Mikita Aharodni — Essays

An unscheduled post: while I sleep

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

an unscheduled post

wanted to share a little experiment. well, at this point, actual experience

my body has been telling me it's tired these past few days. it wants more sleep. so i gave it an hour or an hour and a half in the afternoon. one problem though: i can't work while i'm asleep

so i started wondering how much of that i could automate

here's the setup: i open a project in codex, turn on voice mode, give it some tasks and say i'm going to take a nap. if it needs me, it should call me. i list the situations where i think my input would actually help

if i don't answer for a few minutes, i tell it to open youtube, play loud sounds and turn the volume all the way up. when i say “stop”, it stops everything and we talk

and honestly? it works. i can wake up for five minutes, talk things through with the AI, then go straight back to sleep

going to try scaling this up to nighttime too!!!!

Playing in a bigger league

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

Today I went to the second VCC pitch session.

First, I want to give the organisers credit. Compared with the first session, everything had taken a big step forward. You can see the club growing and our startup ecosystem growing with it.

I'm happy to be a kind of beta tester for this bigger effort to rebuild the startup ecosystem in Belarus.

But today, for the first time in a while, I felt a little shaken. The miserable rain didn't help the atmosphere either.

Here's why.

I realised I was probably one of the youngest people pitching.

Someone steps up with fifteen years of scientific experience. Another has decades in management. Someone else has deep expertise in their industry. People in their thirties and forties with an entire professional life behind them.

Something in my picture of the world broke a little.

In my head, a startup founder is, first of all, a student or a teenager sitting in a dorm room trying to change the world.

Then you look at reality and realise successful founders aren't always twenty-year-olds in hoodies. Often they're people with advanced degrees, years of work, management experience and a deep understanding of a particular field.

And on the other side, there is me.

I'm twenty. I have restless energy and an irrational belief that if you do something you love and truly commit yourself to it, sooner or later something will work out.

I can't offer the market fifteen years of expertise. I'm not an associate professor. I don't have several degrees. I've never worked in big tech.

In fact, I hadn't worked anywhere before starting my own company. I didn't even have an employment record book.

Standing next to those people, I could feel how enormous the difference was.

But I do have something to offer: energy, a point of view, desire, the willingness to learn about almost anything, and the speed with which my team and I can turn ideas into reality.

Still, in the moment, it got to me.

Then Denis, the CEO of Sequoia Health, said something that really helped:

“But that's great. At twenty, you're already playing in a higher league and competing with people who have all the things you just listed behind them.”

I thought about that on the way home. He was right.

Yes, I'm young. Yes, I have very little experience. Yes, in plenty of areas I may be objectively weaker than people who have been doing their work longer than I've been alive.

BUT I'M ACTUALLY DOING IT.

I'm not waiting until I'm thirty-five. I'm not waiting for a couple more diplomas. I'm not waiting for someone to give me permission to become an entrepreneur.

I'm doing the work.

Missing expertise? I'll study. Missing experience? I'll make mistakes and learn. Don't understand an industry? I'll talk to people who do and keep working until I understand it myself.

I also have an enormous advantage: I'm only twenty.

If I'm already sitting at the same table as people with decades of experience, I can barely imagine where I could be in ten or fifteen years if I don't stop.

Maybe one day someone will say I'm just an example of survivorship bias.

SO WHAT?

I want to become excellent at what I do, even among people twice my age. I don't care how many times I have to get things wrong along the way.

I chose a path once walked by Mark, Steve, Jeff, Elon and thousands of other entrepreneurs. Not because I think I'm their equal, but because I also want to build something truly big.

Am I supposed to give up just because someone else is forty and knows more than I do?

No chance.

Forward.

I'll finish with words that feel close to me right now: I wanted to do the thing that gives me air in my lungs. Life is complicated. You can drift with the current, or spend a long time building a ship to sail against it. Everyone chooses. I don't regret the past. I was building the ship. Now I'm moving.

