Impossible, is just a wall that turns into a hill from another perspective.
3x Immigrant | ex-Homeless | 25 Years Sober | 9 Years Smoke Free
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Recognized as Top Founder Q1 2026, and nominated to Founder of the Year by FoubderSquare NYC.
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My conviction came from having lived through enough walls to know that most of them are not permanent. I’ve had to rebuild my life more times than anyone should, across countries, careers, and circumstances that didn’t leave much room for comfort, and over time, I learned that conviction does not come from certainty. It comes from finding gold nuggets in piles of dirt and continued motion of moving forward when the path is unclear, and trusting that no matter what, tomorrow can be brighter than yesterday.
While born in the Soviet Union in an environment that does not reward initiatives, creativity, or unconventional thinking, rather quite the opposite, punished people who did not align with a uniform lifestyle and thinking. I turned out to be the black swan, the one who always asked “Why not?”, challenged authority and conventional thinking.
I could maybe attribute that to my mothers side of the family, growing up with a grandpa who had under table dealings with both Communist party officials and Mobsters, or my fearless parents who moved us form one country to another with zero language knowledge and no money, or that my curiosity always got me in trouble, both at school and home, or maybe that my mom dropped me head down a few flights of stairs when I was just 2 or 3 years old (true story), or the fact that I wanted to have things I couldn’t have, and so I resorted to creative ways of getting them.
I dont have a concrete answer to the above, but I always knew one thing for a fact, I was different, I was not like my peers, my brain always wondered in a million different directions at once and seeing things that ultimately no one around me sees, and even when I would point out to others something I see, others look at me like I just fell off a tree and hit my head real hard (again).
But somehow, I always found myself in situations where I had to resort to unconventional ways of doing things to reach the goals I had in mind, my first entry into the business world was at the age of 7 when I had a brilliant idea how to get money in a country where individual commerce was punishable by serious jail time, but I have a feeling I was not the only 7 year old who didn’t think to consult a lawyer… my parents friends used to smuggle illegal products from Poland to sell on the black market, I always got presents, among those, were a popular bubble gum called Turbo, I would of course eat them, and then shape an aluminum piece of metal into exact bubble gum shape, leave play-doh in it overnight on a heater, then wrap it back into original wrappers and sell half price at my school, getting beaten up for it by older kids, but never giving the money back… business 101 right?
I always wanted to walk my path the way I wanted to walk it, and experience life my way, when I was 15 my dad tried to teach me all the life lessons he learned through all the mistakes he made so I would avoid them, but I refused and told him “Dad, I have to make my mistakes, all of them, even the ones that look like yours, because if I don’t, I wouldn’t learn what I need to learn.” that was the day my dad told me he will never ask me to do homework, or be good at school ever again, that my life is totally mine, and whatever decisions I made, I will have to live with them, but he made me promise one thing… to always do my best to be a good human, that’s it.
Fast froward my entire life story of immigration and homelessness hardships, I discovered that unlike many people, when life gets harder, I get more creative, innovative, and push even harder.
This is why when something hits me in the face, instead of running away, I try to understand it, and figure it out, I guess thats why I love solving problems, one of those moments happened almost 8 years ago, I faced with a problem that got under my skin, product decisions made with either one sided data, fear mongering, or simply with a mindset of “Let’s just ship something and fix it later”, data was everywhere, but no one seem to be able to put all the puzzle pieces together. I had a decision to make, quit, or reinvent how we operate. Naturally, I choose the hardest path, and reinvented how we make product decisions by inventing a completely new way of understanding organizational data in relationship to product and users, which lead to reduced planning meetings, increased customer satisfaction and user adoration, leading to growth in customer acquisition and revenue.
After teaching dozens of other design and product leaders on how to apply the framework I invented, and mentoring over 2,200 designers, it was clear that my framework needed to be a book, but the book didn’t happen… two more leadership positions knocked on my door, at which I deployed the framework and helped reinvent products, discover flagship products, land on awards shortlist, seeing explosive growth of products, and eventually watching the companies that I helped shape through successful products getting acquired.
The writing was not on the wall, the writing was on all walls, doors, rooftops, and floors.
Companies make decisions in silos, with limited pieces of the puzzle, one hand tied behind their backs, and with a wet finger against the wind. I saw products fail, teams complain how they don’t have what they needed to make better decisions, companies collapsing to failed product decisions, and leadership frantically trying to adopt different tools in hopes it fixes the problems, but it only made things worse. Now, companies live with hundreds of tools and sources where data goes to die and zero options to not just unify that data but also make sense of it in timely manner that is truly impactful.
I had to fix this, selfishly, I want companies to build and ship better products. That, starts with better decisions, but better decisions can only be made with unbiased and unfiltered information coming from real data, analytics, behavior, knowledge, etc.
When I started working on Nsight which eventually pivoted into Cepien AI I did not even realize how mission critical our solution is, at the beginning I was just aiming to help product teams make better and faster decisions with clear knowledge of their users in relationship to their products, but little that I knew, that such big names like NEA and Y Combinator will be advocating for founders to build what we have been working on and what this can ultimately become.
Because modern teams do not have a data problem. They have a clarity problem.
The information already exists, in research, analytics, support, sales, product docs, internal knowledge, customer conversations, etc. but it is fragmented, noisy, and often disconnected from the decisions teams need to make. As companies are pushed to move faster with smaller teams, that gap becomes larger and more expensive.
The future of companies depends on turning scattered knowledge and billions of disconnected data sets into clear, validated, actionable intelligence and execution.
That, completely changed my mindset from looking at this through the lens of a product team, to now looking at this through as a global organizational problem, as Madison Faulkner from NEA Fund said at an event in SF late last year “Companies that will win in the future, are the ones who know how to unify their entire organizational data and utilize it to make much better and strategic decisions both at company and product levels”, validating our vision of building a unified neural network, and Product Intelligence is just the first layer that we just shipped.
My journey started behind an iron curtain, breaking the law and selling fake bubble gums, through immigration, adoption, maturity at 15, military service, homelessness, struggle with alcohol, to working with Microsoft, VW, BlackBerry, Sony, and hundreds others across continents, being hunted by the big tech and getting a 6 figure offer from Fortune 100 company without even interviewing me, mentoring and educating designers from some of the largest companies on earth, speaking at dozens of events, appearing on podcasts, and national stamps, being quoted in large publications, shaping startups, processes, impacting exits, and now solving a $2 Trillion problem.
This is not where my story ends… this is where it just begins!