My Story

I was born on February 18, 2005, in Saint Petersburg, Russia, into a regular middle-class family. No wealthy backers, no connections. Whatever came next, I was going to have to build myself.

Early Years

I started playing tennis at six. By my early teens, it wasn't a hobby anymore. It was the plan. Everything else in my life got arranged around it.

I spent my teenage years pursuing professional tennis full-time, training and competing internationally, chasing a spot at the top level of the sport. That meant a schedule most people never see: long drives across borders for affordable tournaments, cheap apartments instead of hotels, years of matches far from any spotlight. It wasn't glamorous. It was the only path I knew toward what I wanted. During my junior career, I climbed into the top 170 junior players in the world.

Building My First Business

Around that time, I also built a small marketing agency on the side, mostly to cover what tennis demanded: travel, coaching, tournament fees. It wasn't part of a bigger plan. I needed money, so I figured out how to get it. The agency ran alongside tennis for the next two years, through injuries, through tournaments in Tunisia, Kazakhstan, and across the Baltics, through all the ordinary instability of running a small business while also trying to become a professional athlete. Eventually the intensity of training and travel made it impossible to keep running, so I let it go. But everything I learned from it became the foundation for what I built next: how people buy, how offers get built, how small businesses actually work. Lessons that wouldn't fully click until much later.

An Unjust End

My tennis career ended earlier than I ever expected. Based on test results, I was falsely accused of violating anti-doping rules. I brought in an international group of experts who provided a detailed and well-supported analysis, demonstrating that the laboratory had made serious procedural errors during testing, errors that led directly to an incorrect result. The full story of what happened, along with the expert analysis, is documented HERE.

It became clear almost immediately that this wasn't something that would resolve quickly or quietly. What followed was a long stretch of uncertainty, where I had to step away from the only path I'd built my life around and figure out, from scratch, what I actually wanted to build next.

What I Did Next

I kept training every day, almost out of habit. The accusation didn't change that. But I also needed to generate income, so most of my energy went into figuring out what came next.

So I moved on and started testing different ideas. Different models, different angles, different offers. I'd work on one thing during the day and a completely different one at night. Some of it made a little money. Most of it went nowhere.

After a few months of this, I stopped and actually looked at what I knew, rather than what I was guessing at. I'd spent two years inside dozens of different businesses through my agency work. I understood how people buy. I understood how offers get built. I understood how digital products actually scale, not from theory, but from having done it, over and over, for other people's businesses.

That was the moment things clicked. The direction became obvious: build an educational platform around exactly what I already understood at a deep level.

I wrote the plan that same day.

Building InfoProjector

I built InfoProjector (infoprojector.com), an educational platform helping coaches, consultants, and entrepreneurs build and scale digital product businesses. I designed two core programs, both based directly on what I'd already tested in real client work. And instead of throwing something together on a course marketplace, I invested in building an actual platform, because I wasn't trying to build a course. I was trying to build a company.

It took six weeks to go from idea to launch. I designed the product and the curriculum myself, and worked closely with a developer who handled the technical build.

The first client came in within the first month. Then another. Then a few more after that. Within four months, InfoProjector had a real, consistent, paying customer base, and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I'd actually built something that worked.

But the longer I ran it, the more I kept running into the same realization. Coaching and consulting education is a good business, but it has a ceiling built into it. There's only so big it can get, no matter how well you run it. And somewhere in the middle of building it, I'd started wanting something different: not just a business that worked, but something with real, uncapped potential, something that could genuinely become enormous.

So I stepped back, took everything I'd just learned, and started redesigning what I was building from the ground up. That thinking is what led me to what I'm building now.

Finding the Next Thing

Once InfoProjector was running and stable, I turned my attention to a bigger question: what should I actually build next. And I'll be honest, I didn't have a clear answer. I knew I wanted something with real scale to it, something that could become enormous, but I had no idea yet what that something was.

So I did the only thing that made sense to me: I went and asked the people who'd actually know.

I started reaching out to founders in Silicon Valley, mostly cold, mostly by email. Every day, I sent a small number of highly personalized messages, three or so, to people I actually admired, not generic pitches, but specific, thought-through notes to people whose work I'd followed closely. And instead of asking them for something, I offered something first: whatever expertise or help I actually had to give, in exchange for maybe twenty minutes of their time.

It worked far better than I expected. Some of these people run multibillion-dollar companies, and it turns out almost no one ever reaches out to them that way, genuinely, with something concrete to offer instead of an ask. A lot of them, especially the more experienced ones, were happy to get on a call and just talk. I ended up landing conversations with founders of billion-dollar companies, and with a couple of investors, people who'd built and sold companies of their own years ago and were now investing in projects they believed in.

I wasn't trying to pitch anything in those calls. I was just trying to learn, to understand the market, to figure out where the real opportunity actually was. And somewhere in the middle of all those conversations and all that research, Stonemason was born.

Building Stonemason

Stonemason builds, acquires, and invests in software companies, and holds them for the long term. The philosophy behind it is simple to describe and hard to execute: Berkshire Hathaway's approach to capital and patience, combined with the speed and product instincts of an AI-native startup. We move fast, the way a startup has to, but we think in decades, the way a holding company does.

Even before we'd built our first product, that vision, combined with early traction from the projects behind it, was enough to close a pre-seed funding round.

Around the same time, I made the decision to exit InfoProjector through a private acquisition, so I could fully focus on what came next.

From here, I'm completely focused on building Stonemason's first products and laying the foundation for what it becomes. I'm genuinely excited about it in a way that's hard to fully put into words. And along the way, I plan to keep sharing what I'm learning, the same way I've learned from people who did the same for me, because building both of these companies has taught me more than I ever expected, and I'm sure there's a lot more still coming.