In scarcity and in abundance

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

“I know how to live with little, and I know how to live with plenty.”

Philippians 4:12.

Lately, I've been thinking about these words of the apostle Paul more and more.

Sometimes I think every startup founder might benefit from spending a year or a year and a half living that broke-founder life.

When almost all your money goes into the project. When crisps and a Snickers seem like a reasonable dinner. When you have a cash-flow gap not only in the company but in your own life. When even basic expenses can become an urgent problem to solve.

The funny thing is that, from the outside, it can look entirely different.

You're speaking at events, meeting incredible people, building a company and travelling to conferences. You seem to be living this wonderfully interesting life.

Then you come home and wonder where you'll find the money for the next unexpected expense. Haha.

That's the other side of the beautiful startup life.

It is a constant emotional roller coaster. On Monday you think you're about to transform the market. On Thursday you're wondering how to make it to next week.

Sometimes everything is going well until an unforeseen expense arrives that had nothing to do with you.

These things used to throw me badly off balance. I'm gradually learning to respond more calmly.

If I can't control the circumstances, why spend my energy worrying instead of looking for a solution?

Here is the interesting part: I wouldn't want to erase this period from my life.

I've gained an enormous amount of experience. Sometimes I'm amazed by what I've learned, the problems I can now solve and the people life has brought me into contact with.

I'm almost certain no university could have taught me all of this in the same way and at the same scale.

When you have almost no resources, you start thinking differently. You look for unconventional solutions, negotiate, ask for help and find opportunities where you hadn't noticed any before.

Somehow, again and again, things work out.

Sometimes it really feels like a small miracle. Yesterday you had no idea where the money for an expense would come from. Today an opportunity appears and helps you cover it.

I believe God works through these circumstances too.

I don't think poverty automatically makes someone better. And I certainly don't believe being short of money is a prerequisite for creating a great startup.

But I can see how these particular difficulties are changing me.

They teach me not to take things for granted, to value the people who stay when I have nothing, and to be grateful even for ordinary things.

Perhaps the most important lesson is learning to be thankful for what I have today while remaining incredibly hungry for what I could create tomorrow.

Not to despair when money is scarce, and not to lose my head when there is more of it. Not to measure my worth by my bank balance. Not to forget why any of this started.

I want to build a truly big company one day. I want us to have enormous resources, possibilities and the freedom to create extraordinary things.

Even more than that, if those things ever come, I don't want to forget the guy who once counted his last money and kept building his startup anyway.

The real test of a person isn't only how they handle hardship. It is also who they become when the hardship ends.

For me, that is the meaning of those biblical words right now: learning to be happy in scarcity and in abundance, grateful for the present without ceasing to reach for more.

Getting used to technological miracles

Wed, 21 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

We've learned to take technological miracles for granted faster than people can create them.

In 1997, Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a chess match. At the time, it was a world event. A machine had defeated a human in a game that, for centuries, had been seen as one of the great expressions of human intelligence.

People soon found an explanation. Chess is just a matter of searching through possibilities, they said. When a computer can talk to a person and write meaningful text, then we can discuss real intelligence.

In 2022, ChatGPT appeared. Suddenly almost anyone could talk to a machine in ordinary language: ask it to explain something complicated, write code, invent a story or solve a problem.

Everyone was amazed. It felt as though we had finally arrived in the future.

A few years pass. And what happens?

We're already dissatisfied with the way AI writes. We're irritated when it makes coding mistakes. We complain that it can't independently complete some difficult task.

We've almost stopped noticing what it can do. We are interested only in what it can't do yet.

There is even a name for this: the AI effect.

Every time a machine learns an ability we once considered uniquely human, we stop seeing that ability as a real expression of intelligence.

We keep moving the finish line.

A chess-playing machine used to seem like science fiction. Today it's an ordinary programme. Talking to a computer as if it were a person used to seem like science fiction. Today we're angry when it doesn't understand us well enough.

