Welcome!
Mikhail here, glad to see you come by.
I'm a creative entrepreneur from Russia, a cosmopolitan mix of a hippie and a silicon valley technorati, who knows a bit of Russian poetry and a couple Japanese songs. I play drums and Armenian duduk, ride motorbikes, travel often, have what I think is a good taste in music and love a good eclectic party. You can find me dancing at one of Burning Mans across the globe or working from one of the cozy coffee-shops in Los Angeles, Tel Aviv or elsewhere.
In the past I worked at Disney Interactive as a product lead on games and at Facebook as an engineering lead on Messenger Platform. I also built a couple things in blockchain space and a whole bunch of games in my two gaming companies when I was in my 20s.
Currently I work at Docebo as a community product line manager, after my previous startup PeerBoard got acquired. We started PeerBoard in August 2019 and built a product to enable active customers (champions) to help business teams and other customers. Now doing it as a product group within Learn LMS product line.
I'm also an angel investor and supported about a dozen different startups, ranging from B2B and consumer AI to XR and to education and real estate tech. I'm very picky in who I invest, but if you're a seasoned founder tackling an ambitious, important or just cool problem, please reach out.
Straight to the point, it is real, at least partial/temporary enlightenment (Kensho) is attainable given a specific combination of factors and here’s a somewhat okay summary on that (given the circumstances of this thing itself being a self-referential puzzle). Surprisingly of all places, on Less Wrong. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tMhEv28KJYWsu6Wdo/kensh. Specifically, comment branch #3 from Moral of the Story resonates a lot with my experience during my Kensho and sporadically after. This is a very distinct perception shift, attaining it is indeed highly beneficial in my opinion, analogous to seeing Matrix code instead of various phenomena. Btw, I’m not a fan of using ancient terminology for all of this, often gets really confusing, too much layers of legacy knowledge on top of each other, not all of it being relevant. It’s easier than it looks and there’re modern tools to explore it.
Update: I just stumbled across this book and I’m starting to employ it’s key idea that is captured in chapters 6 and 7. Start from 6. https://selfdefinition.org/awareness/most-rapid/contents.htm
What to treat yourself to something very special to me? Here’re 6 of 10 audio books of Amber Chronicles, read by the author himself, Roger Zhelanzy, unabridged. Re-reading it through the years helped me to recharge, regain my sanity and simply bringed much joy to my life. Roger recorded 6 out of 10 books in audio before his untimely death. And the recordings got lost and then appeared again in some obscure website. So I found them and here they are. Now I listen to it when I miss him and his characters and this whole universe and it makes me more lucid and grateful. As you can imagine, second 5 are my favorite, we need to do a deep voice fake for the last 4 :) Enjoy:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fpko14r1hq3owbi/AADpMhYBHpn_fvrDr4dKMDPIa?dl=0
Being a music lover, here're some of my favorite playlists on Spotify: