2022 → Personal Updates
This is a hard issue to start. Few things happened since last issue in 2021:
🥇 I’ve received Exceptional Talent Visa to UK
🎡 We moved to London
💰 I opened a product design studio
📷 I resumed several hobbies
😡 russia invaded Ukraine and attacked my family and friends
One event can dim the years of positive progress. I’ve been forced to recollect my values, priorities and life goals. I decided to make this newsletter more personal and share a progress outside of concept ideas. Concepts will stay in different format.
The newsletter becomes personal.
Helping Ukraine systematically:
For the last two months, each week was different. We did a lot: donated millions of dollars, exposed stories about Ukraine, shipped gear to Ukraine from all over the world, managed Ukrainian reputation and cried.
Right now we’re focused on doing the most impactful things:
Donating to ComeBackAlive. They have exemplary reports with all ins and outs available publicly.
Request media and influencers to cover stories from Ukraine, but avoid “war news” fatigue. We ask to include more inspirational content about culture to preserve and populate Ukrainian culture.
Build long-term programs to bring capital to Ukraine and help local entrepreneurs and influencers grow nationally and internationally.
Ask friends abroad to help Ukrainians emotionally and professionally. Give jobs to Ukrainians, share your expertise with them, help them build products. You will be positively surprised by working ethics and output quality!
Ukrainian tech workers collected billions (with a “b”) of dollars, which helped country slow down the aggression. To be honest, I rarely see such unity and effectiveness. It brought so much inspiration and focus to what’s really matter.
Quick Tax Concept
It’s unfair that we don’t pay back to the country, that took care about us during first years or decades of our lives. I think we can do better. For example, create advanced tax system which helps people fund their home country directly through the tax payments.
Tax system is already a mess and I don’t want to make it worse. There’s a lot of questions on how to make it fair and easy: should it be optional, how to avoid extra burden, what’s opt-out mechanism. But eventually, it might be a new tool for countries to get extra capital without worrying about the location of their citizens. The taxes might overlap and extra capital would support countries’ common projects.
Think of “Royalties for the place of birth” or “People of NFTs” if you’re one of THOSE people.
The war should help us reevaluate the government, communications, voting functions. This might be a new market that helps governments operate in a faster, more scientific and less populistic ways. I will dedicate a note to it.
Helping Early-Stage Startups
I’ve started advising newly formed product teams for several reasons:
I want to meet creative and ambitious people.
I want to grow wealth. Equities and other forms of compensation help that.
I want to use all knowledge and talents I have.
I usually help with product strategy and app design in exchange for compensation and part of the company ownership. I think this is very promising, but the timing is complex — first results will be in few 2-3 years, no guarantees. Long term gambling hooray! At least I’m learning how to build those kind of relationships and I’m already working on some new product frameworks, that I can share later.
I explore startups in three areas: Productivity, Communication, and Skills. I will dedicate another issue to each of them.
If you need product advice — write me! I’m happy to provide free consultations before full commitment.
Settling in UK (and Worldwide too!)
Before moving to UK I made a stunt that I’m super proud of — I called 200 UK designers, investors, entrepreneurs to learn about their UK experience and how we can be valuable for each other. The results were amazing! I haven’t made 200 close friends, but I learned tons of tiny useful facts, I got great recommendations, references, people helped me to complete my documentation, learn how systems works, find places to network etc. It taught me a lot.
I don’t want to stop meeting new people, but I want to be smarter about it. So this year I want to:
Build people-attracting channel (Twitter and YouTube sounds like my best bet)
Track all people I contacted with (I’ve tried $20/month Clay, but Google Sheets still work better for me)
Note down their “challenges” and “superpowers” (to help and get helped)
Made small progress with everyone (take a photo, record a video, build idea, follow each other)
Wait until long-term magic happen ✨
Why I’m so focused on people? Because it’s more obvious than ever, that “things” can’t sustain you. People can. One good relationship might bring you millions, one call might lead to a common business or just having fun together. I learned it too late and I’m trying to compensate for it now.