Now we're saying real AI will arrive only when it can carry out research independently, create companies, make discoveries and do work better than a human.

But I suspect that even when those things happen, we'll get used to them fairly quickly and say they aren't particularly remarkable either.

There is another feature of our minds at work here. We adapt to good things incredibly quickly. What inspired awe yesterday becomes normal today and inadequate tomorrow.

I keep thinking about how strange that is.

We live in a future we were dreaming about only a few years ago. Instead of being astonished by it, we're already complaining that it isn't good enough.

That may be one of humanity's best and strangest qualities at the same time.

We are never entirely satisfied with what we've created. That is precisely why we keep creating new things.

Still, sometimes it is worth stopping to notice just how extraordinary the things we now consider ordinary really are.

P.S. I think I managed to connect this one quite nicely to the previous post.

Hungry to build

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

Over the past few weeks, I've felt that incredible startup energy again. And once again, I think I've confirmed that this is what I want to devote my life to.

The thought that you can gather a few extraordinarily smart people and create something that didn't exist before is almost overwhelming. Something that might one day change millions of lives.

The best part is that this isn't fantasy. You actually have a chance to do it.

That possibility is what draws me in most: creating something great enough to remain in the world after you're gone.

We've made good progress with custom development at Chota recently. That's great. I want to keep developing that side of the business, build a separate team for it and create a healthy company.

But I've realised something. Building a profitable company isn't enough for me. I want to build a great product.

I want to bring together truly brilliant minds. People as hungry to create something new as I am. I already know some incredible people, and I can see how much they care about this too.

I can hardly stop thinking about what would happen if we brought those people together and gave them the freedom to create.

That's also why I've started looking at investment a little differently.

To me, investment isn't primarily about money itself. It's about freedom: being able to stop worrying about how you'll afford tomorrow and devote yourself to building a product.

My ideal picture is simple. I persuade Vlad to leave his job, we put a team together, pay ourselves enough to live, and spend our days creating something extraordinary.

That's it. I don't need a crazy personal payday from investors. I need the opportunity to do the thing I love.

Even now, we spend around seven hours a day on the project on average. The wonderful thing is that nobody makes us do it. We enjoy the process: imagining, experimenting, making mistakes, rebuilding and trying again.

I'm willing to work at this for years, even without a financial return, because the act of creating is already an enormous reward for me.

And then there are the people around us.

As I become more involved in the startup community, I'm struck by how many smart, ambitious and wonderfully unreasonable people there are. People who don't want to watch the world change. They want to change it themselves.

I want more people like that around me. I want everyone to try creating something of their own at least once, to feel the excitement of an idea in their head turning into something real.

Of course, this path isn't remotely easy. It contains uncertainty, problems, rejection and moments when you have absolutely no idea what to do next.

But I keep returning to one thought: if you ask God for the chance to become someone different, you have to be prepared to do what others don't do.

If it were easy, everyone would do it.

I have no idea how far we'll get. Maybe there are dozens of failures and many more rebuilt ideas ahead of us. But I know I want to try. Not just make an attempt, but give it as much effort as it needs.

I'm twenty years old, and I'm damn hungry to create something great. Judging by the people around me, I'm far from alone.

We haven't made anything truly great yet. But I love the thought that one day we might.

And I'm willing to work as long as it takes for that chance.

Keep your idealism

Sat, 17 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

Before going to sleep, I was listening to an old Steve Jobs talk, which I knew as a recording from 1982, and heard an idea I really liked.

Why do young people create new things and try to change the world?

He described his first experiences with computers: writing a programme on punch cards, taking them to a computing centre and waiting for the result. To him, the arrival of personal computers was extraordinary progress.

But when he told someone who had grown up with computers, that person didn't understand what was so surprising.

This is the part that stayed with me.

For one generation, the computer is a revolution that changed their entire life. For the next, it is an ordinary thing that has always existed.

