I was born in a country that no longer exists. The Soviet Union felt permanent right up until the morning it wasn't. I was young, but the lesson stuck and became the way I look at everything since: the systems that present themselves as solid and inevitable are usually the ones with the deepest cracks. Most people argue with the surface. I've spent my life going underneath it.
That instinct turned into a method, and the method shows up in three places that look unrelated until you watch them closely.
As an economist, with an M.A. in Macroeconomics, I was trained to ask what's really driving a number, not just what the number says. As a financial controller at Nokia Networks, I lived in the gap between what a business reports and what's actually happening underneath it. As a builder, I take that same habit and turn it into working software. Three costumes, one skill: I find the real problem hiding behind the obvious one.
Here's what that looks like in practice.
Taxformify
Three of my friends are tax accountants. Every season I watched them drown, chasing clients for documents, juggling half a dozen tools, losing hours to chaos that everyone in their field had simply accepted as "how it is."
The obvious read was that they needed better tools. The real problem was that they didn't have five tool problems, they had one workflow problem wearing five disguises. So I built Taxformify: one integrated system that handles document collection and workflow end to end, with AI-powered expense categorization. It wasn't built for a client. I built it because I saw the gap and couldn't unsee it. It was selected by Startup Canada in 2026.
Taxformify isn't the headline here. It's the evidence. It's what happens when the diagnostic habit meets the willingness to actually build.
If you run a tax practice, or know someone who does, you can book a live demo and watch it do the actual work.
The oil & gas engagement
Earlier, consulting for an oil & gas company, I found two things the client hadn't asked me to look for. First, technical capabilities they already owned and were paying for but had never switched on. Second, and the deeper one, a misalignment in how their incentives were structured, quietly steering people toward the wrong outcomes.
Nobody flagged either, because both were invisible if you only looked where you were told to look. That's the work: not being smarter than everyone in the room, but looking underneath the question instead of just answering it.
What I'm not
I'll be straight with you, because I'd rather you trust me than be impressed by me. I'm not McKinsey, Bain, or BCG. I'm not Big Five. I ran a technology and operations consulting agency for years and then deliberately wound it down, not because it failed, but because I wanted to build and think instead of sell hours.
I don't have the credentials that let people skip the work of evaluating me. You'll have to judge me on how I think. I prefer it that way.
Elsewhere
I write about economics, equity-based business structures, and why so many "permanent" systems are more fragile than they look. I speak English, Russian, Azerbaijani, and Turkish, get by in French, and I'm working on Arabic. Languages have always been less about translation for me and more about access to how other people see.
If any of this resonates, the best way to understand how I think is to read what I write, look at Taxformify, or connect with me on LinkedIn.