Coming out...
...about my failures of the past, the present and looking forward to the future ones
Some might have noticed that I am no longer a VC, I haven’t been posting anything and in general have dissapered from the usual scene. The date of dissapereance corresponds with the beginning of the war. I was no longer able to continue my previous life in any way and what I did instead you can read in my Linkedin that I have finally updated.
But here I’m not gonna explain myself or dwell on the past, but I do want to share some learnings from the black box of the failures of my past efforts, past country and the more recent failures of trying to salvage all the best things from it. Spoiler alert, there are not many as it turned out.
Basically, this is my coming out as a person who has failed a lot and sees it as a good thing.
Below is a short summary just to understand where I am coming from, but I do plan to make more posts, again not to grumble about the things that didn’t happen, but to reevaluate which efforts made sense and more importantly still do and how do I plan to reapply them going forward.
The land before time
Not everybody knows this but besides my VC career before the war for about a year and a half I was very much involved in government-affiliated initiatives in Russia. They were all, of course, tech related and started with a simple advisory inquiry on microelectronics revival efforts. I jumped on this opportunity eagerly, as being a part of a classic VC firm has been becoming frustrating for me since I was becoming more opinionated tech-wise and was hitting the limits of the few shots that a VC has and lack of leverage. This gig on the other hand offered access to the whole puzzle, not just a few random pieces. So surely I got carried away with a full-blown plan on how to use Open Source and Open Architectures and stimulate many markets, not just one. Organizations were created, all industry leaders were participating, a lot of investment was lined up. By the end of 2021 I brought this dialog to the global scene and dreamed for it to become the beginning of developing countries' open infrastructure handbook.
It’s not that I didn’t know about politics, it wasn’t ever directly involved, but surely I knew. I had many discussions with my brother about why I even want to work with these people when I had access to global “proper” opportunities. My answer, that I truly believed back then, was that I want to cause change from within. I was, maybe unfairly, given access to dialogs and initiatives that were shaping industries and thus life and work of a lot of people, and I was exhilarated by the fact that I could actually contribute and even lead and try big swings, not just incremental change. What do I think now? I think that was a deal with my consciousness to ignore certain facts, and I’m not even talking about the politics, but I was also ignoring the amount of inertia I was fighting with, that most people never believed in these “new things” and were only participating out of ulterior motives. To be completely honest, that fact I started to realize by the end of 2021 when it became a fight for resources and credits, by February 2022 it was becoming absurd enough to consider giving up. So when the war started I watched the collapse of all these organizations and markets from afar never to come back again. And you know what, they returned to the previous stable point so fast! For me that is another proof that all my efforts remained an external force and failed to stick.
The promised land
But that is not the end of my failures. My first thought in the new world was to help people relocate, starting with Almaz portfolio companies. I quickly realized that that is not the help the Ukrainian-based companies need. VCs doing whatever VCs do, I haven’t seen them being truly helpful. Nor could I, besides the donations and personal help. But we did also have people in Russia, and the same way as I voted with my feet I wanted to give them the chance. It took less than a month to establish a fully working mechanism, including ensuring the fastest path to new passports (still works). But since my belief system was based on open source for quite a while already, naturally the next thought was to leverage it for repatriation of technology. The premise was simple, you can’t take many things with you when you leave hell, but you can take the code by open sourcing it. Sure you’ll have to create a new company, product, strategy - but that’s always true for a new geo. And we had a bunch of people with relevant backgrounds ready to help. We offered it to everybody we knew, and given all that I wrote above, I believe it was pretty good coverage. Just as a reference, a lot of efforts were made to help one of the largest IT companies in Russia to open source pieces of its internal tech, not client facing (like dev tooling, cloud components, etc). Seemed natural for many reasons - CEO being abroad and realistic, people running away anyway, no lack of contacts or investments... And you know what happened? Nothing. A few bits and pieces got open sourced by individual groups, basically academically. But all our top down efforts failed. Death by legacy enterprise mindset. And since almost nothing was developed meanwhile and the time does fly by, there is less and less stuff remaining worth open sourcing.
To be fair some smaller companies actually followed through with our offer, so not all in vain. But not many, way less than I expected.
So, at this point, I’m no longer trying to convince anybody, nor am I focusing in any way on the remains of my failed past - that is a closed gestalt. The time indeed did not stop.
Neverland
While I was busy with those failures, tech industry entered a new era of AI. I’ll simply say that I believe everything will be redefined now. That means not only new products and new companies, but new rules.
Currenly there are mostly questions, as the dialog has to start form the beginning - regulations, open source licenses, governing organizations, ways to invest, corporations locking-in value - all of this rhymes with the questions I dealt with previously. Participating in EU OSS discussions is not far from what I heard 2 years ago. And the way it is going now, people might not be running from the war, but they might run towards better regulations.
And you know what my take is? I’ve seen old systems fail, and since it’s a new world in a chaotic state, why not ditch all the failed legacy setups that require fighting a lot of inertia? This fight requires a lot of energy being put just to keep it stable and way more to push it forward.
But this time around, I believe that the critical mass is finally there to come up with truly new rules - an economically viable, decentralized, self-governed, developer-centric “Open Source AI” future.
So that is what
and I are working on now. I don’t have the answers, but I do have bits and pieces of what methods work and what don’t, I’ve been at it for a while. Looking for people asking themselves the same questions.