And, crucially, the next generation doesn't think it is perfect.

They don't dwell on how much worse everything used to be. They look at what exists now and ask: why does it work like this? Why can't it be better? Why should we put up with it?

I think that is one of the best things about being young.

We don't feel the same reverence for the achievements of the past because we don't remember the world without them.

For our parents, the internet was a revolution. For us, it has existed for almost as long as we can remember. We aren't astonished that we can reach someone on the other side of the planet in a second. Instead, we're annoyed when an app takes three extra seconds to load.

And that is wonderful!

That dissatisfaction is precisely what makes people create new things.

The same is happening with AI. Some people marvel at how far we've come in just a few years. Others already find today's models insufficiently intelligent and are trying to create something fundamentally better.

I don't think this is only about biological age, either.

Over time, people accumulate more reasons to accept the way things are. You remember how much effort it took to create what already exists. You understand the constraints. You know why something won't work.

Gradually, instead of asking “Why not?” you start asking “Why change anything?”

That is exactly what I don't want to lose as I grow older.

At the end of the thought, Jobs urged young people to preserve their idealism and the feeling that the world as it exists isn't yet good enough.

I completely agree.

You can respect what previous generations achieved and still believe that almost everything around you could be improved.

Perhaps the best way to honour people who once changed the world isn't to admire their creations forever. It is to try to make those creations obsolete.

Progress starts when someone looks at what everyone takes for granted and asks:

“Why did we decide this was the best possible version?”

Try things while you are young

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

While you're young, try to get involved in as many different things as possible.

I think that, until around twenty-five, one of the main tasks is to try almost anything that interests you. Build projects, start businesses, meet people, organise events, speak, make mistakes and sometimes get involved in something you can't even explain yet.

The important thing is that you don't always have to know in advance what it will be useful for.

When I started getting involved in student activities, running Telegram channels and building my first projects, I had no idea where it would lead. I was simply interested.

A collection of seemingly random decisions brought me to what I'm doing now, which I enjoy enormously.

I wonder how much of my life wouldn't have happened if I had decided those things were a pointless waste of time.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when you're young is trying to become serious and settle your entire life too early: pick one direction, write a ten-year plan and never let anything distract you.

Right now, you have a chance to try a hundred things, fail at ninety of them, and gain experience you will never get in a lecture.

I also like the idea of being hungry for knowledge and people.

If someone nearby understands something better than you do, make the most of the conversation. Ask questions. Listen. Try to understand how they think. If you have a chance to enter an environment that is completely new to you, go.

Don't be afraid to take responsibility for things you don't know how to do yet. That is often how you learn. We frequently take on projects in unfamiliar areas, learn what we need along the way, and do good work.

I don't want to romanticise endless work or a lack of sleep. I know how easy it is to stop coping, physically and mentally, in the middle of all this activity.

But the ability to work hard, keep going after early failures and finish what you start is an important skill.

There is another thing I consider essential: you can be adventurous in what you do while remaining stubborn about your principles.

Try whatever interests you. Change your interests. Launch ten projects at once if that is what you enjoy. But don't deceive people, let them down or break your word. Don't step over your own values for a short-term gain.

The world is small and life is long. The people you're working with today may still be beside you in ten or twenty years.

Of course there is another side to all this. I know I sometimes spread myself across too many things. Maybe I would have achieved more if I had concentrated on one.

But that constant desire to try something new is also why I ended up where I am now.

For now, I think I'm more likely to regret what I never tried than the projects that didn't work out.

So don't wait until you're experienced, rich or prepared enough to begin doing what interests you.

Join things. Do strange things. Make mistakes. Build your own story.

A life with something to remember seems much more interesting to me than one spent trying never to make a mistake.

Competition and a window of opportunity

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

Here is a very visible problem with monopolies.

During the recent disruption to Yandex services, ordering a taxi in Belarus became difficult. And it wasn't only taxis. What struck me was how few practical alternatives seemed to be available when Yandex went down.

