Graham Duncan has one of my favorite About Me pages, so I took his inspiration and laid out:

A Life Story in Five Chapters

Chapter 1: First 20 years - Russians in West Baltimore

I was born in Baltimore to a 5th-generation Irish Catholic mother and fresh-off-the-boat Russian father. My sister and I grew up in the 90s, a Wild West biculturalism of inner-city Baltimore and summers in post-Soviet Moscow, Russia. Childhood was marked by fun-lovingness, a chaos that we took as totally normal, and a latchkey freedom to roam, explore, and adapt. Connecting with others took on an otherworldly dimension once I got on the internet in middle school and started meeting with internet friends I met on forums and random websites. That later turned into meeting my heroes—Scott Alexander, Tyler Cowen, and eventually Elon Musk! This cemented the internet as a wildly underrated serendipity engine that rewards curiosity and authenticity.

Chapter 2: College, dropping out, and getting my hands dirty

I went to a nearby college, did well enough, but dropped out in the middle of my fifth semester amidst disillusionment with the lack of clarity I had about my purpose. I was 20 years old and I didn’t know what I wanted to do, let alone major in, and parties were a lot more fun in the meanwhile. I knew I couldn’t do that forever, though. My mother had taken me to a Habitat for Humanity build day in high school, and I remembered loving it. In the middle of my aimlessness, I decided to get out of Baltimore and take a tour of national public service. I’m not sure who benefited more, the beneficiaries or me. The structured environment was a welcome change of pace—early to bed, early to rise building homes and hiking trails across the midwest, and every other concievable kind of volunteering from 2014-2016. I went back to college at the riper age of 25 and majored in economics. College with more executive function ruled. I exceled, became best friends with my professors, and picked up gymnastics—the latter development turning into a complete obsession, peaking at 20/hour/week training schedule for nearly five years. I loved every minute of it.

Chapter 3: Twitter catapults my life, a visit to Austin

Near the end of college, on a semester abroad in Korea, there was a fateful day I logged back onto Twitter. I had no idea how much this would change my life. It was on that site that, among many other things, I discovered Austen Allred’s software bootcamp Lambda School, got my first remote tech job, and, in fall 2020, I visited Austin, Texas to meet a few mutual followers, whereupon I fell in deeply in love with the city. Two weeks later, I moved there. 6 months later, I quit my job to start my first entrepreneurial endeavor, a cohort-based coaching platform. I then started Based in Austin, a monthly meetup that grew from 5 people at the first meetup to a few hundred members that met every month. All because of Twitter!

Chapter 4: The journey inside

My world up to this point was heavy left-brain: economics, technology, software development, political philosophy. It took falling in love—and experiencing the most painful breakup—to awaken the right-brain. The pain and confusion of the heartbreak was so thorough and excruciating that it initiated a radical reorganization of my life around the fundamentals of meditation and prayer. I sought retreat, met my teachers Dustin DiPerna, Joe Hudson, and Anurag Gupta, and generally watched—often helpless and horror-stricken—at the depth of unresolved childhood wounds running my adult body. I learned the transformative power of presence; came to believe, like Joe has said, that the scarcest, most precious quantity is attuned, loving presence. In early 2024, I launched Max Impact, a coaching practice founded on the view that I could add some measure of that quantity to the world. I worked as hard as I could at that project. The irony is that I was the one needing that kind of presence, trying to manifest it by giving it away. The depths to which we are full of it is truly profound!

Chapter 5: Now

In fall 2025, I relented on the coaching practice to create space for the latest adventure: Gauntlet—a 10 week, 100-hour-a-week immersive bootcamp for AI-assisted software development. I’m about halfway through, and took time during Thanksgiving to give thanks to this wild opportunity—a Hogwarts of AI magic with a little dose of the ‘tism—to equip me for the next chapter of my life. Thanks for reading.

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