindset growing up, helping me become someone who understands that people, trust, and relationships are key.

Q: Tell us a fun fact about you that will surprise us.

Growing up, I spent my summers in Kyiv, Ukraine. Risk tolerances there are hilariously skewed – weekend fun meant playing with axes, lighting random things in bonfires, and climbing unfinished buildings at my grandparents' farms. Technology also had a way of sneaking up on you. My best friend there learned English through RPG games like Fallout and Baldurs Gate, and we all learned a heck of a lot more about computers through trying to install “Petrivka Market” game copies on ancient hardware while avoiding the inevitable malware that came with them.