In my original post, I linked the disruption to reported damage to data centres in Russia. The bigger point I want to make is about dependence on one service.

This is a serious problem in our part of the world, where we often like to centralise and consolidate things around the state and large companies.

I'm not against the state helping its technology companies grow. That can be a good thing. But when one service becomes so dominant that its failure disrupts an entire market, something feels unhealthy.

Then there are the competitors.

There is A1 Taxi, but in my view its approach to competing with Yandex is so puzzling that I struggle to see how it plans to take market share. There is also WB Taxi, an interesting attempt, though its scale seems small relative to the size and resources of Wildberries.

A1 surprises me most.

You've just been handed a rare opening in a country where you've operated for decades. Your main competitor is having problems. People can't get cars. Drivers are losing orders. What do you do?

If I were in that position, I'd bring together an emergency team of developers, marketers and operations people over the weekend. I'd pay them properly for the extra work and say: let's do everything we can so people can use our service right now.

I'd notify the existing customer base that taxis are available. I'd run advertising and first-ride offers. For drivers, I'd offer attractive joining terms, bonuses and low commissions.

Taxi services have a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Passengers don't come because there aren't enough drivers; drivers don't come because there aren't enough passengers.

Then, suddenly, there is a rare moment when that circle might be broken.

Obviously, you won't beat Yandex in one weekend. But perhaps you can get tens of thousands of people to try an alternative and drivers to seriously consider another platform, especially one whose terms feel fairer to both sides.

Even if Yandex fully recovers tomorrow, some may stay.

Another thought: I can imagine the next regional unicorn emerging from the taxi market.

But I wouldn't want it to be another Yandex that merely replaces one monopoly with another. I'd want a company that starts with a different market model: fair conditions for drivers, transparent commissions, room for local competitors, and less dependence on a single service whose failure leaves a whole country struggling to get around.

A monopoly is not, by itself, a technological achievement. Sometimes it simply means users have gone too long without a decent choice.

This is one reason I love entrepreneurship. Opportunities that companies spend years and millions in marketing to create can sometimes appear in a single day.

The question is whether you can respond quickly enough.

More broadly, I'd like to see more real competition around us. Competition forces companies to improve. Monopoly allows them to get comfortable.

A company as a workshop

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

An interesting observation about myself and the company: maybe I really am spreading myself too thin.

We're always coming up with something new: products, medical services, bots, AI experiments. Some survive. Some die. Some I might abandon simply because the next idea has arrived.

I understand that this can be a problem.

Creating something new is often much more enjoyable than working away at the same thing for years. Coming up with an idea, building it, launching it and seeing the first users is incredibly exciting.

Then comes the boring part: sales, support, processes, economics, the hundredth iteration of a feature.

It's very easy to call all this “experimentation” when really you're avoiding the need to choose one thing and make a serious bet on it.

Recently, though, I looked at it from another angle.

Perhaps one of the most valuable things I've built isn't a particular product. It is the freedom to create.

There used to be so much between “I have an idea” and “this thing exists”: money, developers, servers, design, people and all sorts of other resources.

That distance has become much shorter. I now have a company, a team, infrastructure and skills.

At some point, Chota became something like a workshop for me.

A place where I can think, “What if we made this?” and, after a while, the thing actually exists.

Not necessarily because an investor decided to fund it. Not necessarily because a client requested it. Sometimes simply because I'm curious: could it work?

Of course, these experiments aren't free. We pay for them with time, money and the profit we could have made elsewhere.

But the company has given me room to make mistakes. We can build something, realise nobody needs it, shut it down and try the next thing.

I realised that what I like isn't so much the fact of “having a company.” I REALLY like creating things.

So I've ended up with a slightly unusual arrangement. I'm building a company not only so the company can build things, but also so I can preserve my own ability to keep building throughout my life.

The important part is not turning that freedom into an excuse for endless distraction.

One day, among all these experiments, something may emerge and the market may say clearly enough: “This is it.”

Then I'll have to do what may be the hardest thing for me. Not come up with another idea. Stay. And spend several years building one thing.

Maybe that is something I still need to learn.

For now, I love thinking of Chota as my workshop: a place that gradually gives me the freedom to turn “What if?” into “We made it.”

And I love my team because they're the kind of people who add another hundred thousand ideas to mine. We really get to be creators together.

What Steve Jobs taught me

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

Today marks fifteen years since Steve Jobs died.

I was still very young when he was alive, but he had an enormous influence on me once I was old enough to understand his work.

Some people leave a mark on the world. Others change it. Steve was one of the latter.

I'm grateful for how much he brought into the world. And I don't even mean the obvious things: the iPhone, Mac, iPod and everything else. For me, his influence goes much deeper.

Without Steve's example, perhaps I wouldn't have become the person I am today. A great deal of his philosophy lives in how I build products and teams, and in how I approach work itself.

I want to leave a few of my favourite ideas and quotations here. They aren't just attractive phrases I once saved. I actually use these principles almost every day.

The first is his story about a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers. You wouldn't use a piece of plywood for the back just because it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You would know it was there. To sleep well at night, the quality has to go all the way through.

That probably describes my approach to Chota better than almost anything else.

My team can tell you how much I fuss over the design of our systems, the interfaces and the tiny things most users may never consciously notice.

I enjoy making a product feel considered everywhere, not just on the first screen. That's why our products contain little details and Easter eggs. I love it when someone finds one, or simply notices the attention we have given to design and the user experience.

I also try to notice that plywood back in other people's products. I look at the design of everything, whether it is a milk carton or a pen. I try to get inside the mind of the person who made it and understand whether they put care into their work.

I always appreciate finding something the creator left for people like me, who look closely. Sometimes I won't buy something because its maker didn't win me over with the design.

Another thought that feels very close to me is this:

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful, that's what matters to me.”

Of course a business has to make money. But if money is the only reason to do something, I think it gets boring pretty quickly.

It feels much better to finish the day knowing you made something you can actually be proud of. That quotation is on my team profile at Chota, too.

Then there is the idea often attributed to Steve that we should hire talented people to tell us what to do, rather than hire them and dictate every move.

It took a long time to form the core team we have today. Many people have passed through our startup. I now understand how important that approach is.

I don't need people around me who wait for instructions from morning until night. I'd much rather work with people who can come to me and say, “Nikita, what we're doing is crap. We should do it this way.”

Sometimes they understand their field much better than I do. That's the point. If we had built the team differently, Chota would be much weaker today.

And one last thought, though there are so many more I could write for a week: you have to find what you love. That applies to work as much as to relationships. Work takes up a large part of your life, and the way to be satisfied is to do work you believe is great. To do that, you have to love it.

You can spend a long time searching for the “right” profession, the right niche, the most promising market or the place with the most money.

But when you find something you want to do from morning until night simply because you love the process, it feels completely different.

I think I was very lucky to find that fairly early.

The finish line keeps moving

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

One of the strangest things about ambition is that you almost never get that moment of “That's it. I've arrived.”

You keep thinking it is somewhere ahead.

Once I launch my first proper project. Once I find the first clients. Once I make some money. Once I put a team together. Once I build something people actually use. Once I get a big result, then I can finally breathe out and tell myself I did well.

And then it happens.

You are happy for an evening. Maybe a day. Sometimes a week, though that seems rare; I've heard of such lucky people. :)

Then your brain simply moves the finish line farther away.

You wanted one client; now you want ten. You wanted your first $1,000; now you're thinking about $10,000. You wanted to launch a product; now you want thousands of people to use it.

You wanted to get into a particular community. You got in, and you're already thinking about what comes next. You wanted to prove to yourself that you could build something at all. You proved it, and now that isn't enough.

