About
Orenburg → businesses → investing → Florida → AI
Orenburg
Born and raised in Orenburg, in a family of a doctor and a builder. Graduated from Orenburg State University as a software engineer. For more than ten years — from 2000 to 2014 — I worked as an employee: as an information security engineer at Orenburg Energo, then as a lead information security specialist at RSHB.
At work I always hit a ceiling — I understood that as an employee you cannot jump above a certain level. I started applying the same systems approach I used in information security, but to my own projects. That is what pulled me out of employment: I launched the first two businesses back in 2013 while still working at the bank, and only left the job for good in 2014.
Businesses
Tea shop (2013). Together with my wife Natalia, we took over an existing Tea Shop that was barely surviving and rebuilt it: refreshed the assortment and the staff, and decided to sell not just tea but emotions — gift sets, presentation, corporate gifts.
Home Robot (2013). Wholesale and retail of home robots — robot vacuums, window-cleaning robots — with a dealer network across Russia and a warehouse in Moscow. I built direct contacts with manufacturers at industry trade shows, including Berlin, Las Vegas, and Hong Kong.
Sun School (2014). Also together with Natalia — we opened a franchise of a private kindergarten. We ran one school for seven years, until COVID; after the pandemic we decided not to rebuild the business from scratch.
HOBOT (2017, USA). A direct continuation of Home Robot: in Russia I was a HOBOT dealer, and in the US we secured official brand distribution for the entire country — and built a sales network there from the ground up.
Through all of this — the principle of diversification: try different directions, and if something does not work out, move on rather than fixating on one thing.
Investing
I got interested in investing in 2015 — I took courses on trading and on passive investing. That same year I read “The Richest Man in Babylon” by George Clason — a book with a simple principle: set aside at least 10% of every income. I started with 5% — an amount that barely registers in the moment, but over a year adds up to meaningful capital.
I started building my portfolio in 2018: first bonds and ETFs, later I added individual stocks.
At first I tracked everything by hand — Excel spreadsheets, rebalancing manually. At some point I thought: why do this myself if it can be automated? That is how the portfolio rebalancing app was born — and later I added AI for analysis. Today that is Rebalance App → app.evolutionai.biz.
Florida
In February 2021, after COVID restrictions, we flew to Florida simply to rest on the beach. But we enjoyed the break so much that in summer we decided to try starting over — here, with all the opportunities this country offers. We filed the paperwork, and in the fall we sent the kids to school.
More about that period — in the 2021 chapter.
AI
I got personally interested in artificial intelligence back at university, in the early 2000s. But I started applying it in business later — in 2021–2022. AI was already working in our HOBOT robots, and I became curious: where else it could be used — bots, marketing, copywriting, and essentially automating any workflow.
That is how Evolution AI was born at the end of 2023 — along with several projects I work on today.