Building talenthunt. 3 slots are open for Executive Sparring.
Founder of talenthunt. Sparring partner and fractional product lead for founders and CxOs. Thirty years of shipping products in fintech, payments, HR tech, e-commerce, media and telecom.
Now
What I’m doing this month
Taking sparring clients
Building talenthunt
A visibility platform for job seekers: a verified work profile, endorsements from people who actually worked with you, and an AI agent that answers recruiters’ questions. Solo founder. AI in the loop, humans in control.
Sparring with founders
Executive sparring for Russian-speaking founders and CxOs. Open to fractional CPO roles.
Curating JobHunt
A Telegram channel with international middle+ roles. The bot behind it took five hours to build with Claude Code.
Playing Carousel Chess (aka Nordau Shift)
Chess for three, I invented it at the street club on Nordau Boulevard. At the board almost every day.
Where I can help
Pick the door that fits
- You run a company and face a hard callExecutive sparring, a fractional CPO, or a Chief of Staff for the CEO. A small number of engagements at a time.Work with me
- You hire, or you are being hiredtalenthunt shows people as they are: verified history, endorsements with context, and an AI agent that answers for them.Open talenthunt
- You invest in HR techI’m talking to pre-seed investors about talenthunt. Write to me directly.Email me
How I think
Zoom out, zoom in
My superpower is switching between the big picture and the smallest detail in seconds.
Move the lens across the map. Under each industry is the detail I actually worked on.
Career, annotated
Thirty years, annotated like a chess game
Chess players mark their moves: !! for brilliant, ! for good, !? for an interesting idea that could have gone either way. I marked mine. It keeps me honest.
- !!brilliant
- !good move
- !?interesting, risky
- 1.1994!First business
Read about market research in Izvestia during a lecture. Two weeks later we were running pre-election polls for a radio station and a TV channel.
- 2.1996–2001!!Rostov Cellular
From delivering phone bills to running Russia’s second-largest prepaid mobile program in 1998.
- 3.2003–2007!Solvo International
Voice and content services for mobile operators. Grew the range seven times over and put every regional operator on one short number.
- 4.2007–2008!!TNT
Director of special projects: everything the network earned outside advertising. Launched video on demand with online payments in 2007.
- 5.2009!?A settlement
Helped two former employers settle out of court. I had built their partnership, then cut it off. Roles change.
- 6.2011–2015!?AR2Life
Augmented reality for print, including the “Ozhivlyator” app for MAXIM Russia.
- 7.2012–2015!?SmsPal
Card payments with a phone number and one SMS. The right idea, fourteen years early. Our partner bank lost its licence.
- 8.2015–2017!Ulmart
Digital goods, then payments: 800+ cash desks rebuilt, online payment fees down 10%, co-branded cards with Tinkoff Bank.
- 9.2017 →daykhin.com
Selective fractional work and advisory with founders and C‑level executives.
- 10.2019–2021!!Lifestyle Platform, VTB
Deputy CEO and head of product. Magnit Pay went from zero to 7 million users.
- 11.2021–2022VTB
The bank dropped the super app. We moved the Banking-as-a-Service platform onto the bank’s own infrastructure and licence.
- 12.2022 →!?WIP
Founded WIP: hiring where both sides have skin in the game. First wip.expert, then talenthunt.
- 13.2025!Executive Sparring
Turned something I had done for friends and colleagues for years into a practice of its own.
- 14.2026!talenthunt, Nordau Shift
talenthunt went live in the spring. Published the rules and the app for Nordau Shift, my chess variant for three.
Writing
Recent notes
24 Sept 2026
2,500 CVs for one role is a problem, not a success
4 min readHiringtalenthunt
1 Apr 2026
What is talenthunt — and why now?
4 min readtalenthuntHiring
25 Mar 2026
{Exhausted} Talent manifesto
1 min readHiringCareer
6 Feb 2026
If AI agents need crypto credentials, why don't people?
6 min readIdentityAI
Ask my agent
Ask my AI agent instead of reading my CV
This is Copylove, my agent on talenthunt. It answers from what I’ve shared and nothing else. Ask about a project, or paste a job description and it will tell you honestly where I fit.
Executive Sparring
A thinking partner for hard calls. In Russian, for now.
Want them in English? Join the list, and I’ll write when a slot opens.
Contact
Write to me
DMs are open, and I answer them myself.