About

My career started at 16 in Russia, programming in C for UNIX on a Soviet PDP-11 clone at school. By my mid-twenties I had moved from software development into managing enterprise technology (as IT Director for Russia), first for Cadbury Schweppes, then Ericsson. In 2001, Microsoft brought me to the US to help it engage more effectively with large enterprise customers.

That work led me to the Executive Briefing Center as a mechanism, and I have been building and scaling EBC programs ever since, at four companies and four inflection points: Microsoft's pivot to industry solutions, AWS's run from $7B to $40B, F5's shift from hardware to software, and T-Mobile's push into enterprise B2B. Two of the four facilities I designed received GACEP World Class recognition — the F5 Seattle headquarters in 2020, and the T-Mobile Bellevue headquarters in 2026.

The current inflection point is AI, and I have been exploring it as a practitioner before the recent hype cycle. In 2018, I shared with my teenage son how at his age I had built a self-learning machine from matchboxes. He decided to do it too, and won 1st place at the WA state science fair. From there I built a home lab to experiment hands-on: created my first photorealistic image with Stable Diffusion on an NVIDIA RTX 3090 in 2023, and started self-hosting LLMs on multi-GPU rigs in 2024. Most recently, I started building with Claude Code a relationship management platform to support my professional networking.

At work, the focus has been on immersive experiential storytelling and on capturing insights from EBC engagements. At F5 in 2019, we built a mechanism for capturing customer insights to drive our product roadmap and GTM priorities. At T-Mobile in 2025, my team began using AI to streamline engagement orchestration and capture business insights from sales teams and customer interactions at the EBC.