That may be both the best and the most dangerous part of ambition.

If you keep living by “I'll reach the next thing, and then I'll be happy,” you can quickly discover that the next thing never arrives.

Or, more precisely, it will always be there. It will just keep changing.

I used to see goals as destinations. I thought I just had to get there and things would become calmer afterwards.

Increasingly, I suspect there is no “afterwards.” There is just the process.

Constantly building something, messing up, rebuilding, finding people, losing people. Doing something that seemed impossible yesterday, taking it for granted a month later, and climbing back into something you don't understand.

Maybe that is the whole point.

Not collecting an achievement that suddenly makes life complete, but becoming someone different while you work towards it.

Most of the things I'm proud of today once looked like that big finish line. Now they're simply part of my life, and I'm already thinking about the next thing.

So perhaps we need to learn not just how to use ambition, but how to live with it.

Wanting more is great. It is even better to sometimes look back and realise that you're already standing somewhere the version of you from a few years ago could only dream about.

Then you can keep going.

Because we will anyway. :)

Six habits of startup culture

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0300

I also enjoy studying the culture of entrepreneurship, especially startup culture. There are so many ideas about it that hardly anyone in our part of the world talks about. When I read about them, I try to apply them to myself and the people around me.

Here are a few.

1. Pay it forward

You don't have to repay the person who helped you directly. The idea is to become someone who has the resources and influence to help the next person, just as someone once helped you.

And it isn't only about money. It might be an introduction to an investor, a useful connection, a thirty-minute conversation, feedback on a pitch, a piece of advice or help finding a teammate.

2. Give before you get

Give first, then ask. Don't enter a room full of people thinking only about what you can request. Start by thinking about what you can offer.

Build relationships around helping each other, rather than constantly keeping score of favours.

3. Don't die

Stay in the game.

In startups, the number of attempts matters enormously. Another year of a company's life buys another set of chances to make things work.

So stopping to count your money and cut costs doesn't necessarily mean a lack of ambition. It can mean buying time to keep going.

4. Share what you learn

Strong ecosystems are different because knowledge doesn't stay inside one small group of people or companies.

Founders write posts, talk about failures, share templates and introduce people. That is what helps an ecosystem grow: the next founders don't have to repeat every mistake from scratch.

5. Everyone is a mentor

Everyone has something they can teach someone else.

You don't need a billion-dollar exit or twenty years of experience. If you are one step ahead of someone, you can already explain that step.

Made your first hire? Tell someone who is about to make theirs. Raised your first round? Help someone writing to investors. Had a bad experience with a contractor? Explain where things went wrong.

6. Make the intro

If you think two people ought to know each other, introduce them.

This one doesn't need much explanation. Just introduce them and see what happens. :)

Give student founders time

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0300

Sometimes universities just need to leave enterprising students alone.

That sounds harsh, because a university often gives someone the knowledge, environment and access to people that allow them to start creating anything at all.

A student learns to code, to understand medicine, biology or engineering. They join accelerators, find a team and build their first projects.

At some point, the system gets exactly the person it supposedly wanted: independent, proactive and capable of creating things without instructions from above.

They find a real problem, put together a team, launch a product, get their first users, and decide to spend the next few years building something truly big. People with big ambitions struggle to settle for something small.

And then the university says:

“Great. Now do everything exactly like everyone else.”

The same compulsory assignments. The same deadlines. The same attendance requirements. The same number of hours.

It doesn't matter that one student goes home to watch a series after class while another goes to build a company. To the system, they are the same.

In my opinion, this is where universities make a serious mistake.

We talk a lot about giving students opportunities: accelerators, hackathons, startup schools, competitions and innovation centres.

But when someone actually uses those opportunities and starts building something serious, they still have to squeeze it between lectures, assessments and exams.

Harvard offers an interesting pair of examples. Bill Gates worked on Altair BASIC during his student years, and Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from Harvard. Both eventually left without graduating. Of course, that doesn't mean the lesson is to drop out.

