My Story

From journalist dreams to compiling reality

If you'd met me at 12 and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d have said "journalist." You know, travel the world, cover dramatic events as they unfold, write something powerful in a smoky café somewhere. That sort of thing. I was all set for a life of storytelling and smart conversation.

Then I discovered programming. I was walking by a late Soviet analogue of “video games arcade”, where they would allow you to play games on the ZX Spectrum. My mind was blown away and the first question I asked was “Who makes those games?”. I've been told “Programmers” and that's when I decided I want to be one. Funny enough my relationship with computers and programming was mostly long distance for the first few years - in the Soviet Union my parents (regular engineers could not really afford a computer) so I was reading books on programming and writing my first programs in my paper notebook with a pen, waiting for a chance to implement them.

So I leaned into it: university (Ukrainian National Technical University, formerly known as Kyin Polytechnic Institute), applied math faculty. After the graduation at my first serious job I was fascinated by the world of the Internet (which in the mid 90s in Ukraine you can only see through a narrow keyhole of 19200 baud modem). I wanted more, so I wrote a business plan, got it approved by the company’s management and our company became (in addition to the software developer) a local ISP - and I became a part-time sysadmin and a member of of ukr.nodes (community of people managing Ukrainian ISPs). In two years this got me a position in Telenor (their newly created division in Prague, Czech Republic), where I learned something critical: customers don’t care how clever your code is. They care that the damn thing works—and that someone will pick up the phone when it doesn’t. That lesson stuck with me. It became part of how I build software, companies, and teams.

Learning the corporate world

When I arrived to work in a division of Telenor in 1998 - it was my first experience working for a large corporation. It gave me the opportunity to learn new technologies, meet colleagues from other countries and face many challenges - and exposed me to the traditional inefficiency of corporate management and issues with waterfall project planning. During my first week in the office somebody shared a “Dilbert” comic by Scott Adams; at first I did not get it - but soon enough it became my favorite source of laughter for many years, since it very accurately described what was happening around. The most exhausting part was to work on a project, which you know is going in the wrong direction, should not even exist or with 99% probability will be canceled very soon after the next re-shuffling of the management. To keep myself sane I invented something similar to bushido (the code of honor for Japanese Samurai, which makes them focus on achieving perfection in their own actions without wondering too much whether the actions of their daimyo is smart or justified). In my programmer’s bushido I was striving to do my own work efficiently and attempt to succeed against all odds - but still it was very tiresome psychologically.

Building PortaOne: not your average startup fairytale

So when I had a chance to join a team of my colleagues, who wanted to start their own company - I did it without much hesitation. We didn’t start PortaOne in a garage (we had slightly better heating) - but we worked hard. I remember finishing writing code as Oleksander (the main founder) was driving to perform a demo for our first customer. 😊 We didn’t raise money or attended VC meetings. No TechCrunch writeups. Just grit, a few customers who believed in us, and enough caffeine to sustain a medium-sized developer herd. We built telecom billing software that just… works. Not glamorous, not flashy—but vital. Our motto was “We have nothing to hide from our customers!” - and we shared the source code with them! Over the years, we onboarded clients in more than 90 countries. In the early years I’ve personally trained customers in tiny island nations, mountainous regions with bad internet, and some of the world’s most bureaucratic telcos. I’ve also cleaned up my fair share of 3 a.m. production issues and survived multi-day customer trainings under severe jet-lag and too much instant coffee. We were never chasing unicorn status—we just wanted to build something real, sustainable, and resilient. And we did.

Human nature, explained (by three very loud babies)

Around the same time we were scaling up the company, life handed me a new role: father of triplets. Imagine load balancing three volatile, unpredictable processes — each of which emits random interrupts at 2 a.m.—while still maintaining system uptime at work. It was humbling. It also taught me more about psychology, communication, and the limits of human patience than any MBA program ever could. You want to understand group dynamics, stakeholder conflict, and how to deliver bad news with a straight face? Try telling one toddler that the other got a cookie and they didn’t.

Bridging the gap between the technology and humans

Very soon I realized that frequently the problem is not the software code itself - it is how to communicate the requirements for that code or how to explain to the customer (or to the support engineers) how it should be used. In my personal opinion this is the biggest value I delivered in the last 10+ years: I was able to combine my passion for software engineering with my skills of wanna-be-a-journalist. I worked hard to teach my team to write clearly; I argued with people, who thought “marketing” is about putting as many buzzwords in a single phrase as possible; and I created internal education resources to help newcomers to learn this as quickly as possible. These days my favorite non-fiction writers are not actually the ones writing about the software engineerings - but about human psychology (such as Dan Ariely).

Why I mentor founders now

After two decades of building and leading PortaOne, I realized I genuinely enjoy helping other founders through their own chaos. I’ve lived the rollercoaster: early wins, scaling problems, losing deals that should’ve been easy, winning ones that shouldn’t have been possible, hiring mistakes, hiring miracles, technical debt that kept me up at night, and decisions that aged me five years in five minutes. Now, I help founders figure out how to: Build things that actually solve a problem.

• Scale without overengineering.
• Communicate about your product so that your customers and investors would understand you clearly.
• Make hard decisions with clarity, not panic.
• Deal with the mental strain of building something that matters.

I’m not here to give fluffy startup pep talks or tell you what slide deck design VCs love this week. I’m here to be that guy who’s been through the wringer and will tell you when your architecture is overkill, your roadmap is fantasy, or your pricing strategy needs actual strategy. But I’ll also be the first to say “you’ve got something good—now let’s make it better.”

If that sounds like the kind of support you need, let’s talk.