We can ask a different question instead: what if sometimes a university should remove a few obligations, rather than add another opportunity?

Imagine a separate track for students who have already shown that they can work independently.

You have a real project, users, research, a technological development or a company. Some of the standard workload can be replaced by that work.

Not exemption from education. An opportunity to obtain part of that education through a real project.

Because that is learning too. Sometimes a pretty brutal kind. Actually, often, not just sometimes.

Users don't care about your GPA. Clients don't care how beautiful your presentation was.

The product either solves a problem or it doesn't. The team either works or falls apart. You either run out of money or learn how to earn it.

I understand the main counterargument: if students get more freedom, many may simply waste the time.

Maybe. Although I'd argue that those already wasting their time won't suddenly start wasting much more of it. :)

I'm not talking about cancelling classes for everyone. I'm talking about recognising people who have already demonstrated, through action, that they can use freedom productively.

The economics are asymmetric too.

Suppose a university gives dozens of those students more time and most of their projects fail. If even one builds a major technology company, creates hundreds of jobs, exports a product and pays taxes, the potential benefit of that exception could be vastly greater than the cost of the freedom granted.

That is why it seems strange to optimise a university entirely around the average student.

The average student may genuinely need structure. But someone who has already learned how to build independently sometimes needs something completely different: for people to stop getting in the way.

The university has already done its work. It gave them knowledge, an environment and the ability to build.

Perhaps the most useful thing it can do now is give them time to build something great.

Builders before accelerators

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0300

I don't think Belarus needs its own Y Combinator yet.

At least, not if that means another accelerator that teaches people how to “do startups.”

YC works a little differently. People arrive already knowing how to build products. They have launched things, written code, put teams together, looked for users, made mistakes and started again.

It can choose from a huge pool of applicants. That is the important part: first, there has to be a large number of people who are constantly building things.

This is why I find what is gradually taking shape around StartUp Space in Belarus interesting.

Its value isn't just the events, mentors or opportunities to pitch somewhere. What matters more is the culture around it.

Someone enters the ecosystem with a first idea, meets other founders, gains experience and launches a project. If it works, they don't necessarily disappear from that environment.

They come back with a different kind of experience. They can introduce someone to the right person, look at a product, talk about their mistakes, become a mentor or an ambassador, or simply help the next founder get through a stage that took them a long time.

Gradually, an important cycle emerges:

New founders → first projects → successful companies → experience and relationships → help for new founders.

Every successful graduate makes the ecosystem a little stronger for the next person.

To me, that matters much more than any single accelerator. A startup ecosystem isn't a room, a three-month programme or even a fund. Above all, it is a concentration of people who build things and help other people build faster.

In a strong ecosystem, a student doesn't have to search for an entrepreneur somewhere on the internet. The entrepreneur is sitting at the same table, or at least in the same room.

The person who was looking for their first users a year ago can explain how they did it. The person launching a first MVP today can return in a few years and help the next team.

At some point, the process begins to reinforce itself.

That's why I wouldn't try to copy Y Combinator literally. First, we need a culture that produces enough strong founders in the first place.

Universities have a role here too!

They don't necessarily need another “innovation centre” teaching students how to write business plans. 😁

It would be much more useful to give students knowledge, people to learn from, and space for their own projects.

Not idea → business plan → presentation → competition → certificate.

But problem → prototype → user → feedback → new version → first revenue.

Then the ecosystem could look something like this:

Universities create builders. StartUp Space connects them and develops the culture. Successful graduates bring experience, relationships and capital back into it. New founders start from a stronger position. The best companies go global.

And then, eventually, a local YC might emerge.

But we shouldn't start with an accelerator's name or its building. We should start with a situation in which hundreds of young people around us consider it completely normal to say one evening:

“I have an idea. Let's try building it.”

And, even more importantly, there should be people nearby who once said the same thing, made it work, and are now willing to help you.